Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,545 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
10910

Fast high-level programming languages

Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…

10913

A 2024 Plea for Lean Software

This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors. The really short version: the…

10916

Rust’s worst feature

There are several aspects of Rust that I’m not particularly fond of but the one that takes the cake is core::io::BorrowedBuf which I despise with passion. It’s a nightly feature which puts in question my extreme emotions about it. On the other hand it means there’s time to stop it from getting stabilised and figure…

10919

Go Bloviations

This post was written sixteen months ago, when fish briefly explored Go with the intention of writing a new command line shell. ( fish abandoned Go after discovering that terminal programming is what makes shells so horrible, and term programming is least horrible in C.)