The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
OKRs are one of those business ideas that are just simple enough to be dangerous. You think you understand it in a day, and you can see where your company is falling short: lacking focus and underdelivering. You see how clear, measurable goals could improve the situation. Here’s the one sentence version: You set…
Two years ago, frustrated with a long list of unfulfilled project ideas in my phone notes, I decided to give myself one week to try each idea out in its tiniest form.
The problems I will discuss in this article are not unique to the software industry. In fact, this is expected in many large companies…
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 .
Fifteen years later, developers are still trying to recreate the developer experience of Heroku. Yet, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Why did Heroku fail? Was it just incompetent managemen...
I would rather give away my favorite ideas than to let them go to waste. Please do something with them.
Artificial Scarcity and the Semmelweis Reflex
Understanding how companies go about figuring out compensation. And an exercise to do for your team.
This is a story of how it took me way too long to ship a product, and I ended up paying for a competitor product instead.
The housing shortage in the US is a perennially popular topic of conversation for the urbanist crowd (which online includes basically everyone.) The basic argument is that housing starts collapsed after the financial crisis and have never truly recovered.
There’s no more denying it: if you look at W3Techs CMS market share numbers, WordPress’ market share is shrinking, losing 0.4% market share since February. I do
Idea: Make Mittelstands cool in America. Rebrand the US Middle Market. Create a studio and fund to build and buy Mittelstands.
In December 2021, Robin Kok wrote a series of tweets about his Elsevier data access request. I did the same a few days later. This here is the resulting collaborative blog post...
Building your own entitlement service is key for supporting a modern, flexible SaaS product. Whenever I read about billing systems, there’s a lot of talk about the billing aspects but not so much around entitlements. In the spirit of sharing, and since I haven’t found any good articles about it, I decided to tell you…
The pandemic made evident how much work can, and should, be different. The forced change to accommodate remote workflows also brought to light what I like to call “virtual offices”. Unlike truly remote friendly workplaces optimized for asynchronous communication, these aim to merely transport the office into a virtual…
While most ghostwriting scandals in science involve physicians, the agrichemical company ran a unique and sophisticated campaign to promote GMO technology and attack critics.
Shaving is too expensive and is a demonstrative example of how most consumer products are designed to extract more money from you rather than to improve your life, or the world, or to be in any way remotely good.
When a sale isn’t quite what it seems to be
If you ever find yourself stressed, overwhelmed, sinking into stasis despite wanting to change, or frustrated when you can’t respond to new opportunities, you need more slack in your life. Here’s how slack works and why you need more of it.
#2: The Folly of the Fed and a Call for Change.
Some years back I applied to join IBM's grad scheme, there was a peculiar stage to the process I've not seen elsewhere. It was during the onsite day, where a batch of 20 or so applicants were put through various tests in an IBM office. They called it the "group test"; around 8 of us were led to a room and asked to…
Why would I pay $36 for a pair of underwear?
Now this is pretty weird: I just got blocked by Twitter for a tweet that I did not make:
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?
Brendan@Intel.com
Life is to short to work on things you hate
In November 2020, SFWA came forward with a stunning accusation: Disney had told the beloved writer Alan Dean Foster (author of the original, bestselling Star Wars novelization) that they would not ever pay him the royalties he was owed.
