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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
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Hacking the bureaucracy to get stuff done (2020)
The Dangerous Professional finds the seams between the policies, and slips inside them to Get Stuff Done
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Doing It Wrong
Enterprise Systems, I mean. And not just a little bit, either. Orders of magnitude wrong. Billions and billions of dollars worth of wrong. Hang-our-heads-in-shame wrong. It’s time to stop the madness.
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Two stories about tacit knowledge
To build a nuke or (can) not build a nuke
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The Importance of Having Your Pain Be Legible
How to deal with ideological censorship in a community? Who gets empathy and who is humanized the most? Does contemporary rhetoric about toxicity hold up to scrutiny? “When you keep rewarding…
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How I Choose What to Work On (2023)
A reader, "Moo", asked me to write about my process for entrepreneurship and how I choose what to write on. Despite being a lifelong entrepreneur and being relatively successful at...
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What is Software Engineering?
Nearly all of Go’s distinctive design decisions were aimed at making software engineering simpler and easier. We’ve said this often. The canonical reference is Rob Pike’s 2012 article, “ Go at Google: Language Design in the Service of Software Engineering .” But what is software engineering?
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2 Years at Twitter
I was a Staff Engineer at Twitter’s Build/Bazel Migration team. After two incredible years, November 17 was my last day (I took the voluntary separation offer and resigned, not that it matters). Twitter has been a special place to work for, for its culture of excellence, diversity, and outpouring of care for all the…
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How to leave academia (for science PhDs)
So you've decided to leave academia, or are perhaps just thinking about doing so. Welcome to the dark side. I made the transition a few years ago, and since then I've gotten a number of questions about how to do it. Hence, this article. First of all, I'm going to …
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The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings
How to maximize 10x work and avoid thoughtless daily 1x work routines
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How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
A response to a developer weighing Clojure's benefits, explaining the REPL workflow through human-computer interaction and reflecting on individual productivity.
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Please Do Not Be a One Trick Pony
Paul Simon has a song called ‘One Trick Pony’ with a bit in it that goes like this:
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Does one have to be a genius to do maths?
Better beware of notions like genius and inspiration; they are a sort of magic wand and should be used sparingly by anybody who wants to see things clearly. (José Ortega y Gasset, “Notes on t…
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Overcoming Intuition in Programming
In a [series of experiments](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/nicholas.epley/alteretal.pdf), researchers set out to discover the relationship between difficulty or
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The truth about being a manager
I vividly remember most of my own journey into engineering management over the years. Throughout my career, I’ve also mentored several people taking the step from engineer to engineering manager. It’s a challenging and often lonely journey, and here are a few truths most new managers realize the hard way. (If you…
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Limits of Programmer Productivity: A lesson from Fred Brooks
Fred Brooks published The Mythical Man-Month in 1974, describing the lessons he learned leading IBM’s OS/360 project during the 1960s. As technology goes, it’s ancient. Consider the workflow for a “debugging run”: