Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 191 posts.

Software Engineering
125

How games cheat to help players

If we’ve done our jobs right, Wind-up Knight is a fairly simple game. There are only four inputs, and only two are ever needed simultaneously. Sir Sprint, our heroic spring-loaded knight, runs forward automatically, removing the need for a classic directional pad or analog stick. The challenge is derived from careful…

128

Whyday is Friday

Shopify powers millions of businesses in more than 175 countries with essential commerce infrastructure. Our engineers and developers work on challenging and impactful projects spanning frontend, backend, mobile and data.

150

Faster JavaScript parsing

Over the past year or so I’ve almost doubled the speed of SpiderMonkey’s JavaScript parser. I did this by speeding up both the scanner ( bug 564369 , bug 584595 , bug 588648 , bug 639420 , bug 645598 ) and the parser ( bug 637549 ). I used patch stacks in several of those bugs, and so in those six bugs I actually…