Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 533 posts.

Systems & Performance
242

Why software ends up complex

Complexity in software, whether it’s a programming languages, an API, or a user interface, is generally regarded as a vice. And yet complexity is exceptionally common, even though no one ever sets out to build something complex. For people interested in building easy to use software, understanding the causes of…

251

PostgreSQL B-Tree index deduplication

PostgreSQL 13 development is coming along nicely, Postgres 13 Beta3 was released on 8/13/2020 . The Postgres Beta 1 and 2 releases were released in May and June 2020. One of the features that has my interest in Postgres 13 is the B-Tree deduplication effort. B-Tree indexes are the default indexing method in Postgres…