Best of 2010

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2010. 373 posts.

Software Engineering
183

You can’t beat a good compiler…. right?

It is extremely well worn conventional wisdom that for your “average” programmer, it’s pretty much impossible to beat a good optimizing compiler at writing fast code. For those who skip the “understanding” part, and jump straight into the “application” part, this rule of thumb tends to be grossly misunderstood, and…

187

An Android Side Project

I want to be able to write apps for my phone in in something other than the Java language; for example Ruby or Python. This isn’t one of the things my group at Google has asked me to look at, but I think it’s worth doing and worth some of my time. I’m writing this today because I’m amused by the contrast with the…

197

Desperate Perl Hacker

I owe a whole lot to Perl. So does the practice of computing in general, and the construction of the Web in particular. Perl’s situation is not terribly happy; I wouldn’t go so far as to say “desperate”, but certainly these are not its glory days.

208

C: The Complete Nonsense

Back in 1996, having heard horror stories about Herbert Schildt's C: The Complete Reference , I decided to check it out. I flipped the book open; I found glaring errors. I paged through it. I found more glaring errors. In short, the book had lived up to the hype; it was awful. Being a pedantic sort, and having just…