Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 653 posts.

Software Engineering
128

PHP 7's new hashtable implementation

About three years ago I wrote an article analyzing the memory usage of arrays in PHP 5. As part of the work on the upcoming PHP 7, large parts of the Zend Engine have been rewritten with a focus on smaller data structures requiring fewer allocations. In this article I will provide an overview of the new hashtable…

140

The Death of Cocoa

For many of us, the simplicity, elegance, and performance of Apple’s hardware and software working together are the reason why we build on their platforms. And yet, after just a few months of working with Swift, Cocoa has begun to lose its luster.

143

No more JavaScript frameworks

Stop writing Javascript frameworks. Translations: Chinese Japanese Russian Here's the talk, based on this essay, that I gave at OSCON 2015. [Slides] The 100-line templating library presented as a Gist has been cleaned up, documented, and published as the Stamp library. JavaScript frameworks seem like death and taxes…

144

Code is not Literature

I have started code reading groups at the last two companies I’ve worked at, Etsy and Twitter, and some folks have asked for my advice about code reading and running code reading groups. Tl;dr: don’t start a code reading group. What you should start instead I’ll get to in a moment but first I need to explain how I…

150

Dropping Loot

I got started hacking on my own roguelike after spending several years avidly playing Angband . Like most projects, I had a few itches I wanted to scratch and it kind of took on a life of its own. One thing that annoyed me about Angband was how monsters dropped loot when they died.