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
11646

Nibble Sort

A while back, John Regehr posted the Nibble Sort Programming Contest on his blog. The objective was to write a program that sorts the 4-bit components (nibbles) of 64-bit words as fast as possible. For example, 0x42badc0ffeed00d5 should result in 0xffeedddcba542000 after sorting.

11661

Another go at the Next Big Language

2007 was a different time for languages. While Java held the popular crown, the mainstream programming community were still coming to terms with Java 6. Released 3 months earlier, it was very much an evolution of the Java 5 watershed. Its arrival heralded the end of life for Java 1.4 and represented an opportunity to…