Best of 2020

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

Software Engineering
492

Pain Points of Haskell

I would like to preface this article by saying that Haskell is great. I have been using it as my go-to for native applications for several years now. Everything that follows is a product of my love and affection for the language, and a desire to see it succeed. And none of this is intended to disparage the efforts of…

493

Webpack 5

webpack is a module bundler for JavaScript, CSS, HTML, WebAssembly and assets. It builds a dependency graph from your project and emits optimized bundles for browsers, Node.js, Deno, Bun and other environments.

496

Programming trick questions

Note: me telling you up front that these are trick questions rather gives the answers away in most cases, but oh well. Questions Question 1 What's the fastest way to sort a jumbled array, given that the array has length N and contains all the integers from 1 to N inclusi...

500

The compositor is evil

First, I want to make it clear that I’m not accusing the compositor of true evil, which I define roughly as deliberately causing suffering. There’s unfortunately too much of that in the world. I mean it in the more metaphorical sense that it causes serious problems and forces other parts of the system to be more…

510

When Parallel: Pull, Don't Push

I’ve noticed a small pattern across a few of my projects where I had vectorized and parallelized some code. The original algorithm had a “push” approach, the optimized version instead took a “pull” approach. In this article I’ll describe what I mean, though it’s mostly just so I can show off some pretty videos…