2014 Week 3 - Hacker News Five from Five Years Ago • Rory Hart

A weekly look back at Hacker News coding centric posts from 5 years ago.

You Might Not Need jQuery

jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application. If you’re developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency.

There a couple of interesting aspects to this site. First of all obviously the war has been won on this, browser APIs have moved on and modern frontend toolchains with polyfills have taken care of older browser support. What the browsers haven’t addressed the declarative frameworks such as React, Angular and Vue have, who manipulates the DOM directly anymore?

But then there is the current place we are in where we hardly think about our dependencies’ dependencies anymore. Site sizes have continued ballooning despite people railing against this trend, both then and now. Of course with better tooling we now have tree shaking to save us from ourselves and keep site sizes down.

Site by:

Adam Schwartz - @adamfschwart
Zack Bloom - @zackbloom

The Magic of strace

531 points | 99 comments

Nowadays I probably use strace or some equivalent almost every day I work as a programmer and/or systems engineer. In this post I’ll explain why and how and hopefully show you some tips on how to get the most out of this powerful little tool.

Chad is right, strace is boon when working with closed sourced software. It does however require decent knowledge of Linux system calls and some imagination about how the system you are diagnosing might be using them.

Original post by Chad Fowler - @chadfowler

Academic Torrents

448 points | 63 comments

Want some data for training your machine learning models? This is the place. Since starting five years ago they’ve amassed over 27tb of data to train your models.

Site founded by:

Joseph Paul Cohen - @josephpaulcohen
Henry Z Lo - Linkedin
Jonathan Nogueira - @jonnogi

The Descent to C

377 points | 231 comments

A great post by the original author of Putty on the differences between high level languages and C. If you are getting your hands dirty with C (or C++ for that matter) and you already have another language under your belt this is well worth a read.

Original post by Simon Tatham - personal site

Interactive Version of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP)

262 points | 31 comments

One of the classics of the computer science discipline come to life with each Scheme example editable and runnable inline in the book. If the interactive version doesn’t suit your reading style you could just download a PDF of SCIP for your learning pleasure.

Original post by Li Xuanji - http://www.xuanji.li/