Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 1,747 posts.

Software Engineering
541

Reverse geocoding is hard

My wife and I run OpenBenches - a crowd-sourced database of nearly 40,000 memorial benches. Every bench is geo-tagged with a latitude and longitude. But how do you go from a string of digits to something human readable? How do I turn -33.755780,150.603769 into "42 Wallaby Way, Sydney, Australia"? Luckily, that's a…

555

RFC 9839 and Bad Unicode

Unicode is good. If you’re designing a data structure or protocol that has text fields, they should contain Unicode characters encoded in UTF-8. There’s another question, though: “ Which Unicode characters?” The answer is “Not all of them, please exclude some.”

567

No strcpy either

Some time ago I mentioned that we went through the curl source code and eventually got rid of all strncpy() calls. strncpy() is a weird function with a crappy API. It might not null terminate the destination and it pads the target buffer with zeroes. Quite frankly, most code bases are probably better off completely ……