HackerX

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2017

Ideas that Hacker News readers were still recommending in 2017.

12 posts cited65 citations

Counts show how many picks Hacker News readers cited in each year, not when the post was written.

@mxcl

Career

@mxcl

View on X
Recommended by 42 HN users
From the Hacker News threadleetcode seems to agree with your definition [0]. the meme isn't to say that inverting a binary tree is particularly difficult - anyone familiar with coding challenges and trees could trivially produce a solution. the meme is more pointing out how ludicrous it is that senior/staff/principal interviews can hinge on these types of problems, despite the engineer proving their proficiency by doing something like running DOOM in typescript types or writing homebrew [1]. [0] leetcode.com/problems/invert-binary-tre…... [1] x.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768@LiquixTypeScript types can run DOOM [video]2025
117

@ID_AA_Carmack

Hardware

@ID_AA_Carmack

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Recommended by 5 HN users
From the Hacker News threadSome of that isn't the text editors fault. With the C64 the keystroke may be on the screen before it out of the USB stack on a modern computer. That is even before you start to consider the latency in the video stack. As John Carmack once noted: "I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?" -- twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/193480…@jandreseRegression with the C642021
13

@andy_matuschak

Programming

@andy_matuschak

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Recommended by 4 HN users
From the Hacker News threadWell there's nothing absolutely 'wrong' with them. You can write good and bad apps with view controllers (I've done both). But they're an architectural blank slate, mainly offering access to UI objects & lifecycle callbacks. You need some architecture on top in anything but the most trivial app. The naive approach is to have 'no architecture', which actually is an architecture of just throwing masses of state, ad hoc, into the view controller, and using this to effect the UI any old how (so a 3rd party has no idea where to look to find out where things happen). Or you can go maximalist and select from MVC, MVP, etc, all of which are an improvement on the naive approach. It just so happens that I've found RN (React Native) to be the nicest improvement, to my taste. Simple unidirectional data flow & UI state being a simple function of app state make for a beautifully clean and unambiguous model for how everything fits together. One can argue the costs and benefits of app architectures all day, but there's really no substitute for trying them out, for the sake of curiosity & learning. All the devs I know who have written RN groan a bit when they're back in iOS and/or Android native development, and absolutely not because they love javascript! Check out Andy Matuschak's celebrated Tweet on RN (twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/56051…). I point to it not as an argument from authority. But if one of the people who wrote UIKit thinks RN's model is the superior one, surely that should pique curiosity just a bit? > Are you suggesting React solves the programming language problem completely I'm not sure what you're getting at here. What 'programming language problem'? And why would an improvement have to solve something 'completely' to be of value?@crispinbTakeaways from KotlinConf 20172018
6

@veorq

Security

@veorq

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Recommended by 3 HN users
From the Hacker News threadMore directly and earlier, and, amusingly, a reply to tptacek is: twitter.com/veorq/status/83487298844506… The line of thinking is more fully (if less sha2-specifically) covered in Aumasson's 'Too much crypto' paper, which has also had HN discussions.@pvgBLAKE2: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” Than MD5 (2014)2022
4

@NetflixUIE

Web Development

@NetflixUIE

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Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadI humbly disagree. I've never built a highly interactive application with React, only simple sites where the guys before me chose React, so I can't speak to its relative strengths or weaknesses there, but I've found that it doesn't scale down very well to simple sites. For a simple sign-in page, it's easy to just store state in the DOM and use a element to send the credentials, and maybe a little JS for the password show/hide button. But to implement it in React you have to go on a steep learning curve to learn about JSX, hooks, the component lifecycle, building the app for dev, packaging it for prod, and more. Other frameworks, like Vue and Alpine, let you use them "progressively" and you can even do so with a CDN to avoid having to set up npm/vite from the get go. Their intro docs have instructions for how to do so, along with the relevant caveats React claims to be progressive, but since it's JSX it requires a compile step. Its intro docs do not have instructions for using it via CDN. You can make it work if you really want to, but it basically requires shipping the compiler to the client along with the JSX and doing the compilation client-side, which obviously scales so poorly that their docs don't cover it. To recap, my whole point is that React scales very poorly down to simple sites. And since most site are not Facebook or the Spotify web player or Netflix (and even Netflix is moving away from React: x.com/NetflixUIE/status/923374215041912…), I think it's very hard to argue that React is effective or well designed.@actinium226React is winning by default and slowing innovation2025
3

@gvanrossum

Programming

@gvanrossum

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Recommended by 2 HN users
From the Hacker News threadI think thewhitetulip has GvR's blessing[0]. It makes sense, though: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it. Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you're Dutch. The guy's handle is thewhitetulip, which is the most Dutch thing I can think of. [0]: twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/112670605…@JugurthaShow HN: Easy to understand intro to Python2017
4

@Pinboard

Internet

@Pinboard

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadI've been thinking a lot the past few weeks about the preservation of art and goods in general. I think it comes from two main sources: 1. Maciej Ceglowski (`idlewords) has been talking a lot recently about link rot. Recently, he found that 25% of items pinned a mere five years ago were dead links and 17% from only three years ago were dead [^1]. That's an incredibly high rate -- and, selfishly, one I'm noticing as my bookmark folders for recipes (RIP BroEats.com) and designs and other things is filled with more and more duds. 2. I've been reading Do Not Sell At Any Price [^2], a book about the subculture of 78rpms. These are records that are so rare and so -- for lack of a better term -- unwanted by the vast majority of the music-listening populace that the act of collecting them is less about hoarding and more about preservation. To quote one of the characters in the book (roughly from memory): "It's a weird feeling, holding this thing in your hand and knowing that you could break the song," he said. "I snap this record in half and this song is lost forever. It's a lot of responsibility, and sometimes I think that's why I take it so seriously." I can honestly say that, prior to reading this article, I had no idea what a ZX Spectrum was. Now, after some digging, I do -- and I still have no desire to play one, obtain one, or hold onto it in any meaningful way. (And seeing as I'm usually on the weirdly attached end of the spectrum with these kinds of things, I doubt I'm the only one.) But I'm struck by how important it is to hold onto these things, even if its in a cardboard box in a forgotten closet somewhere or a link on the Internet Archive that gets clicked once every couple decades. I'm not positing that there will ever be a point in time that someone has the hankering to play ZX Spectrum Xtreme Chess, but I think there's inherent value in preserving this ecosystem -- something of a testament to the people who made it, the people who played it, the novelty that at one point in time there were five million living rooms with this machine in it. The Web turned 25 this year, and it's already coming down with acute cases of memory loss. I'm hoping that by the time it hits fifty, the problem won't have gotten worse -- it will have gotten much, much better, not just with URLs but with remembering the time when people played 3D StarFighter by the Oliver Twins. [^4] (This is a very roundabout way of saying the following: Jason, you are completely awesome for doing this, and thanks for sharing it with us.) [^1] twitter.com/Pinboard/status/50140630374… [^2] amazon.com/Not-Sell-Any-Price-Obsessive…... [^3] The nice things about IA links is you can pretty reasonably assume that they won't suffer from link rot, right? [^4] flickr.com/photos/textfiles/14771850314…...@jmdukeScreenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it2014
2

@patio11

Career

@patio11

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Shared by 1 HN user
From the Hacker News threadOne of my most important takeaways from patio11’s list of thing you need to know (mobile.twitter.com/patio11/status/93661…...) was that for B2B companies sales to engineering ratio is at least 2x and usually much larger because that’s the bottleneck. Atlas Siam is no exception.@Jun8Atlassian built a $20B dollar company with no sales team2019
2

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