Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,834 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
11981

Implementing Forth in Go and C

I first ran into Forth about 20 years ago when reading a book about designing embedded hardware . The reason I got the book back then was to actually learn more about the HW aspects, so having skimmed the Forth chapter I just registered an "oh, this is neat" mental note and moved on with my life. Over the last two…

11987

Postgres indexes under the hood

Many software engineers use database indexes every day, but few of us really understand how they work. In this post I’ll explain: How indexing works in Postgres using B-Trees What B-Trees are Why they are a good fit for this problem Indexes in Postgres Postgres actually offers 4 different kinds of indexes for…

11988

Reasoning with Types in Rust

Hi, I'm Ariel (she/her), a newly-minted member of the Swift team at Apple ! Previously, I helped lead the Luau team at Roblox where my efforts primarily focused on the design and implementation of Luau 's type system. I also led the creation of Lute to support using Luau both to build developer tooling, and as a…

11996

How D3 Selections Work

In the past I have presented simplified descriptions of D3 ’s selections, providing only enough detail to get started. This article takes a more comprehensive approach; rather than saying how to use selections , I will explain how selections are implemented . This may take longer to read, but it should dispel any…

11998

Almost Always Unsigned

Almost Always Unsigned # Written by Dale Weiler Twitter GitHub Last updated Saturday, January 1, 2022 The need for signed integer arithmetic is often misplaced as most integers never represent negative values within a program. The indexing of arrays and iteration count of a loop reflects this concept as well. There…