Best of 2024

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

Software Engineering
361

Conditional Git Configuration

Building on the earlier article on automatically transforming Git URLs, I’m back with another article on a (potentially powerful) feature of Git—the ability to conditionally include Git configuration files. This means you can configure Git to be configured (and behave) differently based on certain conditions, simply…

368

Is htmx Just Another JavaScript Framework?

Alexander Petros give a thoughtful exploration of htmx's relationship to traditional JavaScript frameworks, examining how its HTML-first approach and narrow focus on network requests sets it apart. He argues that while htmx exhibits framework-like qualities in how it shapes application architecture, its deep…

372

Game Programming in Prolog

This article explains how a game can be made in Prolog by leveraging the hidden power of logic programming. Inspired by the elegance of data-driven design and declarative programming paradigms, I will be explaining a new way of designing game rules which can at the same time be used as the source code of the gameplay…

377

Against Best Practices

I have come to believe that by and large “best practices” are doing more harm than good. Not necessarily because they’re bad advice as such, but because they’re mostly pounded by either 1) various types of zealots, idiots, and assholes who abuse these kind of “best practices” as an argument from authority, or 2)…

380

Arvind has died

Arvind, a longtime MIT professor and leading scholar in computer architecture and programming languages, has died at 77. He transformed research in computer architectures and parallel computing, enabling faster and more efficient computation.

389

tolower() with AVX-512

A couple of years ago I wrote about tolower() in bulk at speed using SWAR tricks . A couple of days ago I was interested by Olivier Giniaux’s article about unsafe read beyond of death , an optimization for handling small strings with SIMD instructions, for a fast hash function written in Rust.