Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 1,357 posts.

Software Engineering
812

How an Optimizing Compiler Works

Optimizing compilers are a mainstay of modern software: allowing a programmer to write code in a language that makes sense to them, while transforming it into a form that makes sense for the underlying hardware to run efficiently. The optimizing compiler's job is to figure out what your input program does, and create…

822

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.

834

Making Sandspiel

Sandspiel is a falling sand game I built in late 2018. I really enjoyed writing this game, and wanted to put into writing some of my goals, design decisions, and learnings from that process. If you’re reading this but haven’t played sandspiel, you should probably go try it !