Top all-time · #343
Erik Bernhardsson
Personal blog · erikbern.comdatastartupsprogramming
Erik Bernhardsson's personal blog at erikbern.com covers data, startups and programming. Since 2014, 151 different Hacker News readers have linked it 215 times, most often “Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 12 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Erik Bernhardsson's data-driven posts on software estimation, waiting times, hiring and queueing, and name the blog among favourite tech and data science reads.
- Recommended for · 12 comments
- Called a great write-up, enjoyed, explaining a concept quite well, very visual, and a favourite.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Erik Bernhardsson
Most-linked posts?
- Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem15 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2018-05-03
- Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model14 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2019-04-16
- How to hire smarter than the market – a toy model (2020)11 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2020-01-14
- Analysis of longevity of code across many popular projects11 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2016-12-06
- I don't want to learn your query language (2018)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-09-01
- Simple sabotage for software (2023)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-12-14
- Building a data team at a mid-stage startup7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-07-08
- Headcount goals, feature factories, and when to hire those mythical 10x people5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-02-22
- Giving more tools to software engineers: the reorganization of the factory5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-12-17
- Missing the point about microservices4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-06-06
What Hacker News says?
Some data science blogs I enjoy: - https://erikbern.com/ - https://davefernig.com/ - https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Why software projects take longer than you think – a statistical model as a story · 700 points
HN discussionInteresting thought. One could do Monte Carlo simulations to estimate the probability distribution of time-to-finish. I considered something like this [0] to explain the empirical log-normal distribution of project completion times [1], although I hadn't thought about including sequencing & bottlenecks. Probabilistic programming [2] is the discipline concerned with solving this type of problem - some tooling might e…
Comment linking /2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-longer-than-you-think-a-statistical-model.html
on “Show HN: I built my own PM tool after trying Trello, Asana, ClickUp, etc.”Submitted Building a data team at a mid-stage startup as a story · 607 points
HN discussionhttps://erikbern.com/2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html
Comment linking /2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html
on “A History of Clojure [pdf]”Submitted It's hard to write code for computers, but it's harder to write code for humans as a story · 464 points
HN discussionOne difference that comes to mind is that while in advertising / marketing you'd need to get what your clients offer, what they'd like to be offering, and how to work with them, in tech you'd also need to understand how it is currently done. The fact is, it's often a mess, with lost, fragmented and conflicting knowledge. And while both need to deal with unclear goals, figuring out what it is the client and truly nee…
Comment linking /2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-longer-than-you-think-a-statistical-model.html
on “Ask HN: What mistakes did you make when starting as a consultant/freelancer?”Submitted The eigenvector of “Why we moved from language X to language Y” as a story · 442 points
HN discussionI love reading these two for Python/Recommender Systems: 1. Ben Frederickson: https://www.benfrederickson.com/blog/ 2. Erik Bernhardsson: https://erikbern.com/ And for pure ML: 1. Ferenc Huszár: https://www.inference.vc/ 2. John Langford: https://hunch.net (although he hasn't written a technical post in a while)
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What are good solo developer blogs that you enjoy reading?”Submitted Software Infrastructure 2.0: A Wishlist as a story · 321 points
HN discussionHere's an article that explains the phenomenon much better than I can. It made its rounds in HN a week or two ago: https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-l... I haven't seen a good way to turn the concept of "it should almost never take longer than that" into a concrete process. I've always seen it as a gut check, often implemented as "take your initial estimate and double/triple it." What I actu…
Comment linking /2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-longer-than-you-think-a-statistical-model.html
on “Scrum is fragile, not Agile”Submitted I don't want to learn your query language (2018) as a story · 297 points
HN discussionRelated article (albeit a more mathematical focused analysis of the same problem): https://erikbern.com/2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-l...
Comment linking /2019/04/15/why-software-projects-take-longer-than-you-think-a-statistical-model.html
on “We are clueless about how long things should take”Submitted I don't want to learn your query language as a story · 289 points
HN discussionIt depends on how variable the load is, compared to how fast the servers can scale up and down, etc. I often have as a rule of thumb to have enough headroom to be able to deal with twice the load while staying within a triple of the response time. You can solve the equations for your specific case, but eyeballing graphs such as [1] I end up somewhere in the area of 40 %. The important part is of course to ask yourse…
Comment linking /assets/wait-time-2.png
on “%CPU utilization is a lie”Submitted Never attribute to stupidity what is adequately explained by opportunity cost as a story · 288 points
HN discussion(1) DSLs work great sometimes. See https://www.jooq.org/ (2) Elastic Load Balancer is a control loop responsive to workloads, that kind of thing is a commodity (3) Under-provisioning is rampant in most industries; see https://erikbern.com/2018/03/27/waiting-time-load-factor-and... and https://www.amazon.com/Goal-Process-Ongoing-Improvement/dp/0... (4) Anomaly detection is not inherently a problem of distributed syst…
Comment linking /2018/03/27/waiting-time-load-factor-and-queueing-theory.html
on “Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work”Submitted Why software projects take longer than you think: a statistical model (2019) as a story · 277 points
HN discussionStill https://erikbern.com/2018/08/30/i-dont-want-to-learn-your-ga...
Comment linking /2018/08/30/i-dont-want-to-learn-your-garbage-query-language.html
on “We Can Do Better Than SQL”Submitted Simple sabotage for software (2023) as a story · 271 points
HN discussionBetter.com | Software Engineers; Product Managers; DevOps; Data Scientists | New York City (NYC) | ONSITE | Full-time https://better.com We're looking for: - Software Engineers ( Senior, Junior, Frontend, Backend, Full stack, infrastructure, QA ) - Product managers - Data Scientists We’re one of the fastest growing homeownership companies in America. Why? Because we’re building a better way to get home and our custo…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2019)”Submitted The hacker's guide to uncertainty estimates as a story · 248 points
HN discussionReminds me of a similar article that measured a similar kind of question about the wait times for NYC subways conditional on how long you've been waiting ( https://erikbern.com/2016/04/04/nyc-subway-math.html ). I think it's a pretty safe bet that people who like this post will like this article as well.
Comment linking /2016/04/04/nyc-subway-math.html
on “The Waiting Time Paradox, Or, Why Is My Bus Always Late?”Submitted The Impending Cloud Reshuffle as a story · 205 points
HN discussion> Best strategy is to look at something others aren't looking at -- any other source of signal. Better's CTO has several blog articles on this -- a great read! How to hire smarter than the market: a toy model[1] Interviewing is a noisy prediction problem[2] 1: https://erikbern.com/2020/01/13/how-to-hire-smarter-than-the... 2: https://erikbern.com/2018/05/02/interviewing-is-a-noisy-pred...
Comment linking /2018/05/02/interviewing-is-a-noisy-prediction-problem.html
on “Ask HN: Recruiters want people who do side projects, yet contracts forbid them?”Submitted Analysis of longevity of code across many popular projects as a story · 202 points
HN discussionWith enough dimensions, everything is on the Pareto frontier: https://erikbern.com/2016/10/25/pareto-efficiency.htm
Comment linking /2016/10/25/pareto-efficiency.htm
on “Being OK with not being extraordinary (2021)”Submitted NYC subway math as a story · 193 points
HN discussionI guess one good example (that was mentioned just yesterday here on HN) would be Flask vs FastAPI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31953470 - "There are no open issues or pull requests on Flask " Quick count finds that FastAPI has 48422 lines of code, while Flask has 9995. Flask just achieved "Zero standing issues/PRs" while FastAPI has 1.1K open issues and ~500 open PRs. Large surface area/API quickly leads to…
Comment linking /2016/12/05/the-half-life-of-code.html
on “Open source is not about you (2018)”Submitted We are still early with the cloud as a story · 185 points
HN discussion
