Dan Luu

Big company layoff stories

Earlier this week, a story about Stripe layoffs was on the front page of HN. Multiple Stripe engineers commented to say that it appeared that, in general, managers were not consulted about who woul...

A cloud migration story from a car company

Once upon a time, a car company was trying to set up operations that let it read live data from all of its cars. Actually, basically all car companies were trying to do it because the data is valua...

How do commenters coordinate their independent "obviously" wrong answers?

I keep a list of questions that I'm wondering about in my head and, when I'm talking to someone who I think might have an answer, I'll ask them a relevant question. The per-ask hit rate on this is ...

Against epistemic learned helplessness

There's this theory Jamie Brandon has that often comes up in our conversations about how, for mental development, it's important to do some kind of mental activity that connects to ground truth whe...

"You just have to be right, don't you?"

A pattern of interaction I had quite frequently when I was younger was that someone would have strong opinions on a topic they know nothing about, as in the kinds of ideas presented in 2022-08-12 08:17:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Stories of source code loss

It's funny how often source code gets lost.

Once upon a time, I went on a few dates with a writer who worked at Bioware Austin. Of course, like almost every game studio, it was a famously bad...

Pop analogies

I find it funny when people make analogies to things they don't know much about to clarify something, making an analogy that's absurd to anyone who understands the topic. This often "works" in a wa...

Some ironic rebuttals

I really enjoy ironic, self-refuting, rebuttals. One that really sticks in my mind are these comments from Uncle Bob and a supporter of Uncle Bob to Hillel Wayne: 2022-02-08 13:04:01 +0000 UTC View Post

Doing good engineering with bad mental models

One thing I find interesting is how much can be built without understanding the building blocks. For example, when I worked on flash memory, there was still a debate over the physical mechanisms th...

The backlash against doing work (no, no that one)

A lot of people valorize working long hours in an unsustainable way, e.g., lots of VC Twitter, such as http...

My style vs. monetization

I've been thinking about whether not it's plausible that I could make "serious money" (say, 1/5th of what I'd make as a full-time programmer) by writing.

One major strike against this is how ...

Phrases that mean their opposite

I'm reading a github issue on a correctness bug where the first comment from the lead developer is about how much they care about correctness and how much effort they put in.

I find the comme...

Cost of living adjustments and location-based pay

In discussions I've seen over location-based pay, almost everyone I've seen conflates cost of living adjustments with location-based pay. A typical discussion goes something like this:

A: Why...

Writing down the most obvious things

A while back, I convinced Jamie Brandon to write down "obvious stuff" he's learned about programming effectiveness over time that he thought was too obvious to write down (we have a weekly call whe...

Why do so many great engineers hold Alan Kay in contempt?

To answer this question, let's look a claim that's representative of Alan Kay's "systems" claims.

In this ACM interview right before 2005 (2021-08-02 13:01:04 +0000 UTC View Post

Some reasons to measure

A question I get asked with some frequency is: why bother measuring X, why not build something instead? More bluntly, in a recent conversation with a newsletter author, his response to some future ...

What to learn?

Steve Yegge has a set of blog posts where he recommends reading compiler books and learning about compilers. His reasoning is basically that, if you understand compilers, you'll see compiler proble...

The glorification of elite teams

I've been reading older, influential, writing in software (Brooks, Yourdon, etc.) and here's a thought that I suspect I'll never flesh out enough to turn into a post on the "real" blog: I've been r...

What does it mean that some Google execs think they gave away the farm with k8s?

Matt Klein has this Twitter thread (https://twitter.com/mattklein123/status/1229513048378888193) ...

You'd have to be very smart to come up with that

When I look at system designs that have produced failed or extremely problematic systems, a lot of them fall into the category that I think of as "you'd have to be very smart to build something so ...

Reactions to the NYT's potential doxxing of Scott Alexander

For those of you who haven't been following along, Scott Alexander took down his blog, Slate Star Codex, "because" Cade Metz, an NYT reporter, said he was going publish an article that includes Sco...

Why are you still working?

Sometimes, when I find out that someone has been at Google for 12+ years or is a managing director at a hedge fund and they've been unhappy with their job for years, I'll ask them why they're still...

Blog posts I'm not publishing

• Nominal company values vs. actual company values
  • This would be a list of companies with their stated company values next to what we can observe their values are from actual behavi...
    2020-05-04 02:20:37 +0000 UTC View Post

Another case against taking startup employee equity

Since moving to SF, I've had a number of people ask if I want to invest in the seed round of their startup. Until I moved here, I didn't realize that you could do this without being incredibly weal...

Working at an ad supported company (or not)

I have a lot of friends who refuse to work for an ad supported company. I get it. I think everything they say about the pernicious effects of ads is true. In terms of being good for the world, I pu...

Startup vs. big company compensation in practice

I recently caught up with a friend of mine who spent four years at Uber as an engineer starting in mid-2013. They were employee number 60-something or 70-something. I was surprised to find out that...

We're just like a tech company

Here's a glassdoor review for a famous trading firm:

Pros

Nice people

Tech-firm like working environment

Buying a house as an investment

One thing I find interesting about living in SF is that it's the only place I've lived where the "I bought a house and it was a great investment" people who tell me that I should buy a house haven'...

Kyle Petty on Danica Patrick

I haven't followed motorsports for maybe 20 years or so. While I was catching up on what I missed over the past 20 years, I found out that Kyle Petty was a consistent critic of Danica Patrick, sayi...

The "production ready" / "beta" duality

I tried Elm and Rust out in 2013. They both seemed interesting in that they had conceptual models that promised to make programming easier. Elm was particularly compelling to me since its model was...