Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 4,419 posts.

Any topic
3364

Gradual Programming

Programming is a fundamentally incremental (or gradual) process, and our programming languages should reflect that. I show several ways in which program models transition over time and discuss how future research can further a human-centric vision for programming languages.

3375

Porting SBCL to the RISC-V

What better thing to do, during the hot, hot July days, thank something semi-mechanical involving very little brain power? With student-facing work briefly calming down (we've just about weathered the storm of appeals and complaints following the publication of exam results), and the all-too-brief Summer holidays…

3378

The Real Deal About rel="me"

Earlier today , Barry Schwartz published a piece over on Search Engine Roundtable called Google Does Not Use rel=me Microformats . The article got shared around Twitter a lot, and those tweets surfaced on the microformats IRC channel . In it he mentions a few things that I would like to respond to, that is probably…

3379

Giving Mono Souper Powers

By virtue of using LLVM, Mono has access to a wide suite of tools and optimization backends. A lot of active research uses LLVM IR. One such research project, Souper, tries to brute-force a search for missed optimizations in our emitted code. The .NET community may have software projects that benefit from using Souper…

3387

Peak Valley?

The Economist has a cover story this week called Peak Valley. The article suggests that Silicon Valley’s lead as a hub for innovation has peaked and other regions are rising. It ends with the concern that innovation more broadly has peaked. I somewhat agree with “the rise of elsewhere” narrative and disagree that…