Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 1,733 posts.

Software Engineering
302

Why do people still use VBA?

Introduction Recently, I watched a video by YouTuber ThePrimeTime which details a dev’s frustrations with business culture. Prime is an ex-entrepreneur who currently works in software development at Netflix. His views in this video have been criticised for being jaded by FAANG business cultures he has worked in. I…

306

Go 1.21 Released

The latest Go release, version 1.21, arrives six months after Go 1.20 . Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility ; in fact, Go 1.21 improves upon that promise . We expect almost all Go programs to continue…

316

Go 1.20 released

The latest Go release, version 1.20, arrives six months after Go 1.19 . Most of its changes are in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries. As always, the release maintains the Go 1 promise of compatibility . We expect almost all Go programs to continue to compile and run as before.

323

BB(3, 3) is Hard

I’m excited to share a 3 state, 3 symbol Turing Machine that cannot be proven to halt or not (when starting on a blank tape) without solving a Collatz-like problem. Therefore, solving the \(BB(3, 3)\) problem is at least as hard as solving this Collatz-like problem, a class of problem for which Paul Erdős famously…

325

What a good debugger can do

When people say “debuggers are useless and using logging and unit-tests is much better,” I suspect many of them think that debuggers can only put breakpoints on certain lines, step-step-step through the code, and check variable values. While any reasonable debugger can indeed do all of that, it’s only the tip of the…