Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,535 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
572

How does Shazam work? (2022)

Your phone's ability to identify any song it listens to is pure technological magic. In this article, I'll show you how one of the most popular apps, Shazam , does it. The founders of Shazam released a paper in 2003 documenting how it works, and I have been working on an implementation of that paper, abracadabra .

578

I found a bug in SQLite

rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine. Recently I introduced a high-performance write-path into rqlite and, to my great surprise, it exposed a bug in SQLite. The SQLite team quickly addressed the issue but let's take a look at the…

587

Choose Boring Technology

Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become…

588

Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Since I was unable to travel for a couple of years during the pandemic, I decided to take my new-found time and really lean into Rust. After writing over 100k lines of Rust code, I think I am starting to get a feel for the language and like every cranky engineer I have developed opinions and because this is the…

590

Discord is not documentation

I'm going to be slightly contrarian and say that I like Discord. It's great to be able to get real-time help on a problem. And it is fun to see, again in real-time, what other people are working on and struggling with. In truth, Discord is no harder to sign up to than Slack, Matrix, Gitter, IRC, or whatever. And of…