Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 1,747 posts.

Software Engineering
906

Relaxed Radix Balanced Trees (2024)

I’m adding immutable vectors to my language, Ivan, and needed to pick a suitable data structure to implement them. Clojure uses Persistent Vectors (PVs) which support lookups, updates, and appends all in ‘effectively’ constant time. However, it doesn’t have efficient insert or merge operations. Relaxed Radix Balanced…

910

Portals and Quake

Ever wanted to know how exactly did Quake’s precomputed visibility work? I did, so I wrote vis.py , a reimplementation of their algorithm in Python. This guide has all the information you need to understand vis , the tool used by Quake, Half-Life and Source Engine games.

928

Xcode constantly phones home

Building StopTheMadness Pro in Xcode is usually very fast, because my project doesn't use any Swift. It's a combination of Objective-C, which compiles much more quickly than Swift, and JavaScript, which doesn't need to be compiled. However, sometimes the builds were very slow for some strange reason. Checking the…