Best of 2024

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

Software Engineering
874

A 2024 Plea for Lean Software

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. The really short version: the…

876

Firewalling your code

When writing code, you can call any function as long as it’s public, and similarly, you can access any object’s public properties or methods. Usually, access to code is all or none – a piece of code can be either public or private. Lately, I’ve been thinking about ways to implement more fine-grained access controls…

878

ViHN: Vim for Hacker News

tl;dr: I made ViHN to read Hacker News without having to move my hands away from the keyboard. It’s freely available on Firefox and Chrome. This is about yet another Hacker News extension. But other people with my obsession for killing the mouse might enjoy it. Most of the content of this article is just […]

883

I found an 8 years old bug in Xorg

Let me set the right expectations first. This bug I found is actually not that complicated, it's very straightforward once you see what's going on. But I still think the process it took me to uncover this bug could be interesting. It's also kind of interesting that a simple bug stayed undiscovered for so long. I will…

885

Understanding the Y Combinator

This article is about the Y combinator, a fixed-point combinator that provides a way of using recursion in scenarios and programming languages where symbols are not available. The concept of the Y combinator itself is closely related to lambda calculus (λ-calculus) and functional programming languages. More…

888

Analyzing Spotify Stream History

I recently learned Spotify provides downloads for users’ streaming history. For me, this is over 10 years worth of data, so at the very least it seemed like a good nostalgia trip. This post covers some of my analysis of my personal export, and hopefully is a good starting place if you’re interested in exploring your…