Best of 2023

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

Software Engineering
92

Accidental database programming

Join me as we take a look at common application data patterns, and how they relate to the inner-workings of databases. In this post, we discuss data caching, indexing, optimistic mutations, and recursive cache invalidation. We will see how life might be easier if we could just use a frontend optimized database like…

94

Discord is not documentation

I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of…

97

Xmas.c (1988)

The second block has more real work going on. If the character stored in the variable _ does not match the first character of the string a , the code recurses in such a way that this same block of code will again be entered. That is, t=-65 forces a return to the if (t < -50) block. The recursion steps through string a…

111

Joins 13 Ways

Relational (inner) joins are really common in the world of databases, and one weird thing about them is that it seems like everyone has a different idea of what they are. In this post I’ve aggregated a bunch of different definitions, ways of thinking about them, and ways of implementing them that will hopefully be…

114

Rewriting the Ruby parser

At Shopify, we have spent the last year writing a new Ruby parser, which we’ve called YARP (Yet Another Ruby Parser). As of the date of this post, YARP can parse a semantically equivalent syntax tree to Ruby 3.3 on every Ruby file in Shopify’s main codebase, GitHub’s main codebase, CRuby, and the 100 most popular gems…