Best of 2020

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

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2809

Curl will now output JSON

This is not a command line option of the week post, but I feel a need to tell you a little about our brand new addition! --write-out [format] This option takes a format string in which there are a number of different "variables" available that let's a user output information from the previous transfer. For … Continue…

2813

Asterisk

Challenged to write about a single Unicode character, I chose the humble asterisk. In this post, Julia takes a back seat but it’s working hard behind the scenes. [1] The font used for the examples is JuliaMono.

2819

Starting a Business Around GPT-3 Is a Bad Idea

(Update 2023-03: I wrote this in 2020 when GPT-3 was highly hyped, but ultimately made only <1% of the splash that the monstrous ChatGPT made 3 years later. If I had to rewrite this today, I’d 1) think more kindly about defensibility, especially through deep product, user experience, and marketing/distribution (see…