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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 8,982 posts.
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
A post about how Elon Musk became the real world Iron Man.
A market timing strategy rarely outperforms dollar cost averaging even when that strategy knows exactly when to buy.
In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as…
What happens when you only invest at the peaks of the market by being the world's worst market timer.
March 2005 (Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.) Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. But I took so many CS classes that most CS…
This is a brilliant campaign, for technical and artistic reasons. What is the brand that it conveys? Heirloom quality .
[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely refle…
Update 2017/7/1: this is the most linked-to post of mine about construction costs, even though the dataset here is relatively small. You can see links to more posts, with more datapoints, on my sta…
If you are wondering whether to dive in, give a couple posts a quick read. You’ll capture the blog’s essence. If after reading those The Stock Series is appealing, you will very likely enjoy it all. If by the same token your reaction is, “This doesn’t feel right for me,” it very likely isn’t. Stock Series…
When you’re managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. That’s just a five-dollar word for giving people things to do. It&…
A fully realized theory of management through the lens of The Office
[ An updated treatment of some of this material appears in Chapter 2 of the Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet (free) textbook, also mirrors a 2022 article in Nature Physics . . ]
Jason announced a raft of changes we've made to Basecamp earlier today. By far the most controversial is a new etiquette around societal politics at work, and the stances we'll take as a company. So to expand on that, here's a segment from what I wrote internally on that topic, as part of the announcement to employees…
There are lots of à la carte software environments in this world. Places where in order to eat, you must first carefully look over the menu of options to order exactly what you want. I want this for my ORM, I want that for my template language, and let's finish it off with this routing library. Of course, you're going…
I think some people thought I was joking earlier today when I said that we have our own compiler, Wasabi, for FogBugz. Yes, Wasabi is real. Because FogBugz is sold to customers who run it on their …
Just a few months ago, we launched Trello, a super simple, web-based team coordination system. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and adoption has been very strong, even in its early, 1.…
[I hope that it’s obvious from what follows that this is a statement of personal opinion, not an official Mozilla document.]
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to …
Have a look at this little chart: [Source: Iris Associates] This is a chart showing the number of installed seats of the Lotus Notes workgroup software, from the time it was introduced in 1989 thro…
Intro Okay developers, time to have a serious talk. As you are probably already aware, this week React, Babel, and a bunch of other high-profile packages on NPM broke. The reason they broke is rather astounding: A simple NPM package called left-pad that was a dependency of their code. left-pad, at the time of writing…
If you use an object-oriented domain model, and you don't put behavior in your objects, you're missing out on most of the benefits of that pattern.
