Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 1,020 posts.

Software Engineering
35

Signed Char Lotte

“signed char lotte” is a computer program written by Brian Westley and the winner of the “Best Layout” award in the 1990 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. The cleverness of the text is staggering. Superficially it reads as an epistolary exchange between two (possibly former) lovers, Charlotte and Charlie. At…

46

Speed of Rust vs. C

The run-time speed and memory usage of programs written in Rust should about the same as of programs written in C, but overall programming style of these languages is different enough that it's hard to generalize their speed. This is a summary of where they're the same, where C is faster, and where Rust is faster.

51

Programming is hard

Most beginners in programming eventually end up with the same ingratiating message: „Programming is easy, everyone can do it”, with some threatening message that people doing the gatekeeping should stop doing that. I’m here to tell you that that is not true. Programming is hard, programming is not for everyone, and…

55

Surprisingly Slow

I have an affinity for performance optimization and making software as efficient as possible. Over the years, I've encountered specific instances and common patterns that make software or computers slow. In this post, I'll shine a spotlight on some of them.