04 — Hacker News and Lobste.rs¶
You will not learn C directly from Hacker News. What you will learn is industry context — which C projects are on fire, which “C is dead” essay just dropped and how working engineers demolish it, and whose blog post got 400 upvotes today. Lobste.rs is HN’s higher-signal cousin, invite-only, less noise.
Hacker News — news.ycombinator.com¶
Front page cadence for C content:
Roughly 2-4 C-relevant front-page items per week: a new tool, a Wellons/Sanglard post, a llama.cpp release note, a new safe-C variant proposal, or a “why we rewrote X in Rust” thread.
The comments on Rust-rewrite threads are often more valuable than the article because working C engineers explain the tradeoffs and counterexamples the author skipped.
How to use it:
RSS the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/rss
Search Algolia: https://hn.algolia.com/ — filter by “Past Year” and search terms like
"C programming",Cantrill,Bellard,nullprogram,llama.cpp.The “who is hiring” thread (first of every month) — useful signal on which companies are hiring for C roles. Skim the systems/embedded/kernel ones.
The “C is dead” genre — read the counter-narrative:
Every year, a “C should not be used anymore” essay hits HN. Read the article, then read the top comments. The rebuttals typically point to:
The Linux kernel, PostgreSQL, Redis, SQLite, Nginx, curl, git, CPython, Vim/Neovim’s core — all C, all shipping, all irreplaceable.
Memory-safety research (CHERI,
-fbounds-safety,-fsanitize=safety) that improves C in place.The reality that “rewrite in Rust” essays outnumber shipping Rust rewrites by ~100:1 for legacy C codebases.
You are not entering a dying field. You are entering the most persistent field in software.
Lobste.rs — lobste.rs¶
Invite-only (ask around, or wait; anyone in your network with a Lobste.rs account can invite). Higher signal than HN because:
Smaller, more technical audience
Tag-based filtering that actually works
Less startup/AI hype noise
Useful tags:
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RSS the specific tags rather than the front page.
What most people get wrong about HN¶
They read comments and confuse feeling informed with being informed. Rule: if you spend more than 15 min/day on HN, you are losing time you could spend writing C. Skim the titles, RSS the specific submitters (Wellons, Cantrill, Bellard when he posts a new project), and close the tab.
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