Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,541 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
5860

My favorite prime number generator

Many years ago I've re-posted a Stack Overflow answer with Python code for a terse prime sieve function that generates a potentially infinite sequence of prime numbers ("potentially" because it will run out of memory eventually). Since then, I've used this code many times - mostly because it's short and clear. In this…

5865

Common Lisp: 2022 in review

And 2022 is over. The Common Lisp language and environment are solid and stable, yet evolve. Implementations, go-to libraries, best practices, communities evolve. We don’t need a “State of the Ecosystem” every two weeks but still, what happened and what did you miss in 2022?This is my pick of the…

5880

Modeling Message Queues in TLA+

I recently did a corporate TLA+ workshop and some people asked what TLA+ specs look like in practice. If you looked at the most common public examples, you’d probably come away thinking that people only used it for critical consensus algorithms. This is a problem for two reasons: first, it makes it harder to learn…