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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 399 posts.
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Talk Less, Listen More
I spent a whole bunch of time this fall and winter taking calls from young financial advisors. I try to schedule this stuff on Friday mornings when things are a little quieter for me. They DM me or email me and I just say yes. I have 15 minutes for any kid reading my stuff...
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Contributing Without Code
In the mid-90s I was an avid user of online conferencing system called CIX (Compulink Information eXchange). CIX was built using the CoSy Conferencing system from the University of Guelph, which has since been open sourced. Think of it like a dial-up or telnet-accessed forum or message board with a nerd-heavy…
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Interview advice that got me offers
“What would you say if I asked you to design me a service capable of responding to thousands of user requests every second and latency was critical?”
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Should you Work Hard? (2019)
Software engineer, etc etc
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Dava Newman Named Director of MIT Media Lab
Dava Newman, MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics, has been named the new director of the MIT Media Lab.
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My Engineering Axioms
A few months back I gave a talk in which I shared a list of my personal engineering axioms – things that, over the years, I've come to think of as generally true and useful to have in mind when writing code, building things, and working with others.
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Great Hacker != Great Hire (2004)
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Paul Graham's recent essay Great Hackers . His sermon is well-written, and I assume it played very well when he preached it to the choir at OSCON .
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Shitlist Driven Development (2016)
Recently the team I work with completed a project to allow Shopify to run in multiple datacenters . This project was a refactoring project in disguise. When you undertake large refactoring of a code-base with 100s of developers and 100,000s of lines of code, you can’t align by sending an email. The merge-conflicts a…
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The Case of the Extra 40ms
By: John Blair, Netflix Partner Engineering
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Being good at coding competitions correlates negatively with job performance
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
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Can developer productivity be measured?
Defining and measuring programmer productivity is one of the most difficult parts of an engineering manager or CTO’s job description. When everything you do is intangible, how should you measure it? Can it be measured at all?
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Little Tasks, Little Trust
Why Delegating Responsibilities Beats Micromanagement
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How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You
Best practices for code review when you’re the author.
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Why do most top performers have the highest count of commits and pull requests?
It’s largely known that counting commits and pull requests as a measure of engineering productivity is a bad idea.
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The Strength of Being Misunderstood
A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn’t have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong question. Almost everyone cares what...
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macOS to FreeBSD migration a.k.a. why I left macOS
This is not a technical documentation for how I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD. This is a high-level for why I migrated from macOS to FreeBSD.
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I Feel Like I Have No Real Interests; My Only Interest Is Making Money
I feel like I have no real interests or hobbies. My only interest is making money and the pursuit of any activity which can lead to that quickly. However, I feel like this attitude is robbing me of fulfillment and life experiences.
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Hire people who give a shit
A simple formula for success
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Legally operating a job board in Japan
Operating a job board in Japan can lead to legal issues if not properly licensed. This article explains the legal requirements and guidelines for running a job board without facing penalties.
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Five Second Feedback
And they said it couldn’t be done!
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An ex-Googler’s guide to dev tools
After leaving Google, many engineers miss the developer tools. Here's one ex-Googler's guide to navigating the dev tools landscape outside of Google, finding the ones that fill the gaps you're feeling, and introducing these to your new team.
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Tips for Founders Doing Sales (From a Founder)
The most important things I learned since I started doing sales (I had 0 experience)
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On the Loss of a Cofounder
Here’s the rough chronology: On April 22, 2015, Christian Brink and I, two tech entrepreneurs in our early thirties, incorporated the…
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Interview like an asset, not a beggar
You're not asking for a job, you're selling a service. The true question behind every interview is "How can you help us?"