Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 497 posts.

Software Engineering
271

Photoshop’s journey to the web

Over the last three years, Chrome has been working to empower web applications that want to push the boundaries of what's possible in the browser. One such web application has been Photoshop. The idea of running software as complex as Photoshop directly in the browser would have been hard to imagine just a few…

276

VSCode, Dev Containers and Docker

Long term readers of this blog will know our devotion to using container-based technology, especially Docker, to significantly improve software quality through repeatable builds. In the Autumn/fall of 2020, Microsoft introduced a Visual Studio Code (VSCode) extension Remote – Containers. With one quick stroke, this…

291

A Random Walk Through Git

This tutorial is an in-depth look at how Git works, performing a lot of sometimes unusual steps to walk through interesting details. You will have to pay attention closely, or you will get lost on the way. But do not despair; you can run this tutorial on your computer, at the speed you want, skip to any step you want…

292

NumPy 1.20

This NumPy release is the largest so made to date, some 684 PRs contributed by 184 people have been merged. See the list of highlights below for more details. The Python versions supported for this release are 3.7-3.9, support for Python 3.6 has been dropped. Highlights are

296

Showing GUIs from Shell Scripts

Ever written a quick (shell) script to automate a small task at some point? Then that script grew over the years and perhaps ended up in the hands of way more users than you originally anticipated? If you were lucky enough to experience this, maybe you wondered: Wouldn't it be nice to have a GUI for that script?