Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 14,544 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
9665

Smaller Code, Better Code

I was enjoying some pizza the other day with some buddies that know a bit about my research and understand where I am coming from with regards to my own computing aesthetics. They understand that I have always pushed for the smallest code that I can get, and to simplify

9684

Fibers, Oh My

Fibers, Oh My! # Written by Dale Weiler, last updated Oct 5th, 2020 Twitter GitHub It’s been brought to the attention of many people in the game development industry that you can use fibers to parallelize your engines and games. This one presentation in particular: Parallelizing the Naughty Dog engine using fibers has…

9685

Finding unique items: hash vs. sort

A while back, I was trying to speed up some code which finds unique items in a collection. For example, transforming "AABBADCAB" => "ABDC" . There are two ways to do this efficiently - one is based on sorting, the other based on hashing. So, which is faster? I couldn't find the answer, so I ran some experiments and…

9690

Why MongoDB Never Worked Out at Etsy

In 2010ish, we tried to roll out a feature ( Treasury ) using MongoDB. It was an interesting experience. I learned quite a bit in the process. I wrote about what I was thinking at the time here . But for the most part it was an abject failure and Ryan Young wound up porting the entire thing to the MySQL shards which…