Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,981 posts.
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…
My translation of DIE ZEIT’s interview with Thomas Piketty is now hosted by TheWire.in. Read it here.
Low-code can be a great tool but it often fails to live up to its marketing
I've built 12+ AI agent systems across development, DevOps, and data operations. Here's why the current hype around autonomous agents is mathematically impossible and what actually works in production.
In Search of Silence Joel Spolsky is a well-respected figure in Silicon Valley. He created the popular Trello project manager software and is currently the ... Read more
An application typically starts its life as a monolith. Take a modern backend of a single-page Javascript application, for example - it starts out as a single stateless web service that exposes a RESTful HTTP API and uses a relational database as a backing store. The service is composed of a number of components, or…
Going from OSS to SaaS. Mistakes made and lessons learned from launching Sizzy - The Browser For Developers.
If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.
The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920. It's hard to overstate the importance of the work the Foundation does; they provide hardware which keeps the FreeBSD project running, they fund a myriad of independent projects, and they have…
Lessons learned and mistakes made while turning an open-source project into a profitable SaaS product.
the trough of zero dopamine • managing the wrong amount • procrastinating on hard questions • indefinitely deferring maintenance • angsting instead of asking
I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of
By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much…
I have been working inside a dating app for a few months and there are a lot of interesting things. This article is going to be without any structure as there are many things to say. I will mostly ignore homosexual interactions. Not because they don't exist, just because it …
The LastPass statement on their latest breach is full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies. I’m providing the necessary context for some of their claims.
How to rig an index to appease a billionaire
I often get the question what it is exactly that I do for a living and usually I can’t really talk about it due to non-disclosure agreements and possible fall-out but in this case I got permission to do a write-up of my most recent job.
How does mentoring work? I asked this question ten years into my software engineering career when I joined Uber. Until then, I've never received or done mentoring, or at least never put this label on any activity I've done before. Uber, however, had an official mentoring program. Almost
It’s tempting to air your grievances at your exit interview. Don’t. There’s almost no upside to speaking up, and tremendous potential downside. Avoid exit interviews if you can. If you must go, be totally bland; say nothing negative.
The popular model Software product companies aren’t usually started by people with a strong background in building software products. Those who most likely end up founding businesses are good at getting funding, and at understanding their target industry. They’ve been in their industry for a long time, know their…
Should you tell everyone your business ideas, or keep them as your closely guarded secrets?
Towards the end of my mid-2019 job search, I was down to joining the Google Go team or Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph ultimately won due to cultural factors - the most important of which was the ability to build 100% in the open . All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were…
Why Apple Intelligence failed even though everything it's built upon is nearly perfect
At Google I/O, Google was the opposite of defensive: the company set out to make the case that its approach made for better products that makes people’s lives better
This is everything wrong with tech-startup culture, unreasonable expectations, and workaholism in one job posting, by a company with a massive audience that probably contains a very high percentage of young software developers.
Long awaited first paper from Meta Superintelligence Labs is not a model layer innovation. What does this mean?
Sergey Filimonov's blog
