Best of 2008

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2008. 108 posts.

Software Engineering
35

Python + Hadoop = Dumbo

As a research intern here at Last.fm, dealing with huge datasets has become my daily bread. Having a herd of yellow elephants at my disposal makes this a lot easier, but the conventional way of writing Hadoop programs can be rather cumbersome. It generally involves lots of typing, compiling, building, and moving files…

37

Detailed review of MIT's OCW course "Introduction to Algorithms", Part I: Analysis of Algorithms and Asymptotic Notation

I just finished watching the last lecture of MIT's "Introduction to Algorithms" course. Having a great passion for all aspects of computing, I decided to share everything I learned with you. This is the first post in an article series about this course. As I wrote earlier, I am very serious about watching video...

46

John Resig on TraceMonkey

I’ve been waiting to blog about this for a long time now. A fantastic new improvement to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (SpiderMonkey) has landed. Code-named TraceMonkey this engine utilizes a techniques, called trace trees (PDF), which adds just-in-time native code compilation to SpiderMonkey.