Best of 2024

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

Software Engineering
574

Curl is just the hobby

Jan Gampe took things to the next level by actually making this cross-stitch out of the pattern I previously posted online. The flowers really gave it an extra level of charm I think. As a cross-stitch As a pillow This quote is from a comment by an upset user on my blog, replying to one … Continue reading curl is just…

581

Deep Bug

The project has been haunted by a mysterious bug since sometime February. It relates to the code that constructs the index, particularly the code that merges partial indices. In short the search engine constucts the reverse index through successive merging of smaller indices, which reduces the overall memory…

585

C23: A Slightly Better C

One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…

586

Fractional scales, fonts and hinting

GTK 4.14 will be released very soon, with new renderers that were introduced earlier this year. The new renderers have much improved support for fractional scaling—on my system, I now use 125% scaling instead of the 'Large Text' setting, and I find that works fine for my needs. Magical numbers Ever since 4.0, GTK…

591

Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool

Like the blip of an intro on the front page says, my degree was originally in music. My running joke as a web dev is that neither has meaningfully required me to count past 32. And while my main concentration was vocals, I've since realized I should probably stop strictly calling this a nontechnical field, because my…