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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,981 posts.
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Schlep Blindness
January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness . Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. No one likes schleps, but hackers…
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Choose Boring Technology
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become…
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TikTok's Enshittification
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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What We Look for in Founders
(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.) 1. Determination This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most…
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“Why We Sleep” Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors
Note: I link to a bunch of paywalled studies in this essay. Please do not use sci-hub to access them for free and do not use this trick (a) to easily redirect papers to sci-hub. For the clearest example of deliberate data manipulation, see how Walker edits out the data that contradicts his argument from the graph…
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A note of reflection after 10 years of “A successful Git branching model”
In this post I present a Git branching strategy for developing and releasing version-based software.
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Less is exponentially more (2012)
Here is the text of the talk I gave at the Go SF meeting in June, 2012. This is a personal talk. I do not speak for anyone else on the Go...
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I Hate the News (2006)
Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody…
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Japanese zoning
This articles is a follow-up of this one about standard zoning practices in North America. It is advised to read the previous article to b...
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The Simple Math Behind Early Retirement
This is the blog post that shows you how to be wealthy enough to retire in ten years. Here at Mr. Money Mustache, we talk about all sorts of fancy stuff like investment fundamentals, lifestyle chan…
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Strong software tips from 2000 that are 100% valid today
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
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Worse Is Better (2001)
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
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Fire And Motion (2002)
Sometimes I just can’t get anything done. Sure, I come into the office, putter around, check my email every ten seconds, read the web, even do a few brainless tasks like paying the American E…
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Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
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"Dabblers and Blowhards" - hackers are nothing like painters [2005]
About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an essay entitled Hackers and Painters , in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase "computer science".
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The Law of Leaky Abstractions (2002)
There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…
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The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers. We Hired the CFO Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board me…
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What can a technologist do about climate change?
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities , I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our…
81
Lisping at JPL (2002)
This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)
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How to Price Software - Economics vs. Pyschology
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. …
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Considerations on Cost Disease
I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some ar…
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(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
Why does this matter? As Steve Yegge said , "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work." Yegge describes 8 problems that can be solved with compilers (or equally well with interpreters, or with Yegge's typical heavy dosage of cynicism).
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Great Hackers (2004)
July 2004 (This essay is derived from a talk at Oscon 2004.) A few months ago I finished a new book , and in reviews I keep noticing words like "provocative'' and "controversial.'' To say nothing of "idiotic.'' I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste…
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My First BillG Review (2006)
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
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The Story Of Mel
This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather ( < nather@astro.as.utexas.edu > ), on May 21, 1983.
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Gell-Mann Amnesia
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so…
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Kill sticky headers (2013)
There is currently a trend for using sticky headers on websites. There's even a sticky header web startup .