Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 524 posts.

Software Engineering
337

Postgres Count Performance

Everybody counts, but not always quickly. This post looks into how the PostgreSQL database optimizes counting. In Postgres, there are ways to count orders of magnitude faster. We’ll look at exact counts (distinct counts) as well as estimated counts, using approximation algorithms such as HyperLogLog (HLL) in Postgres.

345

Final features of C++17

With last weeks C++ committee meeting in Oulu, C++17 is feature complete and on its way to become an international standard. After the last meeting in Jacksonville I had little hope to see big surprises, but Oulu managed to add a few important and interesting features to the new standard. There is a very good overview…

346

LLVM 3.8 Release Notes

This document contains the release notes for the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, release 3.8. Here we describe the status of LLVM, including major improvements from the previous release, improvements in various subprojects of LLVM, and some of the current users of the code. All LLVM releases may be downloaded from the…