Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 2,330 posts.

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71

Too Clever by Half

The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and…

85

Why Does “=” Mean Assignment?

Take the following code: a = 1 a = a + 1 print(a) A common FP critique of imperative programming goes like this: “How can a = a + 1? That’s like saying 1 = 2. Mutable assignment makes no sense.” This is a notation mismatch: “equals” should mean “equality”, when it really means “assign”. I agree with this criticism and…