Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 1,535 posts.

Software Engineering
780

Magic Numbers

1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here?