Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 5,567 posts.

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1871

The cult of the free must die

For a terrible half an hour last night I thought Firefox was on the brink of disappearing as an independent browser and rendering engine. I was frightened silly by the rumour that Mozilla laid off significant portions of its browser team. The official press release being full of useless corporate open web blah didn’t…

1874

Names are not type safety

Haskell programmers spend a lot of time talking about type safety . The Haskell school of program construction advocates “capturing invariants in the type system” and “making illegal states unrepresentable,” both of which sound like compelling goals, but are rather vague on the techniques used to achieve them. Almost…

1879

Lovely Week with Elixir

Context It’s not often I get excited about programming languages since meeting Ruby in 2015. Way before that, drowning in misery of writing university course works in Java, has pushed me away from development. Ruby’s freedom and expressiveness was what pulled me back, and its style has kept me in. I was on the lookout…

1887

Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo

Ian Harris explains that more than half of commonly performed surgical operations may be placebos. Adequate studies using a blinded control group are essential. Ian Harris, a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, wrote a book titled Surgery, The Ultimate Placebo. I…