Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 1,274 posts.

Software Engineering
693

Algebras we love

If you work with anything that can be modeled mathematically, you most likely know that many things you work on can be expressed with algebras. However, if you are not a graduate of a computer science course or similar you might not know how ubiquitous they are and how often you rely on some of them. (And I don’t mean…

704

Running JRuby on the Graal JIT

Hello, friends! Long time no blog!I'm still here hacking away on JRuby for the benefit of Rubyists everywhere, usually slogging through compatibility fixes and new Ruby features. However with the release of JRuby 9.2, we've caught up to Ruby 2.5 (the current release) and I'm spending a little time on performance.I…

709

Problems with CSVs (2016)

Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.

716

Native Clojure with GraalVM

The newly-released GraalVM changes the status quo in the realm of JVM-based programming languages. In this instalment we’ll explore its impact on Clojure. We’ll start small, but by the end we’ll compile an entire Ring web application into a self-contained native binary.