Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 1,013 posts.

Software Engineering
843

Reverse Engineering Strike Commander

Back in the early 90s, one company was on the bleeding edge of PC gaming: Origin Systems . Their motto was "We Create Worlds" and boy did they deliver: With the Ultima series, Crusader series and Wing Commander series, they consistently took gamer's breath away. One of them took four years and more than a million man…

848

Great Programmers (2004)

I've seen a lot of discussion of great programmers, usually centering on how to find them, but usually what people really want to know is how to become one. Since I'm widely considered to be a great programmer, I'll give some advice. First of all there's raw coding ability. For this, practice makes…

852

The Computer Graphics Library

Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles . By 1998, the book…

869

Compiler Design in C

Compiler Design in C Download a copy! My book Compiler Design in C is now, unfortunately, out of print. You can download a complete copy, with the above button (pdf 19.1Mb OCR/Searchable—thanks to Marvin Hernández for adding the OCR). If you don’t want to print it out (the book is 984 pages long), you can…