Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,826 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
7502

Use fast data algorithms (2021)

As an engineer who primarily works with data and databases I spend a lot of time moving data around, hashing it, compressing it, decompressing it and generally trying to shovel it between VMs and blob stores over TLS. I am constantly surprised by how many systems only support slow, inefficient, and expensive ways of…

7515

How Tail Call Optimization Works

Most undergraduate computer sciences courses teach students about tail call optimization (TCO) , and even if you don't have a formal computer science background the concept is talked about enough that you might be familiar with it anyway, especially if you've ever done any functional programming. However, I think the…

7526

My thoughts about the Principal role

Am I a manager? No. In some cases, people may report to me from an organisational point of view but my way to manage is "don't manage at all" and let the team self organize with my help. I tend to focus more on the team and processes and less on people. I'm not a manager, I try to be a technical leader. Organizations…