Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 380 posts.

Systems & Performance
155

Huge Binaries

A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…

176

Writing memory efficient C structs

A struct in C is the best way to organize your data so that you can easily use the data later in your program. However, there are a few caveats to C structures, mainly how their memory works. Note that I’m making a lot of assumptions about type sizes and standards. These can differ between systems and ABI’s, so for…

179

RIP Usenix ATC

USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference . When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I…