Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 3,290 posts.

Any topic
2642

Formulog: ML + Datalog + SMT

If you read a description of a static analysis in a paper, what might you find? There’ll be some cute model of a language. Maybe some inference rules describing the analysis itself, but those rules probably rely on a variety of helper functions. These days, the analysis likely involves some logical reasoning: about…

2644

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.

2646

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?

2657

Emotional debt in startups

Three to four years into my startup journey our then CTO Sunil introduced me to a term called “technical debt”. He explained that we would have to account some time to make changes to the product that won’t be seen by customers but that would support us in the long run. I was furious. How […]

2663

The Importance of India

This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here. “Quantity has a quality of its own”–Attribution contested A significant factor in the power of states throughout history has been sheer numbers. Spain was able to control an overseas empire to a significantly greater degree than Portugal…

2667

What Is Life? (2019)

What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it…