Type and topic

Essays & writing about Computer science

Every link here is both Essays & writing and about computer science.

Hall of Fame: 18
Candidates: 44
Median span: 7.9 yrs
First seen: 2007

Strongest Hall records

18 items

Why numbering should start at zero (1982)

www.cs.utexas.edu 17 submissions · 16 people · 13.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-12 Resurfaced 2023-07-16

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Statically Recompiling NES Games into Native Executables with LLVM and Go

andrewkelley.me 12 submissions · 12 people · 12.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-08 Resurfaced 2017-09-15

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Computer latency: 1977-2017

danluu.com 17 submissions · 14 people · 8.1 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-12 Resurfaced 2022-11-20

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How Google Code Search Worked: Regex Matching with a Trigram Index (2012)

swtch.com 15 submissions · 15 people · 12.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-12 Resurfaced 2024-05-27

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The $5000 Compression Challenge

www.patrickcraig.co.uk 8 submissions · 8 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2024-11-23

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Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction

worrydream.com 14 submissions · 11 people · 11.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2017-05 Resurfaced 2021-09-11

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Rich Programmer Food

steve-yegge.blogspot.com 18 submissions · 18 people · 17.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-05 Resurfaced 2016-05-23

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Bret Victor: Learnable Programming

worrydream.com 16 submissions · 16 people · 11.0 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-07 Resurfaced 2023-10-03

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Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers.

prog21.dadgum.com 5 submissions · 5 people · 17.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-04 Resurfaced 2026-04-15

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Database “sharding” came from Ultima Online? (2009)

www.raphkoster.com 8 submissions · 6 people · 6.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-04 Resurfaced 2024-08-25

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OCaml for the Masses (2011)

queue.acm.org 9 submissions · 9 people · 8.5 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2018-11 Resurfaced 2018-11-26

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What's Functional Programming All About?

www.lihaoyi.com 10 submissions · 7 people · 7.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-09 Resurfaced 2024-09-04

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Technical Papers Every Programmer Should Read (At Least Twice)

blog.fogus.me 7 submissions · 7 people · 9.9 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2016-10 Resurfaced 2016-12-01

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Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization That the World Forgot

probablydance.com 7 submissions · 7 people · 6.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-04 Resurfaced 2025-04-14

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How Recursion Got into Programming (2014)

vanemden.wordpress.com 8 submissions · 8 people · 8.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2020-05 Resurfaced 2022-10-07

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How to Criticize Computer Scientists (2001)

www.cs.purdue.edu 6 submissions · 6 people · 13.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2021-03-28

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Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm

www.quantamagazine.org 5 submissions · 5 people · 7.0 years

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

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Text Rendering Hates You

gankra.github.io 6 submissions · 5 people · 2.4 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2022-02 Resurfaced 2022-02-14

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Recently resurfaced

latest 20+ point return

Want to Write a Compiler? Just Read These Two Papers.

prog21.dadgum.com 5 submissions · 5 people · 17.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2026-04 Resurfaced 2026-04-15

509max pts

Teenager Finds Classical Alternative to Quantum Recommendation Algorithm

www.quantamagazine.org 5 submissions · 5 people · 7.0 years

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

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Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization That the World Forgot

probablydance.com 7 submissions · 7 people · 6.8 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2023-04 Resurfaced 2025-04-14

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The $5000 Compression Challenge

www.patrickcraig.co.uk 8 submissions · 8 people · 13.7 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2021-03 Resurfaced 2024-11-23

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What's Functional Programming All About?

www.lihaoyi.com 10 submissions · 7 people · 7.6 years

Hall of Fame Class of 2024-09 Resurfaced 2024-09-04

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Candidates

Browse 44 candidates

Dynamic Languages Are Static Languages (2011)

existentialtype.wordpress.com 15 submissions · 15 people · 13.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2015-07-22

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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A history of branch prediction

danluu.com 9 submissions · 8 people · 8.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-07-01

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project

nothings.org 6 submissions · 6 people · 14.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-01-15

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Four Column ASCII

garbagecollected.org 4 submissions · 4 people · 9.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-02-15

Needs:5 submissions

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Why ML/OCaml are good for writing compilers (1998)

flint.cs.yale.edu 6 submissions · 6 people · 10.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2017-04-15

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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The Yoda of Silicon Valley

www.nytimes.com 6 submissions · 6 people · 6.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-08-01

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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A Brief History of the UUID

segment.com 6 submissions · 6 people · 7.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-02-03

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Anatomy of a Program in Memory

duartes.org 10 submissions · 7 people · 12.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-08-10

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Why Programming Is a Good Medium for Expressing Poorly Understood Ideas (1967)

web.media.mit.edu 7 submissions · 7 people · 15.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-05-10

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Channels Are Not Enough

gist.github.com 6 submissions · 4 people · 3.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2016-03-11

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Keyboard latency

danluu.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 5.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-12-01

Needs:5 submissions

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You Can't Sacrifice Partition Tolerance

codahale.com 7 submissions · 7 people · 10.6 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-05-17

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Corners Don't Look Like That: Regarding Screenspace Ambient Occlusion (2012)

nothings.org 8 submissions · 8 people · 9.2 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-03-08

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Please stop calling databases CP or AP

martin.kleppmann.com 7 submissions · 7 people · 10.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-09-07

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Turning a MacBook into a Touchscreen with $1 of Hardware (2018)

www.anishathalye.com 3 submissions · 3 people · 3.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-12-10

Needs:5 submissions

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Homoiconicity isn’t the point (2012)

calculist.org 6 submissions · 6 people · 9.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-05-03

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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A few words on Doug Engelbart

worrydream.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 6.9 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-05-31

Needs:5 submissions

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How do we tell truths that might hurt? (E. Dijkstra, 1975)

www.cs.utexas.edu 5 submissions · 5 people · 14.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-10-14

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)

danluu.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 8.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-03-15

Needs:5 submissions

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Show HN: Domain-tailored CRDTs for collaboration without server involvement

archagon.net 10 submissions · 7 people · 4.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-02-13

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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How to do distributed locking (2016)

martin.kleppmann.com 5 submissions · 5 people · 5.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-10-20

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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The Myers diff algorithm: part 1

blog.jcoglan.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 9.2 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-03-13

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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Nearly all binary search and merge sort implementations are broken (2006)

googleresearch.blogspot.com 6 submissions · 6 people · 6.4 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2012-01-30

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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Cache Eviction: When Are Randomized Algorithms Better Than LRU? (2014)

danluu.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 8.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-07-31

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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CRDTs are the future

josephg.com 4 submissions · 4 people · 4.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-04-16

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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Rust's Type System Is Turing-Complete: Type-Level Programming in Rust

sdleffler.github.io 4 submissions · 4 people · 4.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-03-13

Needs:5 submissions

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Why hasn't Haskell taken over the world? And the curious case of Go

pchiusano.github.io 3 submissions · 3 people · 2.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-05-20

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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All image-editing software gets scaling wrong

www.4p8.com 5 submissions · 5 people · 7.9 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2014-08-21

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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The Alice and Bob After Dinner Speech (1984)

urbigenous.net 5 submissions · 5 people · 6.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2024-04-09

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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I've been writing ring buffers wrong all these years

www.snellman.net 3 submissions · 3 people · 9.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-12-16

Needs:5 submissions3 active years

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Modern SAT solvers: fast, neat and underused

codingnest.com 3 submissions · 3 people · 4.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-05-26

Needs:5 submissions

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GTA V – Graphics Study

www.adriancourreges.com 3 submissions · 3 people · 4.8 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2018-05-02

Needs:5 submissions

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Alan Kay on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented Programming” (2003)

www.purl.org 3 submissions · 3 people · 4.3 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2019-03-17

Needs:5 submissions

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Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)

blog.fogus.me 3 submissions · 3 people · 4.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2020-01-02

Needs:5 submissions3 active years

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How programs get run: ELF binaries (2015)

lwn.net 4 submissions · 4 people · 7.9 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2025-10-25

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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Two Workers Are Quadratically Better Than One

www.hillelwayne.com 6 submissions · 4 people · 5.0 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2022-05-02

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart

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How to Fit a Large Program into a Small Machine (Zork, Z-Machine, ZIL) (1999)

mud.co.uk 4 submissions · 4 people · 6.5 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2023-10-13

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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The memory models that underlie programming languages (2016)

canonical.org 3 submissions · 3 people · 3.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2021-06-10

Needs:5 submissions3 active years

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Eric Brewer on Why Banks are BASE, Not ACID – Availability Is Revenue

highscalability.com 3 submissions · 3 people · 9.1 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2016-09-17

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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The Saddest Moment (2013) [pdf]

www.usenix.org 3 submissions · 3 people · 6.7 years

Candidate Resurfaced 2026-01-31

Needs:2 breakout events 720+ days apart5 submissions

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