Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 1,260 posts.

Software Engineering
781

The Joy of Nand2Tetris

For the last month, I have been working through Nand2Tetris: The Elements of Computing Systems; Building a Modern Computer from First Principles . I recently completed part 1. This first half of the text illuminates the process of building a computer purely from elementary logic gates. Each chapter is comprised of an…

782

Problems with Go channels (2016)

Update: If you’re coming to this blog post from a compendium titled “Go is not good,” I want to make it clear that I am ashamed to be on such a list. Go is absolutely the least worst programming language I’ve ever used. At the time I wrote this, I wanted to curb a trend I was seeing, namely, overuse of one of the more…

786

Hacking Coroutines into C

A while ago, I was part of a team developing embedded software. The software was deeply rooted in state machines - dozens of them—spread across multiple functions. While this architecture is common in embedded development, especially for systems without an operating system, I started to question: Is this really the…

787

My favourite small hash table

I'm the kind of person who thinks about the design and implementation of hash tables. One design which I find particularly cute, and I think deserves a bit more publicity, is Robin Hood open-addressing with linear probing and power-of-two table size. If you're not familiar with hash table terminology, that might look…

789

Several core problems with Rust

I used to call myself a Rust hater, but really I was doing it just to compensate for the perceivable fanboyism e.g. Rust tops on stackoverflow surveys as most-loved language. There are many reasons to hate C++, and I hate C++ too. Lots of people were waiting for a better programming language, but got Rust instead.

809

Emacs: The macOS Bug

The Context I have been recently roaming. Doing some Zig, doing some Go, some Janet. Some C integration. Should have focused on my project but life threw more at me than I could handle, so I sought… happy distractions. My experience with those technologies taught me new tricks and one day, when I needed some more…