Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 1,357 posts.

Software Engineering
666

Stop Memsetting Structures

TL;DR: Use C99’s designated initializers instead. Because it’s 2019! Edit: This post was discussed on Hacker News, Lobste.rs and /r/c_programming. It has been updated to address some of the concerns raised by commenters. One of the little things that annoy me when reading code is the unnecessary use of memset() to…

667

Skills Poor Programmers Lack

A friend and I had a discussion about the basic skills that are often lacking in experienced programmers. How can a programmer work for ten or twenty years and never learn to write good code? Too often they need close supervision to ensure they go down the right path, and can never be trusted to take technical…

670

Xfce 4.14 released

Why is the release manager late to the party with his blog post? The explanation is simple: We prioritized sticking to the schedule and getting our releases out to everyone as planned, as our codebase was ready. What was not (entirely) ready was some parts of the website, which were brought up-to-date over the course…

672

Electron 6.0

The Electron team is excited to announce the release of Electron 6.0.0! You can install it with npm via npm install electron@latest or download it from our releases website. The release is packed with upgrades, fixes, and new features. We can't wait to see what you build with them! Continue reading for details about…

682

Lezer

I keep coming across people who consider parser technology a forbidding, scary field of programming. This is nonsense—a small parser can be very, very simple , and provide a wholesome exercise in recursive thinking. At the same time, it is true that you can make parsing extremely complicated. Mostly, this tends to…

685

Introduction to Svelte

I tried it out, ran through their tutorial, and built a few small things. And I can honestly say that I think writing Svelte feels even faster and easier than React. Svelte gave me the same spark, the same feeling of “wow!” that I had with React.