Best of 2024

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

Software Engineering
101

Why Haskell?

Haskell is a great programming language with many features that make it easier to write robust software, and yet it is rarely taken up by software engineering teams. This essay aims to explain my views as to why Haskell is a great choice for programmers.

105

Sourcegraph went dark

Towards the end of my mid-2019 job search, I was down to joining the Google Go team or Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph ultimately won due to cultural factors - the most important of which was the ability to build 100% in the open . All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were…

112

Planner programming blows my mind

Picat is a research language intended to combine logic programming, imperative programming, and constraint solving. I originally learned it to help with vacation scheduling but soon discovered its planner module, which is one of the most fascinating programming models I’ve ever seen. First, a brief explanation of…

116

“Bad Apple” in Minecraft

Demoscene is the art of pushing computers to perform tasks they weren’t designed to handle. One recurring theme in demoscene is the shadow-art animation “Bad Apple!!”. We’ve played it on the Commodore 64, Vectrex (a unique game console utilizing only vector graphics), Impulse Tracker, and even exploited Super Mario…