Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,823 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
6543

Anatomy of an ELF executable

Almost every one of you must have written a program, compiled it and then ran it to see the fruits of your hard labour. It feels good to finally see your program working, isn’t it? But to make all of this work, we have someone else to thankful too. And that is your compiler (of course, assuming that you are working in…

6550

Code is not Literature

I have started code reading groups at the last two companies I’ve worked at, Etsy and Twitter, and some folks have asked for my advice about code reading and running code reading groups. Tl;dr: don’t start a code reading group. What you should start instead I’ll get to in a moment but first I need to explain how I…

6552

Files Are Fraught with Peril

This is a psuedo-transcript for a talk given at Deconstruct 2019. To make this accessible for people on slow connections as well as people using screen readers, the slides have been replaced by in-line text (the talk has ~120 slides; at an average of 20 kB per slide, that's 2.4 MB. If you think that's trivial…