Most cited

Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 207 posts.

Software Engineering
2022
188

Verilog Is Weird

Verilog is the most commonly used language for hardware design in America (VHDL is more common in Europe). Too bad it's so baroque. If you ever browse the Verilog questions on Stack Overflow , you'll find a large number of questions, usually downvoted, asking “why doesn't my code work?”, with code that's not just a…

201

Norvig's Law (2002)

In July 1999, there was a news article stating that PC usage had doubled yet again, reaching penetration of 50% of homes. People were hailing this as yet another sign of the inevitable climb of technology, but I saw it as a warning sign that the glass was half empty, and coined the following:

202

Programming with Nothing

I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …

205

89 Operating Systems

I occasionally do talks about curl. In these talks I often include a few slides that say something abut curl's coverage and presence on different platforms. Mostly to boast of course, but also to help explain to the audience how curl has manged to reach its ten billion installations. This is current incarnation of…