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Career & Management

The most popular blog posts about career & management on Hacker News. 291 posts.

2011
157

Reminder: "Broken gets fixed, but shitty lasts forever"

A while back, it came to my attention that ruby's net/https implementation had an insecure default: not verifying TLS certificates (OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE). I wrote an article about it for RubyInside, and helped @geemus fix the issue in his excon gem. Despite this being an incredibly serious security issue, nobody…

164

The Rands Test

It's hard to pick a single best work by Joel Spolsky, but if I was forced to, I'd pick The Joel Test. It's his own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate th

167

Experts often end up where they started as beginners

Experts often end up where they started as beginners. If you've never seen the word valet, you might pronounce it like VAL-it. If you realize the word has a French origin, you would pronounce it val-A. But the preferred pronunciation is actually VAL-it. Beginning musicians play by ear, to the extent that they can play

169

How Thomas Jefferson prepared for meetings

Here's an interesting historical anecdote from Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software on the value of preparing for meetings. In his multi-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone tells the story of how Jefferson handled the first meeting held to decide the organization of the…

170

Applying to YC as a Single Founder

In a comment I made on Hacker News , I expressed my desire to write an article about the differences and misconceptions between being a single-founder and having co-founders. This is not that article, but it is related. The application for YC W12 is open, and in response to my comment I received a few emails asking…

171

Don't give bullshit advice

I chatted with a young guy last night about his new startup idea. He’s got a vision for a social commerce app with a few cool spins on it. As I listened to him, I was thinking about how I had heard this exact pitch half a dozen times before. I also knew I had a lot to offer him in terms of help. I have a good friend…

179

A hacker's guide to college

In most professions, a college degree is a prerequisite for a job, even if doing the job doesn’t strictly require one. Your degree is used as a proxy to figure out whether you’re qualified because there is no better measure: “Oh, he went to a good school, he must be smart. Let’s bring him in for an interview.”