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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,541 posts.

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9724

Damn Cool Algorithms: Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves

Last Thursday night at Oredev, after the sessions, was "Birds of a Feather" - a sort of mini-unconference. Anyone could write up a topic on the whiteboard; interested individuals added their names, and each group got allocated a room to chat about the topic. I joined the "Spatial Indexing" group, and we spent a…

9730

XKCD Plots in Matplotlib: Going the Whole Way

One of the most consistently popular posts on this blog has been my XKCDify post, where I followed in the footsteps of others to write a little hack for xkcd-style plotting in matplotlib. In it, I mentioned the Sketch Path Filter pull request that would eventually supersede my ugly little hack.

9737

The Algorithm for Hard Problems: Shake and Pull Gently

(Or, “regularized greedy algorithms and their applications.”) James Gilles “Algorithm” is one of those words that sounds fancier than it really deserves. We hear all the time about the “facebook algorithm”, the “youtube algorithm”, “high frequency trading algorithms”, “artificial intelligence algorithms”, and so on…

9738

C++11 threads, affinity and hyperthreading

For decades, the C and C++ standards treated multi-threading and concurrency as something existing outside the standard sphere - in that "target-dependent" world of shades which the "abstract machine" targeted by the standards doesn't cover. The immediate, cold-blooded replies of "C++ doesn't know what a thread is" in…

9740

Implementing a Game Boy emulator in Ruby

Introduction I created a Game Boy emulator in Ruby and released it as a gem called rubyboy! (I’d be happy if you could give it a star!) And now it runs in the browser using WebAssembly! Try the demo in your browser! Screenshots Rubyでゲームボーイのエミュレータを作りました! カラー対応やWasmでブラウザ対応もやっていきたい💪 GitHub: https://t.co/hFwmZD6FNp…

9743

In Defense of XML

When I started my career, XML was ubiquitous. The meta-information in a Java JAR file - the manifest - follows a proprietary format. But Java EE designers built it from the ground up on XML: meta-information of all artifacts is in XML format e.g. web.xml, ejb-jar.xml, application.xml, etc. Java EE is one example I…

9745

I think I kind of hate lazy loading

Yesterday I was on a train. I clicked on a link and my browser loaded a long article for me to read. Halfway through reading it, the train went into a tunnel and I lost signal. That meant I couldn't see the images on the other half of the page for the rest of the journey. I had a sea of broken images. Even though the…