Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 1,136 posts.

Software Engineering
640

Philosophy of Coroutines

I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…

649

Not knowing the /proc file system

Overview Edit: this post was discussed on hacker news Some of the comments contained valuable reviews of the C code listed below. I’ve appended some edits after the original listing. I’ve been working quite with files and file systems on Linux recently. Mostly from the vantage point of either a shell or a python…

657

Why Do ML on the Erlang VM?

Another question might be; why do machine learning at all? I'm not big into ML/AI though I've been poking it more recently as the open models, such as Stable Diffusion and the more practical Whisper, caught my curiosity. I have a very decent GPU (3090 Ti) and I've poked around a bit. I don't consider ML a super…

658

Driving Compilers

I remember how pleasant it was to learn to program in C. There were so many good books explaining not only the language but also the standard library. I devoured both The C Programming Language (K&R) by Kernighan/Ritchie and The Standard C Library by P.J. Plauger. Then came Expert C Programming by Van der Linden and…