Best of 2020

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

Software Engineering
217

Non-Posix File Systems

Operating systems and file systems have traditionally been developed hand in hand. They impose mutual constraints on each other. Today we have two major leaders in file system semantics: Windows and POSIX . They are very close to each other when compared to the full set of possibilities. Interesting things happened…

220

The “No Code” Delusion

Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of “no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applications without having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this, and I think some of the “no code” tools are…

234

The database I wish I had

I watched the talk " Platform as a Reflection of Values: Joyent, Node.js and beyond " by Bryan Cantrill, and I think he was able to put into words something I already felt for some time: if there’s no piece of software out there that reflects your values, it’s time for you to build that softwarefootnote:talk-time[ At…