Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 483 posts.

Software Engineering
278

Compilers for Free

I’m fascinated by programming, and by metaprogramming in particular. When Ruby programmers talk about metaprogramming they usually mean programs that write programs , because Ruby has various features — like BasicObject#instance_eval , Module#define_method and BasicObject#method_missing — which make it possible to…

287

Infinite work is less work

The first task of last week's Weekly Challenge was to print the first ten strong and weak primes. A prime p n is "strong" if it's larger than the average of its two neighbouring primes ( i.e. p n > (p n-1 +p n+1 )/2 ). A prime is "weak" if it's smaller than the average of its two neighbours.