Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 86 posts.

Databases & Data
33

The Universal Data Structure

Whether you write compilers, web services or Django admin panels, you probably use hash maps more than all other data structures combined. In fact, you may not remember the last time you used anything else. This is not a coincidence: any conceivable data structure can be implemented with a hash map; therefore, there…

35

Reasons to love SQLAlchemy

I've seen some bashing of ORMs of late, which I think is totally undeserved. I'm a big fan of SQLAlchemy ; I use it in most of my projects, and have contributed code to the library. I'm going to explain 10 good reasons you should love SQLAlchemy too! In fairness, there are a number of good ORMs around, and most of…

51

What MongoDB got right

MongoDB is perhaps the most-widely-mocked piece of software out there right now. While some of the mockery is out-of-date or rooted in misunderstandings, much of it is well-deserved, and it’s difficult to disagree that much of MongoDB’s engineering is incredibly simplistic, inefficient, and immature compared to…