Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 1,508 posts.

Software Engineering
422

Image GPT

We find that, just as a large transformer model trained on language can generate coherent text, the same exact model trained on pixel sequences can generate coherent image completions and samples. By establishing a correlation between sample quality and image classification accuracy, we show that our best generative…

425

The Infinite Loop That Wasn't

Once upon a time there was a game for the GBA by the name of Hello Kitty Collection: Miracle Fashion Maker. It was a cutesy game based on the famous Sanrio Hello Kitty franchise, developed by Access. But hidden beneath the surface of the seemingly innocuous title was an insidious problem. Somehow, this simple game…

426

First Impressions of Rust

I've been wanting to write a big project in Rust for a while as a learning exercise, and actually started one in late 2018 (a FUSE server implementation). But then life happened and I got busy and never went anywhere with it. Due to certain world circumstances I'm currently spending a lot of time indoors so rust-fuse…

428

SQLite 3.33

A complete list of SQLite releases in a single page and a chronology are both also available. A detailed history of every check-in is available at SQLite version control site .

445

GTK 4.0 Released

2020 has been a very long year. What better way to end it than with a major release! Today, we released GTK 4.0. GTK 4.0 is the result of a lot of hard work by a small team of dedicated developers. We will have a separate post to go over the statistics, but the short...

446

Fast UTF-8 validation

One of the most common "data type" in programming is the text string. When programmers think of a string, they imagine that they are dealing with a list or an array of characters. It is often a "good enough" approximation, but reality is more complex. The characters must be encoded into bits in some way. Most ……

448

Two Years with Rust

It’s been just over two years since I started learning Rust. Since then, I’ve used it heavily at my day job, including work in the Firecracker code base, and a number of other projects. Rust is a great fit for the systems-level work I’ve been doing over the last few years: often performance- and density-sensitive…