Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 1,508 posts.

Software Engineering
1122

Fibers, Oh My

Fibers, Oh My! # Written by Dale Weiler, last updated Oct 5th, 2020 Twitter GitHub It’s been brought to the attention of many people in the game development industry that you can use fibers to parallelize your engines and games. This one presentation in particular: Parallelizing the Naughty Dog engine using fibers has…

1123

Finding unique items: hash vs. sort

A while back, I was trying to speed up some code which finds unique items in a collection. For example, transforming "AABBADCAB" => "ABDC" . There are two ways to do this efficiently - one is based on sorting, the other based on hashing. So, which is faster? I couldn't find the answer, so I ran some experiments and…

1133

In Defense of XML

When I started my career, XML was ubiquitous. The meta-information in a Java JAR file - the manifest - follows a proprietary format. But Java EE designers built it from the ground up on XML: meta-information of all artifacts is in XML format e.g. web.xml, ejb-jar.xml, application.xml, etc. Java EE is one example I…

1139

Simulating RAM in Clojure

“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…