1
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 71 posts.
2
PEP 8 – Style Guide for Python Code
This document gives coding conventions for the Python code comprising the standard library in the main Python distribution. Please see the companion informational PEP describing style guidelines for the C code in the C implementation of Python.
3
A Plan for Spam
August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc . An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering .) I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the…
4
5
How Microsoft Lost the API War
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir…
6
7
Women in Science
Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest…
8
Groupware Bad
This piece has gotten a lot of attention over the years. I have heard a lot of people saying that they had been "inspired" by it. I fear that what they meant was that they were inspired by the one pull-quote that people tend to quote from it, and ignored the rest. So if someone has linked you to this page, or if…
9
Fire And Motion
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…
10
Revenge of the Nerds
May 2002 "We were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp." - Guy Steele, co-author of the Java spec In the software business there is an ongoing struggle between the pointy-headed academics, and another equally formidable force, the pointy-haired bosses. Everyone knows who…
11
Why to Not Not Start a Startup
March 2007 (This essay is derived from talks at the 2007 Startup School and the Berkeley CSUA.) We've now been doing Y Combinator long enough to have some data about success rates. Our first batch, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. Of those eight, it now looks as if at least four succeeded. Three have…
12
13
Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
14
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
April 2005 This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It's an experiment because we're prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That's why we're doing it during the summer—so even college students can participate. We know from Google and…
15
16
17
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)
A motley gang of anarchists, free-love advocates, and banana-rights agitators have hijacked The Love Boat out of Puerto Vallarta and are threatening to sink it in 7 days with all 616 passengers and…
18
hacker
1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary , usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the…
19
How to Fund a Startup
November 2005 Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes through several rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take just enough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the next gear. Few startups get it quite right. Many are underfunded. A few are overfunded, which is like trying to…
20
21
22
23
E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the…
24
The Power of the Marginal
June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.) A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those…
25
26
27
Hitting the High Notes
In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company: The common belief is that when you’re …
28
29
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…
30