Best of 2021

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

Software Engineering
819

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…

830

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

831

Avy Can Do Anything

Update (2024-09-08): Read this article in Japanese at Qiita or at Emacs-JP. You’re using Avy wrong. Too harsh? Let me rephrase: you’re barely using Avy. Still too broad? Okay, the noninflammatory version: Avy, the Emacs package to jump around the screen, lends itself to efficient composable usage that’s obscured by…

834

Design Issues in LLVM IR

On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…