Best of 2023

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

Software Engineering
1503

Making sense of React Server Components

This year, the React team unveiled something they've been quietly researching for years: an official way to run React components exclusively on the server. This is a significant paradigm shift, and it's caused a whole lot of confusion in the React community. In this tutorial, we'll explore this new world, and build an…

1505

PHP 8.3

PHP 8.3 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features, such as explicit typing of class constants, deep-cloning of readonly properties and additions to the randomness functionality. As always it also includes performance improvements, bug fixes, and general cleanup.

1509

Link-Time Optimisation (LTO)

I recently started exploring link-time optimisation (LTO), which I used to think was just a single boolean choice in the compilation and linking workflow, and perhaps it was like that a while ago… I’ve learned that these days, there are many different dimensions of LTO across compilers and linkers today and more…

1512

A very subtle bug (2010)

6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a reminder that failure modes are subtle and often involve strange interactions between multiple parts of a system. In my own experience…

1517

Eytzinger Binary Search

This tutorial is loosely based on a 46-page paper by Paul-Virak Khuong and Pat Morin “Array layouts for comparison-based searching” and describes one particular way of performing efficient binary search by rearranging elements of a sorted array in a cache-friendly way.