1
You and Your Research (1986)
Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 31 posts.
2
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way (2014)
Translations: Brazilo-Portuguese Chinese (Traditional) Czech Dutch Estonian French Georgian German Greek Hindi Hungarian Indonesion Japanese Lithuanian Polish Portuguese Russian Spanish Ukrainian Uzbek If you want to copy, mirror, translate, or excerpt this document, please see my copying policy .
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A student's guide to startups (2006)
October 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at MIT.) Till recently graduating seniors had two choices: get a job or go to grad school. I think there will increasingly be a third option: to start your own startup. But how common will that be? I'm sure the default will always be to get a job, but starting a startup…
4
Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
5
Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014)
In the first 45-minutes the market was open the faulty software deployment sent millions of child orders into the market resulting in 4 million transactions against 154 stocks for more than 397 mil…
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TypeScripting the technical interview
An homage to Aphyr's Typing the technical interview
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I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 2023
I will no longer be speaking at RustConf 2023 about A (Possible) Future for Compile-Time Programming.
9
How to be a consultant, a freelancer, or an independent contractor (2009)
This is a series of pages that guide you through the creation and operation of a successful consulting business. I’ve written this after running a fairly successful consultancy business in the mid-90’s and reviving this business in 2008. I’m primarily active in software, so some of the things in here will be skewed in…
10
Reflecting on 18 Years at Google
I joined Google in October 2005, and handed in my resignation 18 years later. Last week was my last week at Google.
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I’m now a full-time professional open source maintainer
It works! I am now a full-time independent open-source maintainer. I'm announcing my first cohort of six clients, and sharing some details of how the model works.
12
Theory-building and why employee churn is lethal to software companies
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
13
Digg's v4 launch: an optimism born of necessity (2018)
Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. We had only one remaining shot at revival, launching our two-years in the making rewrite: Digg v4. It did not go as planned.
14
The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
A long, close reading of Poppendieck's talk on how plans quietly become the thing we manage instead of the outcome, from the Empire State Building up.
15
I accidentally saved my company half a million dollars
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
16
How to be a -10x Engineer
To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:
17
My startup banking story
As a relatively new member of adult society, and an absolute infant of the business world, I didn't think much about bank choice. I figured: you put money in, you take money out, they're all the same. I also figured a local branch of a global bank is just a fungible tentacle of the giant banking machine, so also…
18
Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015)
The obvious benefit to working quickly is that you'll finish more stuff per unit time. But there's more to it than that. If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you'll be inclined to do more.
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A blog post is a long and complex search query to find people (2022)
When writing in public, there is a common idea that you should make it accessible. This is a left over from mass media.
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Dumb and Gets Things Done (2010)
Someone once asked Napoleon how he decided where to assign soldiers. Napoleon's reply was that it's simple: soldiers are either smart or dumb, lazy or energetic. The smart and energetic I make field commanders. They know what to do and can rally the troops to do it. The smart and lazy I make generals. They
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Academic Ranks Explained or What on Earth Is an Adjunct?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023159 points126 commentscited by 4Career & Management details
This week we’re going to take a detour into understanding the structure of academia, in particular the different kinds of ‘professors’ and their academic ranks in the American sys…
22
Be sceptical of your own work (2009)
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes, which can be made, in a very narrow field. (Niels Bohr) If you unexpectedly find a problem solving itself almost effortlessly, and you can’t quite …
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Most of my skills are now worth nothing, but 10% are worth 1000x
...but the other 10% are worth 1000x
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Excuse me, is there a problem?
Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem. This explains why, so you can avoid their fate.
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Working for a Dating Website (2015)
Over this past weekend, I came across a Wired called "Write the Perfect Email to Anyone with this Creepy Site" on using machine learning and natural language processing to analyze a person's social media profiles and offer tips on how to communicate with them effectively. Most people immediately thought about sales…
28
Broken Ownership
In the ownership trio, we discussed 3 elements: Knowledge, Mandate and Responsibility. This article digs into various broken ownership scenarios where 1-2 of those elements are missing, what are the common symptoms and how to fix them.
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The joys of maintenance programming (2011)
In the old days when I started programming, green programmers trying to build their skills and get experience started out doing maintenance programming. Only the old hands got to write new code. The newbies cut their teeth debugging and fixing musty old code that still worked for the business. I’ve done my share of…
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