Best of 2020

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

Software Engineering
781

Remembering Conway

Gosper's Glider Gun in Conway's Game of Life I'd known of Conway since my early teens. I remember reading about his Game of Life in an old Scientific American someone gave me. The article (a quick search tells me) was published in October 1970, so I'm guessing I saw it in the early 70s, perhaps 1972. I was hooked.

787

Testing Sync at Dropbox

Executing a full rewrite of the Dropbox sync engine was pretty daunting. (Read more about our goals and how we made the decision in our previous post here .) Doing so meant taking the engine that powers Dropbox on hundreds of millions of user’s machines and swapping it out mid-flight. To pull this off, we knew we…

804

Localisation is too hard for Gmail

/ləʊk(ə)lʌɪˈzeɪʃ(ə)n/ The ability to adjust a user-interface to the user's local language or dialect Because I live in the UK, I speak en_GB (English, Great Britain) rather than en_US (English, Simplified United States). Mostly, all dialects of English are mutually intelligible. Sure, the Brits love the letter U and…