Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 258 posts.

Programming Languages
184

Type-Level Programming in Rust

I show how two domain-specific type systems, information flow control and two-party communication protocols, can be implemented in Rust using type-level programming. I explain how interesting properties of these domains can be verified at compile-time. Finally, I construct a general correspondence between type…

186

Better Than JSON?

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.

188

Inventing Monads

I got into a discussion about monads recently. On a search to find some resources to share, I realized that most essays explained them with type signatures and rules. A missing ingredient to grok them, I think, is to understand the intuition behind them. How could you end up inventing monads?

197

Fast high-level programming languages

Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…