Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,842 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
17792

Don't Build APIs

My first job at Microsoft was providing developer support for the early Windows SDKs. To do my job well, I spent hours studying the Windows SDK documentation, the Windows source code, and writing sample applications. I then spent hours poring over customers’ (such as Lotus, WordPerfect, and Computer Associates) code…

17796

Who Says C is Simple? (2010)

When I (George) started to write CIL I thought it was going to take two weeks. Exactly a year has passed since then and I am still fixing bugs in it. This gross underestimate was due to the fact that I thought parsing and making sense of C is simple. You probably think the same. What I did not expect was how many dark…

17801

Faster Sorting with Go Generics

Recently, a new set of sorting functions has landed in Go's golang.org/x/exp/slices package [1] . These functions leverage Go generics to provide a more ergonomic API for sorting (without requiring users to implement sort.Interface ), and also deliver a nice performance improvement, as the CL demonstrates.

17804

Self-Replicating Functions

These are notes I’m creating for myself as I explore functions \(f\) that can be written as a sum \(f = g_1 + g_2\) where \(g_1\) and \(g_2\) are shifted and possibly reflected versions of each other, both strongly resembling the original function \(f\) . When a function \(f\) has these properties, I informally call…