Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 278 posts.

Systems & Performance
186

Apache Spark: The Next Big Data Thing?

Apache Spark is generating quite some buzz right now. Databricks, the company founded to support Spark raised $14M from Andreessen Horowitz, Cloudera has decided to fully support Spark, and others chime in that it's the next big thing. So I thought it's high time I took a look to get an understanding what the whole…

189

Effectively Managing Memory at Gmail Scale

While JavaScript employs garbage collection for automatic memory management, it is not a substitute for effective memory management in applications. JavaScript applications suffer from the same memory related problems that native applications do, such as memory leaks and bloat, yet they must also deal with garbage…

203

Interactive Programming in C

I’m a huge fan of interactive programming (see: JavaScript , Java , Lisp , Clojure ). That is, modifying and extending a program while it’s running. For certain kinds of non-batch applications, it takes much of the tedium out of testing and tweaking during development. Until last week I didn’t know how to apply…