Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 1,535 posts.

Software Engineering
274

I wrote a Game Boy Advance game in Zig

The Game Boy Advance is an interesting game console. It has a modern-style CPU (32-bit ARM, lots of registers), but uses an old-fashioned tile based renderer like how the NES did it in the 80s. Don’t get me wrong, since its one of Nintendo’s last tile-based systems, they took the idea as far as it can go with fancy…

275

How Does GPT-4o Encode Images?

Here’s a fact: GPT-4o charges 170 tokens to process each 512x512 tile used in high-res mode. At ~0.75 tokens/word, this suggests a picture is worth about 227 words—only a factor of four off from the traditional saying. (There’s also an 85 tokens charge for a low-res ‘master thumbnail’ of each picture and higher…

290

NumPy 2.0

NumPy 2.0.0 is the first major release since 2006. It is the result of 11 months of development since the last feature release and is the work of 212 contributors spread over 1078 pull requests. It contains a large number of exciting new features as well as changes to both the Python and C APIs.