Best of 2016

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2016. 1,304 posts.

Software Engineering
1231

The limitations of sampling profilers

Perf is probably the most widely used general purpose performance debugging tool on Linux. There are multiple contenders for the #2 spot, and, like perf, they're sampling profilers. Sampling profilers are great. They tend to be easy-to-use and low-overhead compared to most alternatives. However, there are large…

1239

Tcl/tk vs. the web

I agree with you. How is it that in order to build an application on the web I need to know at least seven technologies? Client side: - Javascrit - Coffescript to make JS seem sane - Angular or Jquery to make JS seem productive - CSS - SASS to make CSS seem sane - HTML5 - localstorage (to save somethnig) Server side …

1242

Notes on concurrency bugs

Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature echos this result …

1246

Version SAT

The package version selection problem is to find a set of dependencies that can be used to build a top-level package P that is complete (all dependencies satisfied) and compatible (no two incompatible packages are selected). There may be no such set, because of the diamond dependency problem: perhaps A needs B and C…