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
13201

Python's Type Checking Renaissance

You may have heard that TypeScript has been taking the web development space by storm in the last few years , bringing to it static types. I believe the same thing is starting to happen in the world of Python, where type checkers like mypy , Pyre , and Pyright are increasingly used, at least where Python is used by…

13202

The cost of Go's panic and recover

TL;DR ¶ Some of the wisdom contained in Josh Bloch’s Effective Java book is relevant to Go. panic and recover are best reserved for exceptional circumstances. Reliance on panic and recover can noticeably slow down execution, incurs heap allocations, and precludes inlining. Internal handling of failure cases via panic…

13209

Generation JavaScript

I’ll start by saying that this is not a rant, but rather a cry of despair that I’m repeating and that slowly - but steadily - seems to come to consciousness in our industry, like this one. The phenomenon I’m about to describe is not only limited to the Javascript community either, that community seems a lot more…

13214

Why Elixir (2014)

It’s been about a year since I’ve started using Elixir. Originally, I intended to use the language only for blogging purposes, thinking it could help me better illustrate benefits of Erlang Virtual Machine (EVM). However, I was immediately fascinated with what the language brings to the table, and very quickly…

13220

Vibecoding #2

I feel like I got substantial value out of Claude today, and want to document it. I am at the tail end of AI adoption, so I don't expect to say anything particularly useful or novel. However, I am constantly complaining about the lack of boring AI posts, so it's only proper if I write one.

13225

Final features of C++17

With last weeks C++ committee meeting in Oulu, C++17 is feature complete and on its way to become an international standard. After the last meeting in Jacksonville I had little hope to see big surprises, but Oulu managed to add a few important and interesting features to the new standard. There is a very good overview…

13230

The FFmpeg/Libav situation

One year and a half ago, an important part of FFmpeg developers decided to change the way the project was managed. This led to some kind of takeover , mainly to get rid of the old maintainer dictatorship, but also to change development methods, redefine objectives, etc. Then, for various reasons I will quickly…