Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 1,733 posts.

Software Engineering
1423

The Case for Bash (2021)

Bash is oft-maligned: you hear it sneered at in sentences like “our continuous integration pipeline is just a pile of bash scripts .” It is commonly regarded as unintelligible and thus unmaintainable. The pile of bash scripts are the toxic byproduct of an infrastructure team understaffed, pressed for time, unwilling…

1431

Who invented vector clocks?

Back in spring 2020, I was wrapping up the distributed systems course I was teaching, and for the last lecture, decided to spend a little time poking at the question of who actually invented vector clocks. Most people who need something to cite for vector clocks cite Friedemann Mattern’s “Virtual Time and Global…

1432

Iterating on Testing in Rust

With the release of rust 1.70, there was some surprise and frustration that unstable test features now require nightly , like all other unstable features in Rust. One of the features most affected is --format json which has been in limbo for 5 years . This drew attention to a feeling I've had: the testing story in…