Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 1,517 posts.

Software Engineering
340

PostGIS at 20, the Beginning

Twenty years ago today, the first email on the postgis users mailing list (at that time hosted on yahoogroups.com) was sent, announcing the first numbered release of PostGIS. The early history of PostGIS was tightly bound to a consulting company I had started a few years prior, Refractions Research. My first contracts…

341

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

Updates: 12th of September 2021: I’m writing a book on DNA! If you want to become a beta reader, or have suggestions, I’d love to hear from you! 8th of January 2021: This article has been revised and updated, scientifically and in terms of dead links. Revision made by Tomás Simões (@putadagravidade /…

345

Maybe we could tone down the JavaScript (2016)

I’m having a really weird browser issue, where scripts on some pages just won’t run until about 20 seconds have passed. Whatever you’re about to suggest, yes, I’ve thought of it, and no, it’s not the problem. I mention this not in the hope that someone will help me debug it, but because it’s made me acutely aware of a…

358

Comparing Svelte and React

Last year I created Pomodone , a small time tracking application based on the Pomodoro technique of working in 25 minute intervals. It's a pretty basic app; it has a 25 minute timer (that runs in a Web Worker) and saves a history of your "poms" to a small Firebase database. I initially built it using React (well…