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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
Proof that job interviews done by incompetent people are irrelevant.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 146 posts.
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Why Tim Cook Is Steve Ballmer and Why He Still Has His Job at Apple
What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why. Mi…
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GiveDirectly Planning to Give $30M in Basic Income to East Africa
Money always helps, but for the poorest, one large lump sum can last a long time. A long-term universal basic income also looks promising.
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Employment, construction, and the cost of San Francisco apartments
Everyone agrees that housing in San Francisco is expensive, and that the high costs are hurting the city. But there is a lot of disagreement...
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The illegal city of Somerville
Zoning is complicated. It’s complicated on its own, with even small towns having dozens of pages of regulations and acronyms and often-inscrutable diagrams; and it’s complicated as a policy issue, with economists and lawyers and researchers bandying about regression lines and all sorts of claims about the micro and…
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Cisco’s Attempt to Dodge Responsibility for Facilitating Human Rights Abuses
Cisco custom-built the so-called “Great Firewall of China,” also known as the “Golden Shield.” This system enables the Chinese government to conduct Internet surveillance and censorship against its citizens. As if that weren’t bad enough, company documents also revealed that, as part of its...
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What If I Don't Actually Like My Users? (2008)
Subscribe Subscribe to a syndicated feed of my weblog, brought to you by the wonders of RSS.
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HARC
We’re excited to announce YC Research’s newest project: the Human Advancement Research Community (HARC). This came out of a conversation that started between Alan Kay and me more than a year ago about how to invent future computing technologies; I’m delighted to finally be officially working with him and his group. He…
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Dick Smith Is the Greatest Private Equity Heist of All Time
Want to know how to turn $10m in to $520m in less than two years? Just ask Anchorage Capital. The private equity group has pulled off one of the great heists of all time
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The 9 lines of code that Google allegedly stole from Oracle
After reading about the Oracle v. Google trial I looked up the famous 9 lines of code that Google allegedly stole from Oracle, which implement the rangeCheck method for arrays. Note that arrays and…
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Open Whisper Systems Partners with Google on End-To-end Encryption for Allo
At Open Whisper Systems, our goal is to make private communication simple. The foundation of our technology is Signal Protocol, a modern, open source, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems. It is built from the ground up to make seamless end-to-end encrypted messaging poss...
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Firing People
Firing People: a talk about firing people, by Zach Holman.
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Changes to Npm's unpublish policy
npm Blog (Archive); updates from the npm team are now published on the GitHub Blog and the GitHub Changelog
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Pinboard Turns Seven
Heh, don't worry, that's just the whiskey talking. Pinboard is seven years old today!
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How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public Domain
Every time Disney’s beloved mouse is about to enter the public domain, U.S. copyright law magically changes. Does he deserve special protection, or should he be relinquished to society?
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Opendoor, a startup worth emulating
OpenDoor has a unique yet high-risk approach to residential real estate; that’s a great thing, both for its prospects and for society.
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Dear Matt Mullenweg: An Open Letter from Wix.com’s CEO Avishai Abrahami
Dear Matt,We were all very surprised by your post, as you have so many claims against us.Wow, dude I did not even know we were fighting.First, you say we have been taking from the open source community without giving back, well, of course, that isn’t true. Here is a list of 224 projects on our public GitHub page, and…
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Open-source infrastructure is not venture-backable
Let’s make software even better.
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No-Cost RHEL Developer Subscription Now Available
May 2019 UPDATE - The no-cost developer subscription now includes RHEL 8.
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On the Road to Recap
Why the Unicorn Financing Market Just Became Dangerous…For All Involved In February of last year, Fortune magazine writers Erin Griffith and Dan Primack declared 2015 “ The Age of the Unicorns ” noting — “Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists.” By…
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Employee benefits at Basecamp
Our headquarters in Chicago. I’m often asked about the benefits we offer at Basecamp. Potential employees are obviously curious, but most of the questions I get are from fellow business owners…
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Amazon's customer service backdoor
As a security conscious user who follows the best practices like: using unique passwords, 2FA, only using a secure computer and being able…
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Cruise
There is a long and sordid history of people coming out of the woodwork with bogus claims when huge amounts of money are on the line. This has just happened to Cruise, which is run by my friend...
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Bringing Pokémon GO to life on Google Cloud
Throughout my career as an engineer, I’ve had a hand in numerous product launches that grew to millions of users. User adoption typically happens gradually over several months, with new features and architectural changes scheduled over relatively long periods of time. Never have I taken part in anything close to the…
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Startups Can’t Manufacture Like Apple Does (2014)
Startups can’t do things the same way big companies do. And that’s a good thing; here’s why. Startups and big companies differ in a lot of ways. When it comes to hardware, the gulf between the two is massive. Early-stage startups are painfully under-financed. This lack of capital makes manu
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