Top all-time · #3525
Berglas.
Personal blog · berglas.org/Articlesprogrammingai
Berglas. is a personal blog at berglas.org about programming and ai. Since 2009, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 32 times, most often “Why It Is Important That Software Projects Fail (2008)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (23) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Berglas's essays on why software projects fail, and on Parkinson's law and the growth of bureaucracy, often as a reference for how automation adds administrative work.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 23 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Why It Is Important That Software Projects Fail (2008)7 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2009-11-10
- /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-01-09
- Parkinson's Law (1955) [pdf]3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-11-04
- Why it is important that software projects fail (2008)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-07-21
- Complexity is bad, software failures limit complexity2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-11-16
- Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Our Grandchildren (Singularity)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-12-12
What Hacker News says?
Actually, unlike controlling humans, whatever that means, it's very easy to limit the impact of AI - all you have to do is treat advanced chip fabrication processes the way nuclear technology is treated, and put a legal limit on processor power so it's somewhere where it was in the late 80s. (So you have office software and email but neither YouTube nor Doom 3; a reasonable price for our survival, I find.) Fewer org…
Comment linking /Articles/AIKillGrandchildren/AIKillGrandchildren.html
on “Introducing OpenAI”Submitted Why It Is Important That Software Projects Fail (2008) as a story · 139 points
HN discussionYou might like this https://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/...
Comment linking /Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
on “Whistleblowers: Software keeping inmates in Arizona prisons beyond release dates”Submitted Why it is important that software projects fail (2008) as a story · 119 points
HN discussionWhy it is Important that Software Projects Fail http://berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/Impor...
Comment linking /Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
on “Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?”Submitted Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail as a story · 54 points
HN discussionI think about 'Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail' a lot. https://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/... It's been posted a few times over the years: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=berglas.org
Comment linking /Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
on “Essays on programming I think about a lot”Submitted Parkinson's Law (1955) [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI think that Parkinsons law applies to all form of administration tasks including doctors and hospitals. "Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion". It is sometimes applied to the growth of bureaucracy in an organization." Parkinson noticed that the English ship fleet was decreasing in numbers but the number of administrators administrating the fleet was inc…
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “Why Doctors Hate Their Computers (2018)”Submitted Complexity is bad, software failures limit complexity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionC. Northcote Parkinson wrote about single reports in his 1995 Parkinson's law article published by The Economist[1]. That's the article that articulated in its first sentence the Parkinson's law we all know. In the article he explains that a worker that feels overworked prefers to have subordinates rather than a peer of his own level that would be a rival for promotion. A single subordinate is not ideal because the…
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “It’s easier to manage four people than one person”Submitted Why It Is Important That Software Projects Fail (2008) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttps://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill available time”Submitted Why It Is Important That Software Projects Fail (2008) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe pithy quote is just the opening sentence to the piece. The substance is far more interesting and describes a law about the growth of bureaucracies. I strongly recommend anyone interested to just read the whole thing, because it's only 5 pages. [1] https://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf edit: Thanks. Fixed.
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill available time”Submitted Artificial Intelligence Will Kill Our Grandchildren (Singularity) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionPDF to the original Parkinson's law article in The Economist (1955) https://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “Better technology means higher expectations, which creates more work”Submitted Why it is Important that Software Projects Fail as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe more I think about IT industry the more I'm convinced that the majority of it is bullshit jobs [0]. Productivity, efficiency, job hopping, long term short term - it all almost doesn't matter. Giving raise or not is not about an individual's contribution to the bottom line. It's about social status, pecking order and winning an argument for its own sake. > "There is wisdom that only comes from complete product cy…
Comment linking /Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
on “Job-hopping increases, in possible boon to wage growth and productivity”Berglas actually wrote about AI as well ( http://www.berglas.org/Articles/AIKillGrandchildren/AIKillGr... ), and suggested to legally limit chip frequency to 1 MHz to avoid AI proliferation, on the theory that from an evolutionary standpoint, rogue AI is inevitable. More recently (during the current deep learning bubble) he wrote a whole book about AI.
Comment linking /Articles/AIKillGrandchildren/AIKillGrandchildren.html
on “Why It Is Important That Software Projects Fail (2008)”I think this is hilarious, but probably not going to continue to be true. Yes, a lot of software products fail, but automation is increasingly driving capital growth and replacing labor. The p2p gig economy does cut out a lot of bureaucracy, and AI advances... both of which were hard to predict in '08. The article he cited, Parkinson 1955 (originally in the Economist), on the relationship of british naval bureaucrac…
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “Why It Is Important That Software Projects Fail (2008)”http://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “The Growth of Administrative Staff in Universities”No. I think he's serious. The same author also advocates that the manufacturing and distribution of high-performance processors should be outlawed and regulated as nuclear weapons in order to save humanity from a potential AI singularity [0]. Also, since the computing power we currently have may already be sufficient to run an AGI via distributed computing, destroying existing computers may be necessary. Finally, si…
Comment linking /Articles/AIKillGrandchildren/AIKillGrandchildren.html
on “Why it is important that software projects fail (2008)”Parkinson's Law is incorrectly stated, as anyone who makes it to the second paragraph of the essay[1] can see. The pithy quote is just the opening sentence to the piece. The substance of the piece is far more interesting, and describes a law about the growth of bureaucracies. I strongly recommend anyone interested to just read the whole thing, because it's only 5 pages. [1] https://www.berglas.org/Articles/parkinson…
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “Laws, theories, principles and patterns that developers might find useful”No amount of automation will have any significant effect on the size or efficiency of a bureaucracy. http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
Comment linking /Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
on “MTA's A.I. bus cameras issue mistaken parking violations”This is a well known phenomenon that was described by C. Northcote Parkinson[1]. While Parkinson's law is often misunderstood by readers, including Wikipedia editors, who can't make it past the first paragraph of a work, the actual law is a formula describing the growth of bureaucracies: x = (2k^m + p)/n, "where k is the number of staff seeking promotion through the appointment of subordinates; p represents the diff…
Comment linking /Articles/parkinsons_law.pdf
on “Intel restructures and creates new business units and leadership roles”You might like this essay: http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
Comment linking /Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
on “Students being prepared for jobs that no longer exist – how that could change”Also because they have computers. When they didn't have them, somehow the tax code was shorter: http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
Comment linking /Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
on “Computer Scientists Wield Artificial Intelligence to Battle Tax Evasion”I always liked SimpleOrm https://berglas.org/simpleorm/index.html It should be used more...
Comment linking /simpleorm/index.html
on “ObjectiveSync – A thin Java object persistence layer for JDBC (2015)”When I am in the office I constantly hear my inner voice whispering into my ear - b-u-l-l-s-h-i-t. P.S. http://www.berglas.org/Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/I...
Comment linking /Articles/ImportantThatSoftwareFails/ImportantThatSoftwareFails.html
on “Ask HN: Do you feel any cognitive dissonance working in tech at all?”
