Hacker News Reader

No. There may have been micro optimizations on specific chips, but there's nothing intrinsically faster about one encoding or the other.

Sorta like English reads right to left, but left to right or top to bottom would work just as well. left to right was what won.

Not sure about today's CPUs, but back in the days of the 68000 I'm pretty certain there was a small advantage in both designs but for different reasons. I wouldn't normally write such a vapid post without supporting details (that I can't recall anyway), but I wanted to pipe up to encourage you to do more research if you're curious.

No, no advantage. Just variety. You used to occasionally see bugs where things would work fine on little and not big, or vice-versa. Usually due to assumptions about data.