Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 1,116 posts.

Software Engineering
453

Mathematica 14

Wolfram's Version 14 includes expansive connections to and from LLMs. New learning tools, including courses and books. Plus, functionality advances in math, core language, video objects, trees, finite fields, Knowledgebase, systems engineering, graphics. Astro, biological and chemical computation.

469

I'm not a fan of strlcpy(3)

strlcpy(3) is an OpenBSD function which is often hailed as a safer replacement for strcpy(3) and/or strncpy(3) . One of the obvious issues with strlcpy is that it's not safe if src isn't null-terminated. However, that's not the reason I don't like strlcpy. In fact despite knowing this, I used to think it was an okay…

478

The new APT 3.0 solver

APT 2.9.3 introduces the first iteration of the new solver codenamed solver3, and now available with the –solver 3.0 option. The new solver works fundamentally different from the old one. How does it work? Solver3 is a fully backtracking dependency solving algorithm that defers choices to as late as possible. It…