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AI coding tools can reduce productivity
Study Shows That Even Experienced Developers Dramatically Overestimate Gains
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 648 posts.
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Uncle Bob and Silver Bullets
A while back I wrote that Robert Martin was ruining software by being too good at programming. That was supposed to be a joke. Since then he’s done his damndest to actually ruin software by telling people they’re doing it wrong. His most recent response where he yells at software correctness was the breaking point for…
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Success, and Farming vs. Mining
Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What a...
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Algorithms Interviews: Theory vs. Practice
When I ask people at trendy big tech companies why algorithms quizzes are mandatory, the most common answer I get is something like "we have so much scale, we can't afford to have someone accidentally write an O(n^2) algorithm and bring the site down" 1 . One thing I find funny about this is, even though a decent…
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Chris Lattner to Lead SiFive Platform Engineering Team
My quest is to build beautiful things that help change the world, and I’ve been fortunate to spend the last 15 years in Silicon Valley, working with some of the major players shaping all sorts of technology. Today, I’m super excited to join SiFive - the company I believe is best positioned to transform the silicon…
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Oncall Compensation for Software Engineers
Which companies pay for oncall, and how much? Philosophies across the industry for paying for standby duty and numbers from 80 companies.
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Being good at coding competitions correlates negatively with job performance
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
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Writing for Engineers
This article is available as Korean- (thanks to longfin ) and Chineese- (thanks to webup ) translation.
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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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When ‘he’ll be kept on payroll, somewhere’ is where you are
On August 31, 2015, I started a Ph.D. in cryptography at TU Eindhoven, working with Tanja Lange and Dan Bernstein. On December 2, 2016, I…
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Is revenue model more important than culture?
HN Discussion Here: I always loved getting problems of the type “What is the limit as x approaches infinity” type in high-school/college. You’re given an equation (of the classic y=x format), and a…
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Apple Interview – 1995
In the 1990’s, I had access to the early internet (before the web) and made use of a public forum ( Usenet ) where I could ask and respond to questions about programming the Macintosh computer. I’ve mentioned before how this caught the attention of engineering at Apple ( Tom Dowdy , in any event). Perhaps too, the…
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How Software Companies Die (1995)
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
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On Succeeding Steve Jobs
A new Apple CEO would need credibility with two highly disparate factions: Apple’s rank-and-file employees, and Wall Street. The only candidates who could satisfy both factions, to any degree, already work at Apple.
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How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)
I was talking with a friend the other day about that perennial subject of conversation in the Valley, Google. And finally she gave me the clue that made the whole place make sense. “It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls…
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Early employees take the most risk today
Why are we still using old 1990’s cap tables and the same tiny option grants for employees as we did back then? Is that fair? To whom? Is…
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How to build great products
If you believe that sales fix everything, it follows that most startups fail because they don’t ship a great product in a growing market before they run out of money. Assuming you’ve picked an explosive market, how do you go about building a great product?1
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Life at a startup
As a child, I had read about the Homebrew Computer Club, where Osborne and Apple were born - and I wanted to be part of a big movement like that ever since. When I first heard about Y Combinator I thought here was something happening right now that might be looked back on in the same way. I worked my way through the…
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Resumes suck for hiring engineers
In this experiment, I wanted to see how good engineers and recruiters were at resume-based candidate filtering. Going into it, I was pretty sure that engineers would do a much better job than recruiters. However, that’s not what happened at all. As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the…