Best of 2020

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

Software Engineering
1207

Formulog: ML + Datalog + SMT

If you read a description of a static analysis in a paper, what might you find? There’ll be some cute model of a language. Maybe some inference rules describing the analysis itself, but those rules probably rely on a variety of helper functions. These days, the analysis likely involves some logical reasoning: about…

1210

Better Than JSON?

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.

1212

Inventing Monads

I got into a discussion about monads recently. On a search to find some resources to share, I realized that most essays explained them with type signatures and rules. A missing ingredient to grok them, I think, is to understand the intuition behind them. How could you end up inventing monads?

1223

CockroachDB 20.1

We want to give you a database that allows you to quickly and simply build and manage data-intensive applications in the cloud—without worrying about the performance, scale or resilience of those apps. To support that mission, our latest release includes updates that let you build fast and build to last.