Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderHis point is that instead of byte swapping input, we should always use single-byte load operations because "it works for him." But Plan9 is not a system known for its graphics, and I think performance would seriously suffer if everyone had to program like that. Being able to load a pixel as an int is the reason 32-bit RGB is used more often as a pixel format than 24-bit. Of course it might not matter as much these days, GCC…
IME, there's one big thing that often keeps my programs from being unaffected by byte order: wanting to quickly splat data structures into and out of files, pipes, and sockets, without having to encode or decode each element one-by-one. The only real way to make this endian-independent is to have byte-swapping accessors for everything when it's ultimately produced or consumed, but adding all the code for that is very tedious in most languages. One can argue that handling endianness is…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 160
- Total comments
- 161
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012-04-04 | The byte order fallacyFirst breakout · Best thread | enneff | 107 | 103 |
| 2015-02-05 | The byte order fallacy (2012) | rainbowgarden | 1 | 0 |
| 2018-09-06 | The byte order fallacy | ingve | 7 | 0 |
| 2024-09-16 | The Byte Order FallacyLatest 20+ point return | codesuki | 45 | 58 |