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The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 217 posts.
My father passed recently, and he was twice my age. I am approximately the same age that he was when I was born, and I am now “the old generation” - there’s no one left in the generation above me.
I think behind a lot of the enthusiasm around AI is a dream of being able to manifest things into reality without having to get into the details.
The models are good now. But most people still miss the point.
A week ago, I wrote about how Generative and Agentic AI may be amplifying what I’ve been calling cognitive debt: the accumulated gap between a system’s evolving structure and a team’s shared unders...
Paper: This blog post has been expanded into a full paper: Scalable and Personalized Oral Assessments Using Voice AI (Panos Ipeirotis and...
How your dependencies became Bernies
I started a reading group in 2021, a few months after joining Microsoft as a new grad on the Azure Databases team. The group was initially focused on database internals, which was my favorite subject at UW. Databases touch so many areas of CS: compiler construction in the query engine, memory management with the…
I find it very useful to be able to do everyone else’s job — it helps you learn how they work and what they need, and it helps even more when you need their job done, but they won’t do it themselves.
How do you know the output is good without redoing the work yourself? You've received a report, a market analysis for the new product you're planning to l...
A look at the surprising probabilities behind a simple coin flipping game
I shared this internally at Meta in response to a deluge of clout-chasing posts celebrating PMs landing prod diffs. The response was positive and the message generalizes, so here we are on the open www. PMs shouldn’t waste time landing … Continue reading →
In early 2025, I started seeing people turn off their brain as they use LLMs 1 . They would have an LLM take an action (summarize text, write some code, etc.), and just assume that it worked 2 . This generally didn't work in early 2025 and the result was often quite silly.
Why I left Figma to work full-time on open source, and how I plan to make the work sustainable.
One of my favorite ways that creative people communicate is by “working with their garage door up,” to riff on a passage from Robin Sloan (below). This is the opposite of the Twitter account which mostly posts announcements of finished work: it’s Screenshot Saturday ; it’s giving a lecture about the problems you’re…
Across hundreds of Reddit threads and a small body of clinical literature, AI-driven displacement is producing an emotional category that most closely resembles grief, and the institutions causing it have no language for it.
A recurring meeting serves as a powerful forcing function for long-running projects.
This post is an elaboration of a shorter post I wrote about five years ago. The two management giants of the mid-twentieth century were Peter Drucker and W. Edwards Deming. Ironically, while Drucke…
Interestingly enough, at least two of them were specifically about performance!
The current situation on the IT job market is hard. So you are lucky when a recruiter on LinkedIn reaches out to you having a suitable match for a new position based on your prior experience. It might not be what it seems at a first glance.
In an industry that pressures developers to always be shipping side-projects, it can be helpful to be retrospective with the projects that don't make the cut
Starting at Engine brought back the urge to prove myself quickly, and the difficulty of knowing what to change before I understood the context.
So, my latest post went viral. And with virality, you get a ton of comments that you must reply to. I don't want to reply in HN/Reddit/Whatever to prev...
A casual, roughly bimonthly Sunday coffee meetup for Hacker News posters in Helsinki. Open to anyone with 64+ HN karma.
On quitting, the spread of AI, and the loss of an ideal.
And my history with KDE
Growing up as a kid in rural Bavaria, I always …
