Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 975 posts.

Tech Industry & Business
2012
374

Why Tarsnap doesn't use Glacier

On the surface, Tarsnap sounds like the perfect use case for Glacier. Out of every TB of data stored on Tarsnap, in any given month approximately 100 GB of data will be deleted, while only 33 GB of data will be downloaded; in other words, Tarsnap is very much a "write once, read maybe " storage system. Tarsnap's…

375

Elon Musk and the Hyperloop

For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on…

376

One hiring filter that works

In a fairly popular blog post, Raganwald advocates against using various heuristics while filtering out resumes. For the most part, I agree with him. Since it's hard to find good programmers, false negatives are very costly compared to the cost of a false positive (a wasted interview). But I have …

389

The Bozo Event Horizon

I’m on a Harvard mailing list for some folks interested in startups and innovation. A recent thread of discussion was around hiring, and in a posting to the group I talked about making sure that you did your hiring so that you avoided the bozo effect. I was asked by a number of people what I meant by that, which led…