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

Software Engineering
Any year
12033

Infinite work is less work

The first task of last week's Weekly Challenge was to print the first ten strong and weak primes. A prime p n is "strong" if it's larger than the average of its two neighbouring primes ( i.e. p n > (p n-1 +p n+1 )/2 ). A prime is "weak" if it's smaller than the average of its two neighbours.

12035

The lost malloc()

Prompted by another project idea that popped into my mind, I did some Unix archaeology and looked at the original sources . This is the most fun I've ever had reading someone else's code - probably due to the historical significance. But also because of how delightfully approachable it was, compared to modern…

12054

Branchless Coding in Go

So, I was recently inspired by a coworker’s design to pack what would have been JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) data into a bunch of bit fields in an array of 64-bit elements. Binary arithmetic, bit-packing, and high performance are fun for me, so I thought of some ways to improve it, for learning purposes. Then I…