Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 4,838 posts.

Any topic
1593

PostgreSQL at low level: stay curious

Yes, I know, it’s a long text, and it was my conscious decision to write it in this way. But fear not! Imagine that you read a book, take a look at the introduction and first few interesting sections, think about it and then find time to read further. I hope I’ve left enough references, so if you don’t get some ideas…

1595

Awk by Example

Awk is a very nice language with a very strange name. In this first article of a three-part series, Daniel Robbins will quickly get your awk programming skills up to speed. As the series progresses, more advanced topics will be covered, culminating with an advanced real-world awk application demo.

1597

What is energy, actually? (2011)

That’s an easy go: energy is the amount of (on) my electricity bill, or maybe of (on) my natural gas bill. If I am very concentrated, I might add that it is also the money I spend at the gasoline pump, and if I am even more concentrated I will suggest that it might have something to do with the filling up of my…

1609

Escher-Like Spiral Tilings

The artist M.C. Escher drew many lovely tilings, which he called “regular divisions of the plane”. He worked hard to ensure that his tilings were of lifelike animal forms such as birds and fish. He filled notebooks with hand-drawn sketches of tilings, many of which later found their way into his woodcuts. If you’d…

1617

Alone in the Dark

Most videogame stories are power fantasies. You spend your time getting ever stronger, ever tougher, ever more formidable as you accumulate experience points, gold, and equipment. Obstacles aren’t things to go around; they’re things you go through. If you can’t get past any given monster, the solution is to go kill…