Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 6,220 posts.

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5735

Clojure Zippers (2021)

In this article, we will discuss zippers in the Clojure language. These are an unusual way to work with collections. Using a zipper, you can traverse a data structure arbitrarily and modify its content as well as search in it. A zipper is a powerful abstraction that pays off over time. However, it is not as…

5753

Reassessing Wayland

So a bit under 3 years ago, I made my infamous Wayland rant post that is likely the most read post on this blog by miles. I should really actually write about music again one of these days, but that's a topic for another time. The language was perhaps a bit inflammatory, but I felt the criticisms I made at the time…

5760

Ways to generate SSA

Static Single Assignment is a program representation where each “variable” (though this term can be misleading) is assigned exactly once. Mostly the variables aren’t variables at all, but instead names for values—for expressions. SSA is used a lot in compilers. See this lesson from Cornell for converting Bril to SSA…