Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,308 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
Ideas are just a multiplier of execution (2005)
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Progress Delayed is Progress Denied (Safari feature lag)
Apple's iOS browser (Safari) and engine (WebKit) are uniquely under-powered. Consistent delays in the delivery of important features ensure the web can never be a credible alternative to its proprietary tools and App Store. This is a bold assertion, and proving it requires examining the record from multiple directions.
How Tesla Will Change the World (2015)
The story of how change really happens.
From Geek to Freak: How I Gained 34 lbs. of Muscle in 4 Weeks
After holding off for nearly two years, I’m posting this because too many people have asked for it. The lasses should read it, too, as the same principles can be applied to bodyfat loss. I weighed 152 lbs. for four years of high school, and after training in tango in Buenos Aires in 2005, that […]
bliki: Bounded Context
Don't try to build a single, unified model for a large domain. Instead DDD advises us to divide such a domain into many bounded contexts with explicit relationships between them.
Proebsting's Law
This means that while hardware computing horsepower increases at roughly 60%/year, compiler optimizations contribute only 4%. Basically, compiler optimization work makes only marginal contributions.
Five Worlds
Something important is almost never mentioned in all the literature about programming and software development, and as a result we sometimes misunderstand each other. You’re a software develo…
The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment
I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of…
How bundling benefits sellers and buyers
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
John T. Reed's analysis of Robert T. Kiyosaki's book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Part 1
An in-depth, factual analysis of Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad Poor Dad. Discover the dangerous advice, factual errors, & misleading claims exposed by John T Reed.
Painless Functional Specifications
When The Joel Test first appeared, one of the biggest sore points readers reported had to do with writing specs. It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, …
Benedict’s Newsletter
What mattered in tech this week? A weekly email newsletter.
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
My third book
Rails is omakase (DHH)
There are lots of à la carte software environments in this world. Places where in order to eat, you must first carefully look over the menu of options to order exactly what you want. I want this for my ORM, I want that for my template language, and let's finish it off with this routing library. Of course, you're going…
How Trello is different
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.…
Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives
When you design user interfaces, it’s a good idea to keep two principles in mind: Users don’t have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn’t read it. In fact, users can’t r…
Who’s behind Wednesday’s epic Twitter hack?
Twitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee into providing access to internal Twitter…
Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model
Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It's hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something.
What do executives do, anyway?
An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per person in th...
Fraudulent trading activity at Mt. Gox
Somewhere in December 2013, a number of traders including myself began noticing suspicious bot behavior on Mt. Gox. Basically, a random number between 10 and 20 bitcoin would be bought every 5-10 m…
Modeling a Wealth Tax
A wealth tax will usually have a threshold at which it starts. How much difference would a high threshold make? To model that, we need to make some assumptions about the initial value of your stock and the growth rate. Suppose your stock is initially worth $2 million, and the company's trajectory is as follows: the…
The tiny corp raised $5.1M
Here we go again. I started another company. The money is in the bank.
Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover
Ruby Central recently took over a collection of open source projects from their maintainers without their consent.
The Internet of Beefs
You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming , right? It's a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is -- by design -- no…
How Tech Loses Out
This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. Hi everyone, This is a transcript of my presentation over at the European Microwave Week 2020, actually held in 2021. You can find the video here and the slides here. I’d like to thank Frank van Vliet, general chair of the EMW, for inviting me…
Developer hiring and the market for lemons
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes,