Software engineering

Links about software engineering that Hacker News readers keep rediscovering.

Hall of Fame: 416
Candidates: 711
Types: 8
Median span: 6.4 yrs

Browse Software engineering by type

Every link below is about software engineering and belongs to the selected type.

8 types

Strongest Hall records

416 items

Choose Boring Technology (2015)

mcfunley.com Essays & writing 41 submissions · 39 people · 11.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-06 Resurfaced 2023-10-01

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The Unix-Haters Handbook (1994) [pdf]

web.mit.edu Books & learning 17 submissions · 16 people · 15.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-03 Resurfaced 2025-08-25

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Why GNU grep is fast (2010)

lists.freebsd.org Essays & writing 14 submissions · 14 people · 11.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2015-03 Resurfaced 2022-07-24

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A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

james-iry.blogspot.com Essays & writing 42 submissions · 41 people · 17.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2012-01 Resurfaced 2023-06-25

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John Carmack on Inlined Code

number-none.com Essays & writing 21 submissions · 14 people · 11.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-01 Resurfaced 2024-10-06

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ΠFS

github.com Software & code 25 submissions · 25 people · 12.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-03 Resurfaced 2026-06-10

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The Architecture of Open Source Applications

www.aosabook.org Reference 19 submissions · 19 people · 14.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-08 Resurfaced 2023-10-08

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Asciiflow

www.asciiflow.com Tools, games & demos 20 submissions · 20 people · 14.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2014-01 Resurfaced 2025-08-27

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Explain Shell

explainshell.com Tools, games & demos 29 submissions · 29 people · 11.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-03 Resurfaced 2022-05-30

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The Lost Art of C Structure Packing

www.catb.org Books & learning 17 submissions · 15 people · 12.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-08 Resurfaced 2022-04-27

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UTF-8 Everywhere

utf8everywhere.org Essays & writing 18 submissions · 17 people · 13.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-06 Resurfaced 2020-04-14

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Asciinema

asciinema.org Sites & organizations 24 submissions · 24 people · 11.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-05 Resurfaced 2025-07-25

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Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces

pages.cs.wisc.edu Books & learning 20 submissions · 17 people · 12.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-09 Resurfaced 2021-02-07

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How SQLite Is Tested

www.sqlite.org Reference 23 submissions · 20 people · 16.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2025-12 Resurfaced 2025-12-17

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FFmpeg 4.0 released

ffmpeg.org Software & code 11 submissions · 8 people · 15.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-04 Resurfaced 2026-03-17

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Pijul: A intuitive VCS unlike Git that's based on sound theory of patches

pijul.org Software & code 16 submissions · 15 people · 10.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-09 Resurfaced 2026-04-07

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Eloquent JavaScript 4th edition (2024)

eloquentjavascript.net Books & learning 14 submissions · 14 people · 18.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2014-07 Resurfaced 2024-03-07

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Crystal Programming Language

crystal-lang.org Software & code 23 submissions · 22 people · 10.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-04 Resurfaced 2022-09-01

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Linux ate my RAM

www.linuxatemyram.com Books & learning 12 submissions · 12 people · 12.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-02 Resurfaced 2023-10-09

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Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

lists.busybox.net Essays & writing 8 submissions · 8 people · 13.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-05 Resurfaced 2026-01-04

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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)

www.kalzumeus.com Essays & writing 29 submissions · 27 people · 15.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-11 Resurfaced 2021-03-07

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Command-line tools can be faster than a Hadoop cluster (2014)

adamdrake.com Essays & writing 11 submissions · 10 people · 7.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-03 Resurfaced 2026-01-18

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The Twelve-Factor App

12factor.net Reference 62 submissions · 61 people · 14.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-04 Resurfaced 2023-10-12

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Tutorial: How to use Git in a team development environment

nvie.com Books & learning 17 submissions · 17 people · 12.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-10 Resurfaced 2023-09-07

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How I do my computing

stallman.org Essays & writing 12 submissions · 12 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-10 Resurfaced 2023-07-29

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Oh Shit, Git?

ohshitgit.com Books & learning 8 submissions · 8 people · 8.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-01 Resurfaced 2025-01-16

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Shellcheck finds bugs in your shell scripts

www.shellcheck.net Tools, games & demos 25 submissions · 22 people · 11.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-05 Resurfaced 2023-11-23

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Naughty Strings: A list of strings likely to cause issues as user-input data

github.com Software & code 12 submissions · 12 people · 10.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-11 Resurfaced 2026-02-21

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Cool Retro Terminal

github.com Software & code 13 submissions · 13 people · 11.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-07 Resurfaced 2025-11-24

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Let’s Build a Simple Database (2017)

cstack.github.io Books & learning 16 submissions · 15 people · 8.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-07 Resurfaced 2023-05-03

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Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils

github.com Software & code 12 submissions · 10 people · 12.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-12 Resurfaced 2024-01-03

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-2000 lines of code

www.folklore.org Essays & writing 10 submissions · 9 people · 12.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2022-11-05

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Why should I have written ZeroMQ in C, not C++ (2012)

250bpm.com Essays & writing 8 submissions · 8 people · 11.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-04 Resurfaced 2022-08-12 archived copy

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DevDocs

devdocs.io Reference 22 submissions · 22 people · 10.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-10 Resurfaced 2024-01-12

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Cockpit: Web-based graphical interface for servers

cockpit-project.org Software & code 9 submissions · 9 people · 11.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-02 Resurfaced 2023-10-16

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Falsehoods programmers believe about time

infiniteundo.com Essays & writing 14 submissions · 13 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-01 Resurfaced 2022-08-22

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What Color is Your Function? (2015)

journal.stuffwithstuff.com Essays & writing 25 submissions · 22 people · 11.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-05 Resurfaced 2026-05-26

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List of falsehoods programmers believe in

github.com Reference 15 submissions · 14 people · 8.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-09 Resurfaced 2023-08-03

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GoboLinux

www.gobolinux.org Software & code 10 submissions · 10 people · 15.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-02 Resurfaced 2024-02-28

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Rich Hickey: "Simple Made Easy" from Strange Loop 2011 [video]

www.infoq.com Audio, video & images 19 submissions · 19 people · 14.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-02 Resurfaced 2020-07-21

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A Spellchecker Used To Be A Major Feat of Software Engineering

prog21.dadgum.com Essays & writing 9 submissions · 9 people · 17.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-12 Resurfaced 2025-08-09

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Imba – A new programming language for the web

imba.io Software & code 16 submissions · 15 people · 10.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-07 Resurfaced 2023-09-23

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Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake

www.infoq.com Audio, video & images 16 submissions · 16 people · 13.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-01 Resurfaced 2023-02-28

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Fish: A user-friendly command line shell for macOS, Linux, etc

fishshell.com Software & code 8 submissions · 8 people · 12.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-10 Resurfaced 2026-01-18

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Advanced programming languages (2009)

matt.might.net Books & learning 12 submissions · 10 people · 10.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-06 Resurfaced 2020-05-05

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Why, oh why, do those nutheads use vi?

www.viemu.com Essays & writing 10 submissions · 10 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-04 Resurfaced 2021-12-07 archived copy

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Log File Viewer for the Terminal

lnav.org Software & code 20 submissions · 16 people · 12.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-03 Resurfaced 2026-03-24

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A Guide to Undefined Behavior in C and C++

blog.regehr.org Essays & writing 15 submissions · 15 people · 14.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-08 Resurfaced 2025-03-13

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New Racket Language Website

racket-lang.org Software & code 11 submissions · 11 people · 15.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-08 Resurfaced 2024-04-21

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JSLinux Now Supports x86_64

bellard.org Tools, games & demos 10 submissions · 10 people · 14.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-07 Resurfaced 2026-03-09

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Parse, Don’t Validate

lexi-lambda.github.io Essays & writing 9 submissions · 9 people · 6.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-03 Resurfaced 2026-02-10

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The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

www.destroyallsoftware.com Audio, video & images 27 submissions · 23 people · 12.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-06 Resurfaced 2026-06-14

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My history with Forth and stack machines (2010)

yosefk.com Essays & writing 16 submissions · 16 people · 14.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-08 Resurfaced 2024-12-28

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What is code

www.bloomberg.com Essays & writing 20 submissions · 19 people · 10.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-06 Resurfaced 2026-01-01 archived copy

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The Hardest Program I've Ever Written – How a code formatter works (2015)

journal.stuffwithstuff.com Essays & writing 11 submissions · 7 people · 10.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2019-11 Resurfaced 2025-10-29

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Quine Relay

github.com Software & code 25 submissions · 25 people · 12.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-11 Resurfaced 2022-05-28

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Big Ball of Mud (1999)

www.laputan.org Research & data 21 submissions · 20 people · 18.3 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-07 Resurfaced 2024-07-10

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SQLite small blob storage: 35% Faster Than the Filesystem

www.sqlite.org Research & data 8 submissions · 8 people · 7.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-01 Resurfaced 2024-10-26

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In the Beginning Was the Command Line (1999)

web.stanford.edu Books & learning 14 submissions · 14 people · 11.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-07 Resurfaced 2025-12-08

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Notes on structured concurrency, or: Go statement considered harmful

vorpus.org Essays & writing 19 submissions · 19 people · 8.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2022-07-02

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Recently resurfaced in software engineering

latest 20+ point return

The Birth and Death of JavaScript [video]

www.destroyallsoftware.com Audio, video & images 27 submissions · 23 people · 12.2 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-06 Resurfaced 2026-06-14

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ΠFS

github.com Software & code 25 submissions · 25 people · 12.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-03 Resurfaced 2026-06-10

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The state of building user interfaces in Rust

areweguiyet.com Reference 7 submissions · 7 people · 6.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-06 Resurfaced 2026-06-10

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Queues don't fix overload (2014)

ferd.ca Essays & writing 8 submissions · 8 people · 11.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-01 Resurfaced 2026-06-09

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Practical Common Lisp (2005)

www.gigamonkeys.com Books & learning 9 submissions · 7 people · 19.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-01 Resurfaced 2026-05-29

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Candidates

Browse 711 candidates

The TTY demystified (2008)

www.linusakesson.net Books & learning 32 submissions · 32 people · 16.2 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-08-26

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Wat [video] (2012)

www.destroyallsoftware.com Audio, video & images 36 submissions · 36 people · 14.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-03-29

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Cdecl – Turns English phrases into C declarations

cdecl.org Tools, games & demos 21 submissions · 21 people · 15.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-11-11

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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The Night Watch (2013) [pdf]

www.usenix.org Essays & writing 18 submissions · 16 people · 9.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-03-12

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Jq – A Command-line JSON processor

stedolan.github.io Software & code 18 submissions · 16 people · 7.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2015-04-27

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Radicle is an open source, peer-to-peer code collaboration stack built on Git

radicle.xyz Software & code 26 submissions · 24 people · 7.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-01-23

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Learn X in Y Minutes

learnxinyminutes.com Reference 25 submissions · 25 people · 12.9 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-08-19

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Kivy: Develop multi-touch enabled Python apps

kivy.org Software & code 16 submissions · 15 people · 11.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-12-20

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)

www.cs.virginia.edu Essays & writing 17 submissions · 17 people · 14.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-12-31

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Pipe Operator (|>) For JavaScript

github.com Reference 13 submissions · 13 people · 8.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-01-20

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Free for Developers

free-for.dev Reference 14 submissions · 13 people · 6.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-07-19

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind? (2005)

charlespetzold.com Essays & writing 8 submissions · 8 people · 14.2 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-01-01 archived copy

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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AT&T Archives: The Unix Operating System [video] (1982)

www.youtube.com Audio, video & images 52 submissions · 51 people · 14.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-08-28

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Starship: A minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell

starship.rs Software & code 14 submissions · 13 people · 5.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-06-24

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered? (2011)

stackoverflow.com Essays & writing 22 submissions · 22 people · 16.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2013-09-19

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Microjs

microjs.com Reference 16 submissions · 16 people · 13.2 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-07-30

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Git Cheatsheet (Visualization)

www.ndpsoftware.com Tools, games & demos 12 submissions · 12 people · 12.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-02-07

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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C Is Best

sqlite.org Essays & writing 4 submissions · 4 people · 7.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-01-06

Needs:5 submissions

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VSCodium – Free/Libre Open Source Software Binaries of VS Code

vscodium.com Software & code 10 submissions · 10 people · 6.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-01-05

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Rust Language Cheat Sheet

cheats.rs Reference 11 submissions · 11 people · 7.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-08-30

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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The Clockwise/Spiral Rule of C declarations

c-faq.com Books & learning 13 submissions · 11 people · 14.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-01-01

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Continuous Unix commit history from 1970 until today

github.com Reference 13 submissions · 13 people · 8.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-06-16

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Kubernetes Failure Stories

k8s.af Reference 14 submissions · 14 people · 6.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-08-25

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Software optimization resources

www.agner.org Reference 17 submissions · 17 people · 15.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-07-19

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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AnimeJs v4 Is Here

animejs.com Software & code 9 submissions · 8 people · 7.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-04-03

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Interactive Vim Tutorial

www.openvim.com Books & learning 11 submissions · 11 people · 11.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-10-23

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Redox – A Unix-Like Operating System Written in Rust

www.redox-os.org Software & code 9 submissions · 8 people · 8.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-03-03

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Show HN: Obsidian – A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files

obsidian.md Software & code 11 submissions · 10 people · 6.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-10-17

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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A book series on JavaScript

github.com Books & learning 10 submissions · 10 people · 11.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2016-06-25

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

479max pts

Fixing Unix Filenames (2012)

www.dwheeler.com Essays & writing 15 submissions · 15 people · 17.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-03-17

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

107max pts

Use the Unofficial Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Love Debugging)

redsymbol.net Books & learning 17 submissions · 17 people · 11.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-08-22

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

180max pts

The Humble Programmer (1972)

www.cs.utexas.edu Books & learning 14 submissions · 14 people · 17.2 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-06-17

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Easy 6502 – How to get started writing 6502 assembly language

skilldrick.github.io Books & learning 9 submissions · 9 people · 11.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-02-07

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Readings in Database Systems, 5th Edition (2015)

www.redbook.io Books & learning 12 submissions · 12 people · 10.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-06-14

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Appropriate Uses for SQLite

sqlite.org Reference 7 submissions · 6 people · 10.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-02-12

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)

www.cs.unm.edu Essays & writing 11 submissions · 9 people · 16.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-03-03

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Vis: A Vim-Like Text Editor

github.com Software & code 10 submissions · 9 people · 10.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2017-11-16

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

355max pts

International Obfuscated C Code Contest – 2018 Winning Entries

www.ioccc.org Reference 18 submissions · 15 people · 11.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-05-07

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Why Most Unit Testing is Waste [pdf]

www.rbcs-us.com Essays & writing 4 submissions · 4 people · 5.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-06-28

Needs:5 submissions

306max pts

How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary

samizdat.mines.edu Books & learning 11 submissions · 11 people · 7.9 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2015-05-12

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

162max pts