Best of 2011

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2011. 488 posts.

Software Engineering
373

Visualizing dynamic programming

I’ve always thought dynamic programming was a pretty crummy name for the practice of storing sub-calculations to be used later. Why not call it table-filling algorithms , because indeed, thinking of a dynamic programming algorithm as one that fills in a table is a quite good way of thinking about it.

381

The myth of the Lisp genius

I'm fascinated by the myth of the Lisp genius, the eccentric programmer who accomplishes super-human feats writing Lisp. I'm not saying that such geniuses don't exist; they do. Here I'm using "myth" in the sense of a story with archetypical characters that fuels the imagination. I'm thinking myth in the sense of…

385

Don't Forget Your Logged Out Users

I find myself saying this quite often these days to entrepreneurs and their product teams. It's something that I've noticed working with leading social platforms like Etsy, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. Services such as these have a large number of their users accessing the service regularly on a logged out basis. I…