Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,668 posts.
A friend and I had a discussion about the basic skills that are often lacking in experienced programmers. How can a programmer work for ten or twenty years and never learn to write good code? Too often they need close supervision to ensure they go down the right path, and can never be trusted to take technical…
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
Tim Kadlec writes about performance, product management, and the web.
Mailchimp was getting too expensive, so I moved this blog's newsletter to Sendy.
Logs from the application level are the only way your application talks back to you. Having proper logs with commendable search capabilities is like having a torch in a dark room.
I was at the Microsoft BUILD conference last week and spent some time with a ...
Why is the release manager late to the party with his blog post? The explanation is simple: We prioritized sticking to the schedule and getting our releases out to everyone as planned, as our codebase was ready. What was not (entirely) ready was some parts of the website, which were brought up-to-date over the course…
This is part 4 of an intermittent yet always enjoyable series: • Part 1: the rise of the ancient Puebloan civilization in the American Southwest from 10,000 BC to 750 AD. • Part 2: the rise and col…
I once wrote that there are two types of charges: the ones you see coming and the ones you don’t. Perhaps I was too reductive. There’s a third category: the fees that you know are looming, but the …
I was asked by someone to put this old piece of writing of mine somewhere more permanent, so here it is. A few comments off the top: This isn’t new. I wrote it years ago. Yes, I’m a b…
I'm going to let you in to three TOP SECRET rules for getting hired. These are the hidden techniques used by TOP interviewers… Never Tell The Candidates The Rules Of Success I read an infuriating blog post recently: "If someone doesn't send a thank you email, don't hire them". This is a great way to limit your talent…
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
Most business ideas are neither objectively good nor bad. The quality of an idea for you (as a founder) depends on your goals, your skill set, and your risk tolerance.
EvE online is a fascinating game. It’s one of the few MMO’s that only have a single “server” to log into, meaning everyone is playing on the same logical world. It’s also had a fascinating set of events that have happened inside it, and also remains a very visually appealing game for what it is:
I can’t keep track of the number of articles I’ve read about hiring in the past few years. Inevitably, they all follow the exact same format. First, they claim that hiring is broken. Ne…
Netflix is an Aggregator, with a value chain that lets it drive demand, raise prices, and dismiss competition.
We use some names mostly for boys and some mostly for girls, but then there is a small percentage that, over time, switched from one gender to another. Which names made the biggest switch?
Phones are so full of ads that you don’t even notice them anymore. Suggestions and notifications you didn’t ask for, tracking mechanisms you don’t even know are there, services over which you have no control. It’s absurd how much smartphones, a large extension of our private and social lives, are controlled and…
Update: See follow-up post about A1 vs A2 performance, Raspberry Pi microSD follow-up, SD Association fools me twice?. After I published my 2019 Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison, I received a lot of feedback about newer 'A2' Application Performance class microSD cards, and how they could produce even…
The nuance between timestamp with and without time zone
A first-hand story about the TRS-80 Model 100 and journalism
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...
What happens when we collect too much data?
Tales of Developing Clojure
