Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 6,299 posts.

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5552

Modern Transactional Stack

Transactional databases have long been the most critical component of application design. Why? Because a steadfast database is generally the ultimate enforcement point for correctness in a messy, distributed world. Without them we’d overpay and undercharge. We’d lose riders trying to get home from the airport, and…

5558

NP-complete isn't always hard

A common assumption I see on the ‘net is that NP-complete problems are impossible to solve. I recently read that dependency management in Python is hard because package resolution is NP-complete. This is true in principle, but the reality is more complicated. When we say “NP-complete is hard” we’re talking about…

5575

C++ at the End of 2022

I must admit that some previous years for C++ might feel a bit “boring” and “stable”. New features, new standard every three years, meetings, conferences… life as usual (apart from some additional World/Economy/public Health events…). This year seems different as it looks like a “breakpoint” in the history of C++… and…