Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 5,567 posts.

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4358

The Frink Is Good, the Unit Is Evil

One day Alan Eliasen read a fart joke and got so mad he invented a programming language. 20 years later Frink is one of the best special purpose languages for dealing with units. “But why do we need a language just for dealing with units?” Glad you asked! Intro to Units A unit is the physical property a number…

4378

Fix Your Timestep

Introduction Hi, I’m Glenn Fiedler and welcome to Game Physics. In the previous article we discussed how to integrate the equations of motion using a numerical integrator. Integration sounds complicated, but it’s just a way to advance the your physics simulation forward by some small amount of time called “delta time”…

4379

R7RS versus R6RS (2018)

InPhase asked today on #scheme about the R7RS vs R6RS debate. I followed the original debate closely and have experience both using and implementing R6RS. I also recently added R7RS support in Akku.scm 0.3.0, so I feel like I can weigh in on this. It’s a topic that many feel passionately about, and I’m also firmly on…

4380

ESO Instrument Finds Closest Black Hole to Earth

A team of astronomers from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and other institutes has discovered a black hole lying just 1000 light-years from Earth. The black hole is closer to our Solar System than any other found to date and forms part of a triple system that can be seen with the naked eye. The team found…