Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 1,551 posts.

Software Engineering
1211

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…

1213

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 →

1218

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.