Best of 2022

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

Software Engineering
814

Code vs. No-code

There was a conversation on Twitter this week that helped to clarify my thinking about something, and I wanted to share. There is a sort of tension between “code” and “no-code” (sometimes “low-code”) solutions. People who consider themselves software developers see people trying to use no-code solutions to do things…

830

Assembly Nights

Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…

840

Norvig's Law (2002)

In July 1999, there was a news article stating that PC usage had doubled yet again, reaching penetration of 50% of homes. People were hailing this as yet another sign of the inevitable climb of technology, but I saw it as a warning sign that the glass was half empty, and coined the following: