Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 1,420 posts.

Software Engineering
631

Addendum to “Curl is C”

I posted curl is C a few days ago and it raced on hacker news, reddit and elsewhere and got well over a thousand comments in those forums alone. The blog post has been read more than 130,000 times so far. Addendum a few days later Many commenters of my curl is C post struck … Continue reading Yes C is unsafe, but… →

633

Search at Slack

On average, 20% of a knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for the information they need to get their work done. If you think about a typical work week, that means an entire day is dedicated to this task! To help our users find more time in their day, the Search, Learning, and Intelligence team set…

636

Using JDK 9 Memory Order Modes

This guide is mainly intended for expert programmers familiar with Java concurrency, but unfamiliar with the memory order modes available in JDK 9 provided by VarHandles. Mostly, it focuses on how to think about modes when developing parallel software. Feel free to first read the Summary .

640

In Defense of C++

I really like C++. It's not the right tool for every job, but it's what I reach for when I need to do any kind of systems programming. Unfortunately, C++ has often been cited as a "bad" language, and I feel like that reputation has worsened over time. Recent languages like Go and Rust have taken over a lot of mind…

659

Faktory, a new background job system

Yesterday I explained how a good background job framework is critical to scaling business applications. Today, meet Faktory. I’ve spent the last six months building Faktory, a new background job system which aims to bring the best practices developed over the last five years in Sidekiq to every programming language…