Top all-time · #19935
Joel Laity
Personal blog · joellaity.com · on HN as stuffypagesprogrammingmath
Joel Laity's personal blog at joellaity.com covers programming and math. Since 2018, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times, most often “How Linking Works”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite Joel Laity's 2020 post on short string optimization, which says libc++ uses 24 bytes for std::string. One commenter uses it to dispute a quote in the 'Why Rust strings seem hard' thread.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- How Linking Works2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-01-25
- Libc++'s Implementation of std::string2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-31
What Hacker News says?
That’s disingenuous. That quote is _immediately_ followed by a note > Technically there will be a tiny amount of extra data, like a length, so it won't be precisely twice the size. But it's close enough for our purposes. Also, nitpicking, those two strings _can_ take up the same amount of memory due to short string optimization ( https://joellaity.com/2020/01/31/string.html shows that libc++ uses 24 bytes for string…
Comment linking /2020/01/31/string.html
on “Why Rust strings seem hard”Submitted Libc++'s Implementation of std::string as a story · 243 points
HN discussionSubmitted Principal component analysis: pictures, code and proofs (2018) as a story · 179 points
HN discussionSubmitted Checkmate, Undefined Behavior as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Linking Works as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Linking Works as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted How Linking Works as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Principal component analysis: pictures and proofs as a story · 2 points
HN discussion