Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,748 posts.
Advice to the Bright and Young
One perspective on school, achievement, meaning, and life. An article on one bright young man, Moshe, recently appeared on Hacker News. For a long time I’ve been meaning to write about the su…
Climbing the wrong hill
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Make More Than GPA
25% Drop in free playtime for 6-to-8-year-olds from 1981 to ’97, while homework more than doubled. Time 30Nov, p.57.
Zero to Riding the Rails in Four Months
Whew! four months of nose-to-the-keyboard development work, and we launched our new product! Because it was the first time we designed, developed, and deployed a complete web application with our n…
Hardest delegating lesson to learn: Trust but verify.
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Mini Mario Game as Resignation Letter
How do you break the news to your coworkers that you’re leaving your job at a major game studio to pursue indie development? With a game, of course.
The Ideal Startup Career Path
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Hiring Is Obsolete (2005)
May 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Berkeley CSUA.) The three big powers on the Internet now are Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft. Average age of their founders: 24. So it is pretty well established now that grad students can start successful companies. And if grad students can do it, why not undergrads?…
The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code (2000; Still relevant?)
Have you ever heard of SEMA? It’s a fairly esoteric system for measuring how good a software team is. No, wait! Don’t follow that link! It will take you about six years just to understa…
Joel Spolsky's talk at Yale, part 2
This is part two of the text of a talk delivered to the Yale Computer Science department on November 28. Part one appeared yesterday. After a few years in Redmond, Washington, during which I comple…
Startup founder evolution (or, the biz guy *is* valuable, just not at first)
In the past two months I’ve been on two different panels with other entrepreneurs. The first was at WTIA in Bellevue, WA (“ Cashing in on Web Services “)– the other panelists were very clearly what I’d call “business entrepreneurs”. All of them had relatively successful funded startups, but not a one of them had…
Rands in Repose Gives Dropbox Love
Cloud computing is yet another name for services that have existed for a really long time. Here's the 2008 IEEE Internet Computing quote regarding Cloud Computi
The Choice of Work
During the back and forth of exchange with a technical recruiter, he finally asked me what I was looking for. And so the floodgates opened. This may sound weird, but I pretty much choose employment…
Where I Program - Independent Developer's Cribs
whereiwrite.org is a photographic project showing science fiction writers and their offices. I started wondering what the offices of other microISVs and small software companies look like. Were the…
Taming Doubt
An article that explores the feelings of doubt and how to tame them.
Don't hire a programmer if they don't code for fun
I'm not the first person to talk about this paradigm and I won't be the last. Every single programmer I've seen that is exceptionally good at their job also does it for fun.…