Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 1,001 posts.

Software Engineering
788

Const all the things?

Last week someone posted a /r/cpp thread titled “Declaring all variables local to a function as const”: Ok, so I’m an old-school C++ programmer using the language now since the early ’90s. I’m a fan of const-correctness for function and member declarations, parameters, and the like. Where, I believe, it actually…

790

Amish Hackers (2009)

[Translations: Japanese] The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It’s well known the strictest of them don’t use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in … Continue reading →

794

Zero point leet seconds (2018)

While calculating certain round-trip times, here is a number I came across that is surprisingly memorable: It takes light 0.1337 seconds to travel the length of the Earth's equator via vacuum or air. Let me repeat that. It takes light "zero point leet" seconds to travel once around the equator.

802

Julia Macros for Beginners

Macros are a powerful and interesting feature of the Julia programming language, but they can also be confusing. Users coming from Python, Matlab or R have not come in contact with similar constructs before, and they require a different way of thinking about code. This article is supposed to be a simple introduction…

807

New Clojure Project Quickstart

Clojure beginners sometimes struggle with setting up a new Clojure deps.edn project compared to setting up a lein project. This is one of the reasons I've built neil . But not only for beginners, I've been using neil myself a ton too, to add common features to existing deps.edn projects. You may think that neil is a…

810

Rust in 2022

In previous years, the core team have asked the community to write new years blog posts about Rust in the coming year. They haven't this year, but I wanted to write one anyway. However, it turned out to be harder than expected. Perhaps that's due to Rust being in an