Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 1,020 posts.

Software Engineering
152

The complexity that lives in the GUI

The user interfaces are a weird thing. There are all sorts of libraries and frameworks that are supposed to help you on your journey of writing a GUI, but despite all the best practices and frameworks forcing you to eat your vegetables, the GUI always ends up being a ridiculous mess. After pondering some more about…

162

The compiler will optimize that away

A lot of programmers believe that compilers are magic black boxes in which you put your messy code in and get a nice optimized binary out. The hallway philosophers will often start a debate on which language features or compiler flags to use in order to capture the full power of the compiler’s magic. If you have ever…