Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 874 posts.

Software Engineering
310

To ORM or Not to ORM

I've been enjoying using Go's database/sql package for working with databases. Recently, some mentions of gorm piqued my curiosity about using ORMs in Go vs. using database/sql directly. Having had some mixed experiences with ORMs in the past, I decided to start with a practical experiment by writing the same simple…

312

A bug I wish I hadn't caught

When I catch a bug before release I’m usually glad, because I’ve narrowly averted ruining someone’s experience or eating their data. Today I found a bug that I wish I hadn’t caught, a bug that I wish I’d released into the wild to witness in its full glory. I found this bug in my digital card game Ring of Worlds, and…

313

Anatomy of an ELF executable

Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too. And that is your compiler (of course, assuming that you are working in…

315

Files Are Fraught with Peril

This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…