2011
Getting things “done” in large tech companies
What does it mean to get things done? In the abstract, you can complete a mathematical proof or a problem set, but the real world is much fuzzier. Suppose I…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
2012
How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
Instagram's guiding principles and tech stack explained simply
2013
2014
Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
Choosing to cultivate a path as a technical leader.
2015
Facebook Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Buy Tbh
Facebook is acquiring tbh, another burgeoning social network; regulators erred in allowing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, but there is no better place to start enforcing the law than now.
2016
A very valuable vulnerability
The vulnerability — which has since been fixed, or else I would not be writing about it publicly — was in Stripe's bitcoin payment functionality . Some background for readers not familiar with this: Stripe provides payment processing services, originally for credit cards but now also supporting ACH, Apple Pay, Alipay…
2017
2018
Times are great for programmers now. How does it end?
It is a good time to be in tech right now: soaring salaries, daily LinkedIn recruiter spam, people bootcamping their way into career switches to tech, remote work allowing you to work for a major tech company making triple digit salaries from the beach. It really feels like every single company is trying to recruit…
2019
No tipping means better business
Friendly and helpful customer support that goes above and beyond. We help you get the perfect domain name.
2020
Why I don't believe in Uber's Success
I wanted to write this blog post for well over half a year. I don’t believe Uber will be a successful business . I’ve been making my points in individual conversations over and over again - with this post I’m creating a writeup of my arguments that I can share in future.
2021
Why jet engines aren't made in China
What China’s jet engine program tells us about the limits of industrial policy
2022
Facebook, Libra, and the Long Game
Libra is less about an immediate benefit to Facebook, and more about creating a world where companies like Facebook have the best chance to prosper. That is why Facebook gave up so much control.
2023
The great software quality collapse or, how we normalized catastrophe
Apple’s Calculator leaked 32GB of RAM. The deeper failure is an industry shipping more software while producing fewer engineers capable of fixing it.
2024
2025
2026
How To Make a Quick Buck
In 1992 I had bought a license to a little known real time micro kernel based operating system called QnX.
2027
How to get your first ten customers (2013)
Preface: the assumption for this essay is that you’re building a B2B app, and you have something built but you’re having trouble getting people to pay for
2028
Google search's death by a thousand cuts
Reddit communities are still private in protest of new API rules. Twitter moved beyond a login wall and is rate-limiting users. Users are frustrated but still using these sites.
2029
2030
The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
2031
Why Good Developers Are Promoted into Unhappiness (2007)
I once thought I had traveled a unique career path. Graduating from college with a degree in computer engineering and electrical engineering I was on fire to be a manager. My dad had worked for the same electrical contractor for 30-something years and I knew everyone from the Chairman of the Board d
2032
The tech market is fundamentally fucked up and AI is just a scapegoat
The Tech Market is Fundamentally Fucked Up - AI is Just a Scapegoat
2033
Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)
Over the years I have spent a lot of time brainstorming startup ideas with people who are (asymptotically) as nerdy as me. For some reasons, every time I brainstorm with a new set of people, the following ideas come up. This suggests that either all nerds think alike, or alternatively, that they are unsolved problems…
2034
2035
2036
2037
2038
2039
CEO
In this post I’m going to try to give potential and actual CEO’s (and other C level execs to some extent) some actionable advice when it comes to how they conduct themselves in the hope that this will at some future date save some of you a great deal of misery and in some cases charges of misconduct or worse. My hope…
2040