Best of 2020

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

Software Engineering
845

Racket 7.8

Racket version 7.8 is now available from https://racket-lang.org/ Racket CS may become the default Racket implementation in the next release. With the improvements in this release, Racket CS provides all of the functionality of Racket BC (the curre...

849

Code only says what it does

Code says what it does. That’s important for the computer, because code is the way that we ask the computer to do something. It’s OK for humans, as long as we never have to modify or debug the code. As soon as we do, we have a problem. Fundamentally, debugging is an exercise in changing what a program does to match…

850

New JSX Transform

This blog site has been archived. Go to react.dev/blog to see the recent posts. Although React 17 doesn’t contain new features, it will provide support for a new version of the JSX transform. In this post, we will describe what it is and how to try it. What’s a JSX Transform? Browsers don’t understand JSX out of the…

851

Event Sourcing (2017)

I recently became intrigued by the concept of event sourcing as applied to back-end architecture, specifically a microservice-oriented approach. I have spent the last few years working predominantly on the front-end, and became enamored by the simplicity and elegance of this pattern as the backbone of front-end…

852

Computers Can Be Understood

Computers and computer systems are build up from deterministic, comprehensible, building blocks. Their operations and behaviors can be understood and reasoned about. I relate my personal beliefs and mindset on this point, and explore some manifestations and ramifications of this philosophy.

865

Windows 10 Hosted App Model

In Windows 10 version 2004, we are introducing the concept of Hosted Apps to the Windows App Model. Hosted apps are registered as independent apps on Windows, but require a host process in order to run. An example would be a script file which requires its host (eg: Powershell or Python) to be installed. By

867

Embedded Rules of Thumb (2018)

26 April 2018 by Phillip Johnston • Last updated 10 June 2021You may call them guidelines, heuristics, or rules of thumb. No matter, the purpose is the same: to provide a reasonable approximation of the truth. These rules of thumb can help guide your understanding of the systems you work on, focus you toward the ……