Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 427 posts.

Tools & Productivity
102

What a good debugger can do

When people say “debuggers are useless and using logging and unit-tests is much better,” I suspect many of them think that debuggers can only put breakpoints on certain lines, step-step-step through the code, and check variable values. While any reasonable debugger can indeed do all of that, it’s only the tip of the…

115

Making macOS Apps Uninstallable

Wiggling apps in Launchpad There's this thing called **Launchpad** on macOS which shows you all the apps on your Mac in an iOS like manner. You may already have it in the Dock, but you can also launch it as any other app. There's even a nifty trackpad gesture for it where you *pinch with thumb and three fingers*. ...

119

How to improve Python packaging

There is an area of Python that many developers have problems with. This is an area that has seen many different solutions pop up over the years, with many different opinions, wars, and attempts to solve it. Many have complained about the packaging ecosystem and tools making their lives harder. Many beginners are…