Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 599 posts.

Software Engineering
159

Lisp in Your Language

I'm a fan of Lisp programming languages, but there's an incredible conceptual elegance that struggles to materialise as readable elegance for many unfamiliar programmers. The underlying concepts are incredibly simple, but the learning curve can represent a disproportionate challenge.

160

Asynchronous Python and Databases

To quote the last part of this blog post, "I think it's [asyncio] really well done, it's fun to use, and I still am interested in having more of a SQLAlchemy story for it, because I'm sure folks will still want this no matter what anyone says.". To that end, SQLAlchemy 1.4 now includes complete support for asyncio …

177

Procedural City Generation

Since seeing the city generation from the shelved Introversion Software game “Subversion” in action , I’ve wanted to to try writing a basic procedural city generator myself. The developers followed a method described in Parish and Müller’s paper: Procedural Modelling of Cities (2001) . The paper is well-written and…