Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 359 posts.

Life, Learning & Writing
2017
249

Clever ideas that failed (2010)

The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. Brian Kernighan once said that “debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” I have built many things that I wasn’t…