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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. 648 posts.
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Be Relentlessly Resourceful
March 2009 A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful. Till then the best I'd managed was to get the opposite quality down to one: hapless. Most dictionaries say hapless means unlucky. But the dictionaries are not doing a very good job. A team that outplays…
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Programming's Dirtiest Little Secret
Wow, no comments? They must all be stuck on that bit about the "home row." Oh well... here's hoping some of those non-typists make it all the way through this piece.
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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…
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The FAA's Hiring Scandal: A Quick Overview
An Air Traffic Control nightmare
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Steve Jobs to 2005 graduates: ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks—including death itself—at the university’s 114th Commencement on Sunday in…
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Fog Creek Compensation
At Fog Creek Software, the way we make sure that people are paid fairly and rewarded for excellent work is based on a professional ladder. Historically, our ladder is based on Microsoft’s pro…
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Guide to Equity Compensation
Stock options, RSUs, job offers, and taxes—a detailed reference, including hundreds of resources, explained from the ground up, for both employees and managers.
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Done, and Gets Things Smart
First off, I'm calling for a moratorium on Simpsons references until the writers over there are Done, and gets things funny . Secondly, is it possible to cluster DGTSers? Can they recognize each others' brilliance and form into a sort of hive mind, or do they end up abrading one another with slight differences?…
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Quantity Always Trumps Quality
Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear. Although I am not at all ready to call software development “art” – perhaps “craft” would be more appropriate, or “engineering” if you’re feeling generous – the parallels between some of the advice offered
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Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats
⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that
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Evidence Based Scheduling
Software developers don’t really like to make schedules. Usually, they try to get away without one. “It’ll be done when it’s done!” they say, expecting that such a brave, funny zinger will reduce t…
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Forgotten Employee (2002)
PART ONE An epiphany was had this morning as I perused SA, sipping Code Red and toying with the notion of stepping outside for my third cigarette in an hour: Nine years and 2 months of my life have been devoted towards the goal of personal advancement within a small yet thriving company. I
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Programmer Competency Matrix (2016)
A matrix for rating programmers on computer science, software engineering, programming, security, infrastructure, data, AI-assisted development, experience and knowledge, from 2ⁿ to log(n).
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Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
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Finding Great Developers
Where are all those great developers? The first time you try to fill an open position, if you’re like most people, you place some ads, maybe browse around the large online boards, and get a ton of …
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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company.
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What every computer science major should know (2011)
Given the expansive growth in the field, it's become challenging to discern what belongs in a modern computer science degree.
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Reversing the technical interview (2017)
If you want to get a job as a software witch, you’re going to have to pass a whiteboard interview. We all do them, as engineers–often as a part of our morning ritual, along with arranging a beautiful grid of xterms across the astral plane, and compulsively running ls in every nearby directory–just in case things have…
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On Being a Senior Engineer (2012)
I think that there’s a lot of institutional knowledge in our field, especially about what makes for a productive engineer. But while there are a good deal of books in the management field about “expert” roles and responsibilities of non-technical individual contributors, I don’t see too many modern books or posts that…
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How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
Using spaced repetition to create understanding
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“It's The Future”
The CircleCI blog is your home for DevOps, continuous integration and delivery, and engineering productivity. Explore tutorials, guides, and best practices.
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I'm not collaborating with Kenneth Reitz
[Content Warning: parts of this post could be triggering for those who have experienced gaslighting or other forms of abuse]
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The boring truth about why groups don't get invited to interviews
A lot of groups that don't get invited to interviews would like to know why. This is a reasonable thing to want. If there's something wrong with your project, you want to know what.
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steve yegge - five-essential-phone-screen-questions
The Five Essential Phone-Screen Questions Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ I've been on a lot of SDE interview loops lately where the candidate failed miserably: not-inclined votes all around, even from the phone screeners who brought the person in initially. It's usually pretty obvious when the
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Welcome to Rands Leadership Slack
For a role as crucial as leadership, there is a shocking lack of required training on the topic. Combined with a tremendous collection of impenetrable literatur
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The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing
The current version of this article is The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, Version 3.0.
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NCEES discontinuing PE Software Engineering exam
NCEES will discontinue the Principles and Practice of Engineering (PE) Software Engineering exam after the April 2019 exam administration. Since the original offering in 2013, the exam has been administered five times, with a total population of 81 candidates. Only 19 candidates registered for the April 2018…
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Selling to the Fortune 500, Government, and Other Lovecraftian Horrors
You really can sell SaaS/software to large enterprises, despite your perceived inability to do so. Read on for how.
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