Best of 2010

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2010. 514 posts.

Software Engineering
254

New Programming Jargon

Every field comes up with its own jargon, and oftentimes subgroups within a field come up with their own specific words or phrases (those of you familiar with Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team know that we have our own term for “broken”, named after one of our teammates who is notorious for…

265

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…