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What I Learned From Blowing An Interview
Some time ago, I was a development manager with 23 reports spread over four teams.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,943 posts.
Life, Learning & Writing
Any year
6632
Never Going Back - A Week of Not Eating Lunch at My Desk
According to a 2011 study on the subject, around 80% of us still eat lunch at our desks. I quit eating lunch at my desk and not only has it been incredibly enjoyable, I’m much more productive…
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Hunger beats tenure: Advice for junior engineers
The coding interview is dead, at least for my team at Anthropic. I've seen enough to know that it no longer provides signal. I have a spicily optimistic take: I think there's a huge opportunity for junior engineers.
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"TLDR" is unnecessary
If you summarize your idea in your first sentence, writing "TLDR" is superfluous. The English Language already has tools to summarize and communicate your thoughts. Leverage existing conventions, which are accepted by a larger population, and you will engage more users and succeed in communicating your idea. "TLDR"…
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When or If
The CSSWG (CSS Working Group) is currently debating what to name a conditional structure, and it’s kind of fascinating.
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Why 13th Chords
As the background to my music theory is more classical in nature, it used to puzzle me when I saw jazz chords like C9, B♭11 or F13. I mean, I knew what a 9th, 11th and 13th note were but I wondered why you'd call a note a 9th rather than a 2nd, or a 13th rather than a 6th and so on.
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Hydrofoiling
I was standing on a floating dock on a Pacific-ocean inlet, a place where it’s obvious why motorboats are such an environmental disaster. Fortunately lots of other people have noticed too and it looks increasingly that more people will be able to enjoy Messing About In Boats without feeling like they’re making Greta…
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Why I'm Learning Sumerian
After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.
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Good developers learn to program. Most courses teach a language
A bootcamp can teach you the syntax of a language in six weeks. The part that takes a decade is everything else: where the seams go, where the data flows, which decisions you are stuck with for the life of the codebase. This is a senior developer's argument for what learners should actually be looking for, after…
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Trapped priors as a basic problem of rationality
P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
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My solar-powered blog is now on lithium iron phosphate
In my last blog post I discussed how a small solar project - to power this blog on a Raspberry Pi - escalated into a full-blown off-grid solar setup, large enough to power the computer I use at the moment to write this update 1 . In this update, I want to discuss my battery upgrade.
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Cross the world four times
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.
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I made a quieter air purifier
The physics of sound, and the PC fan CR box v1.
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The Worst (2012)
I don’t really know who Dustin Curtis is, but he blogs a lot, and those blog entries often end up onHacker News. Not too long ago, he wrote a blog post titled “The Best,” in which he explains that he has nice stuff. That in fact, everything he owns is actually the very best of its kind.Dustin’s...
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I Build Supercomputers in My Spare Time
Brian Guarraci is a software engineer at Twitter and in his spare time he’s building a Parallella cluster with a design that was inspired by two of the most iconic supercomputers ever made.
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When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
In my last post, I reminisced about my bbs software that I wrote and sold in 1993. In 1995, I was a senior in high school, and my school had just purchased a 76 computer Novell network for the 900 ...
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Why Entrepreneurs Can't Sleep
For those of you that know me well, you know that I have terrible, horrible insomnia. In high school, I would go to sleep around 3am and then struggle to get up at 6:30 am. I would drink a dozen Mountain Dews everyday just to stay awake. In college, my schedule shifted further so that I was falling asleep around 6am…
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Dear Google, am I pregnant?
Here in the UK, we are a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights, which among other things includes an explicit right to privacy (considerably stronger than the implicit privacy rights acknowledged in the US, which are not enumerated directly by the US constitution).
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Novellas with Groff
Don't even think about it: I won't publish this. Nor send it to you privately, which is mostly the same as publishing it.
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Changing Directions
<p>I have two important announcements:</p> <ol> <li> <p>I’m leaving the tech industry. Hopefully “for good”; if not, at least “for now”.</p> </li> <li> <p>As such, the content on this blog is going to shift, perhaps dramatically. I’m going to be writing about a broader range of…
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Psychological manipulation - what I learned trying to save money on a sandwich
The official blog of Inkling Markets. We make prediction market software for organizations to improve their forecasting and make better decisions.
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The Unhealthy Desire for Prestige
There is an unhealthy desire for prestige and money that is ruining people's lives. At the end of all the striving, you might end up feeling empty inside. The desire for prestige and money is why we: 1) spend an outrageous sum of money on education despite it being free, 2) kill ourselves at jobs we