Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 1,733 posts.

Software Engineering
511

Base64 Encoding, Explained

Base64 is an elegant way to convert binary data to text, making it easy to store and transport. This article covers the basics of Base64 encoding, including what it is, how it works and why it's important. It also shows how to encode and decode Base64 data in various programming languages.

522

The Transformer Family

Many new Transformer architecture improvements have been proposed since my last post on “The Transformer Family” about three years ago. Here I did a big refactoring and enrichment of that 2020 post — restructure the hierarchy of sections and improve many sections with more recent papers. Version 2.0 is a superset of…

526

The Registers of Rust

It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of…

539

This code smells of desperation

A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…