Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 780 posts.

Software Engineering
525

Beating the Compiler

An oft-repeated fact on programming forums these days is that a decent optimizing compiler will always beat a puny human's attempt at hand-written assembler. There are rare cases, like MPEG decoders, where making good use of the SIMD instructions can allow assembly to massively beat the compiler. But generally you'll…

530

Fixing JSON

I’ve edited a couple of the JSON RFCs, and am working on the design of a fairly complex DSL, so I think I can claim to have dug deeper in the JSON mines than most. We can easily agree on what’s wrong with JSON, and I can’t help wondering if it’d be worth fixing it.