Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 3,497 posts.

Any topic
184

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…

197

Why I Work on Ads

"I work on ads at Google" "Can I ask why? I honestly can't understand how anyone could." Someone recently asked me why I work on ads, and I wanted to write up something more thorough than my comment. (Despite being a work topic this is a personal post and I'm speaking only for myself.) One answer is that I'm earning…