Best of 2019

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

Software Engineering
1057

Software Is Hard (2007)

"Software is hard," reads the quote from Donald Knuth that opens Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code . The 400 pages that follow examine why: Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis? Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both? Why can't we ship code without bugs? Why, everyone asks…

1064

SpaCy v2.2

Version 2.2 of the spaCy Natural Language Processing library is leaner, cleaner and even more user-friendly. In addition to new model packages and features for training, evaluation and serialization, we've made lots of bug fixes, improved debugging and error handling, and greatly reduced the size of the library on…

1065

Unintuitive JSON Parsing

Despite the goal of JSON being a subset of JavaScript — which it failed to achieve (update: this was fixed ) — parsing JSON is quite unlike parsing a programming language. For invalid inputs, the specific cause of error is often counter-intuitive. Normally this doesn’t matter, but I recently ran into a case where it…

1070

Commit Graph Drawing Algorithms

This article is one chapter of my master thesis entitled “Design and implementation of a graphical user interface for git”. It describes the algorithm I designed to draw the commit graph in my own prototype git client called gitamine. I have adapted the content so that it fits better with this blog. Drawing graphs is…

1080

Programming Sucks

E very friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: “Bro, 1 [1] you don’t work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver.”