The Best Things and Stuff of 2021 | Hacker News Reader

The Best Things and Stuff of 2021

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262 pointsbvaldivielso23 comments

I like this list. In a time when there are many listicals and claimed "curated" collections that are little more than lists of affiliate links, I find value in actual curated lists with actual opinions.

It helps that I think many things mentioned are interesting, but I haven't heard of.

“10 times lists drove me absolutely insane, number 7 will blow your mind!”

If you haven't seen them, you'll probably like past years lists as well as the discussions here about them as well.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Great to see Herzog on the list. Highly recommend "Werner Herzog, A Guide for the Perplexed", which is a great collection of musings in his own words about life and art, including various anecdotes related to both. Probably one of my favorite books in recent times.

Last year this post tipped me off to 18xx.games, which I had a lot of fun exploring.

(Also I suspect they listen to the weird studies podcast, what with the Ishmael Reed and Doris Lessing)

I'm glad that you find the joys of 18XX games through my list. I had a regular game group pre-pandemic and spent a lot of time with them. There's nothing like them in tabletop gaming.

Your insight about Weird Studies is spot on. In hindsight I should have a Favorite Podcasts section too since I've spent more time listening to them in the past year than ever. WS would definitely be at the top.

https://www.weirdstudies.com

I have heard some conflicting opinions on one of the books you mentioned. Software Design for Flexibility How to Avoid Programming Yourself into a Corner. Most seem to dislike it, but you have the complete opposite opinion. Why do you think that is?

I can’t speak for others but for myself I love that the techniques described are very unconventional.

Can you get rid of the font size property on your <body>? The text is very hard to read. (A viewport meta tag would be great too ). Thanks for the blues album suggestion!

Do you think they help from a practical perspective or is it mostly at the might come in handy someday level? Who would get the most out of this book you think?

Those Inside Macintosh books were the best! I was a very lucky teen to have had a few, which unfortunately completely tainted my perspective on quality documentation.

I loved The Detectorists, a nice peaceful show to relax to.

I don't think Fisher would be particularly happy with his writing being described as neo-liberal! The rest of the list was interesting though.

Rereading that sentence I can see how it could be read as applying to Fisher’s book but it was the world passed through a neoliberal filter that I attempted to describe.

Let's take a moment to pray for all the stuff. (from Don't Look Up)

Inside Macintosh was a great series. I used them mostly as a Lisp (Macintosh Common Lisp) programmer, totally new to Macs, trying to translate everything to the MCL FFI.

Part of me thinks I'd love to have a copy, but I'm sure I have a lot of nostalgia coloring my feelings.

It’s not from 2021, but I re-read it in 2021: Lyonesse book one: Suldrun’s Garden. It is excellent. I’m just starting on book two tonight. I found the series via Hacker News years ago, and thought I’d pay it forward.

Software design for flexibility is amazing, just dove into it because of this post thank you.

I am in awe how it's possible to get so much done in a year! I could hardly manage to learn a new programming language, do my day job, read fiction, spend time with family, exercise regularly, socialize, give talks, write blogs etc.

I thought so too, but then I started keeping a diary. I also stopped, as the past 20 months really have been extraordinarily busy.

Anyway, if you write stuff down, it turns out you mostly just forget most of what you did, and tend to misremember or mix up times and dates.

tl;dr - you're probably more awesome than you remember.

I love it when this comes up in the rss feed. I wish more folks did these!

Can anyone elaborate on “Stop: Modern C++” under 2021 Tech Radar?

I can elaborate. I used to do a lot of C++ early in my career -- pre-Boost days. I recently explored the post-Boost landscape to see if there was something worth pursuing (for me) and decided that I wasn't satisfied with that as an option.

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