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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. 129 posts.
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PEP 20 – The Zen of Python
Long time Pythoneer Tim Peters succinctly channels the BDFL’s guiding principles for Python’s design into 20 aphorisms, only 19 of which have been written down.
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Get that job at Google
Thanks, Steve; that was very helpful, although it would've been more helpful before I had a phonescreen with you guys last fall and totally brainlocked on a tree traversal. I kid you not, I could hear the guy interviewing me impatiently tapping his fingers on the table. He was just ITCHING to pencilwhip my ass out of…
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Bayes' Theorem explained by Yudkowsky
Bayes’ Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.
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The Perils of JavaSchools
Lazy kids. Whatever happened to hard work? A sure sign of my descent into senility is bitchin’ and moanin’ about “kids these days,” and how they won’t or can’t d…
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A Fundraising Survival Guide
August 2008 Raising money is the second hardest part of starting a startup. The hardest part is making something people want: most startups that die, die because they didn't do that. But the second biggest cause of death is probably the difficulty of raising money. Fundraising is brutal. One reason it's so brutal is…
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The Tao Of Programming
Last substantive modification 1996-04-10 or earlier; Kragen link updated 2016-11-30
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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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The Web’s the Place
I’ve been following some discussions about the future of software applications, and a phrase that came up in my dinner with Robb Beal has been echoing in my mind. What it comes down to is this: if you want to develop software, you can build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can be a…
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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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Programmer Dvorak
As a computer professional, you've probably done some typing over the years. A lot of typing. And your hands don't always love you for it. If you are concerned about catching the carpal tunnel syndrome, you should be looking into Dvorak keyboards. They have been designed to minimize the finger movement for the most…
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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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The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
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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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Top Down Operator Precedence
Vaughan Pratt presented "Top Down Operator Precedence" at the first annual Principles of Programming Languages Symposium in Boston in 1973. In the paper Pratt described a parsing technique that combines the best properties of Recursive Descent and Floyd 's Operator Precedence. It is easy to use. It feels a lot like…
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Knuth: Recent News
Leading banks and investment funds have been foundering, because of bad debts and lack of trust; and other, less well-known kinds of fiscal chaos are also on the horizon. For example, due to an unfixable security flaw in the way funds are now transferred electronically, worldwide, it is no longer safe to write…
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Spider Robinson: Melancholy Elephants
Copyright is a hot-button topic these days. Does information want to be free…or just reasonably priced? I discussed copyright at some length 25 years ago—a year before the first TCP/IP wide area network in the world went operational—two years before the first Macintosh went on sale!—in the following story. It won the…
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Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
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Elastic Tab Stops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code
Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code
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Rees Re: OO
(Jonathan Rees had a really interesting response to Why Arc isn't Especially Object-Oriented , which he has allowed me to reproduce here.) Here is an a la carte menu of features or properties that are related to these terms; I have heard OO defined to be many different subsets of this list.
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A Field Guide to Developers
Unfortunately, you can advertise in all the right places, have a fantastic internship program, and interview all you want, but if the great programmers don’t want to work for you, they ain’t gonna …