Top all-time · #2785
Lucas F. Costa
Personal blog · lucasfcosta.com · on HN as lucasfcostaprogrammingstartupscareer
Lucas F. Costa's personal blog at lucasfcosta.com covers programming, startups and career. Since 2016, 27 different Hacker News readers have linked it 118 times, most often “Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (11) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link these posts on software estimation and Monte Carlo forecasting, deadlines, streams and terminals, and the Y combinator. One calls the Y combinator post an explanation that worked very well.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 11 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Most-linked posts?
- /2021/09/20/monte-carlo-forecasts.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-11-10
- Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-08-03
- Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-09-19
- Lucas' Laws of Project Management2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-07-08
- Your terminal is not a terminal: An Introduction to Streams2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-04-08
- Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-09-30
- Why long-term plans don't work and how to fix them2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-07-15
- UX Patterns for CLI Tools2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-06-06
- Backpressure is all you need2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-05-31
- Localhost Will Inevitably Die2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-11
What Hacker News says?
Reminds me of this post: https://lucasfcosta.com/2021/09/20/monte-carlo-forecasts.htm...
Comment linking /2021/09/20/monte-carlo-forecasts.html
on ““This project will only take 2 hours””Submitted How to replace estimations and guesses with a Monte Carlo simulation as a story · 396 points
HN discussionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26368011 https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/yes-you-should-estimate/ > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006853 https://josephmate.github.io/PowersOf2/ Complexity Estimator https://earthly.dev/blog/thought-leaders/ > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27467999 https://jacobian.org/2021/may/20/estimation/ > https://news.ycombina…
Comment linking /2021/09/20/monte-carlo-forecasts.html
on “Estimates are difficult for developers and product owners”Submitted Finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable as a story · 393 points
HN discussionHello everyone, thanks for all your feedback! Regarding IDEs and bloatware: here’s a more detailed explanation of that argument https://lucasfcosta.com/2018/08/05/In-Praise-of-Plaintext.ht... They’re not always bloatware, they have meaningful use cases, I just don’t think most of them are in the domain of software engineering specifically. I’ll take some time to go through comments in more detail at another time and…
Comment linking /2018/08/05/In-Praise-of-Plaintext.html
on “How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal”Submitted Why long-term plans don't work and how to fix them as a story · 286 points
HN discussionI can see some Monads in his examples. One particular example being https://lucasfcosta.com/assets/fortune-and-cowsay-streams.pn...
Comment linking /assets/fortune-and-cowsay-streams.png
on “Your terminal is not a terminal: An Introduction to Streams”Submitted Useful engineering metrics and why velocity is not one of them as a story · 241 points
HN discussionfunny given that only a month ago he was expounding the benefits of "Talk To Your Customers" [1] aka "Agile", which is essential artificially and programmatically governing your day via deadlines. [1] https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/08/03/talk-to-your-customers.ht...
Comment linking /2022/08/03/talk-to-your-customers.html
on “Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead”Submitted How I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal as a story · 225 points
HN discussionHave your team read this and know its a managment and not a team problem. https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/09/15/deadlines.html
Comment linking /2022/09/15/deadlines.html
on “Ask HN: How does your company handle late running projects?”Submitted Your terminal is not a terminal: An Introduction to Streams as a story · 223 points
HN discussionThis piqued my interest so I had a read of the below which explained things very well, although I’m only about 70% fully comprehending it: https://lucasfcosta.com/2018/05/20/Y-The-Most-Beautiful-Idea...
Comment linking /2018/05/20/Y-The-Most-Beautiful-Idea-in-Computer-Science.html
on “An intriguing discovery of Computer Science: The Y combinator [video]”Submitted Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead as a story · 186 points
HN discussionThis is a good example of AI native thinking. Teach AI everything and ask it if it has learnt throughly learnt. The results are surprisingly good. I am following similar steps from this article https://www.lucasfcosta.com/blog/backpressure-is-all-you-nee...
Comment linking /blog/backpressure-is-all-you-need
on “Write code like a human will maintain it”Submitted Why your daily stand-ups don't work and how to fix them as a story · 177 points
HN discussionNice explanation. Another article on terminals I stumbled upon in the past https://lucasfcosta.com/2019/04/07/streams-introduction.html
Comment linking /2019/04/07/streams-introduction.html
on “The beginner's guide to Linux terminals, tty, pty and shell”Submitted How to distort Scrum until it no longer works as a story · 144 points
HN discussionMy blog and personal website: https://lucasfcosta.com I usually write about Startups, Agile, and CLIs.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal website here?”Submitted Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing as a story · 144 points
HN discussionGuess streams was a mixed analog / digital world thing[0]. Is 'curl' the higher order wave crest of LC_NETWORK (aka 'sane' http protocol reference to type bundled 0,1,2 file descriptors) One can have curl as a bash loadable routine without the need to recompile bash. Headless or not, much more sane[4] than ctypes.sh[1] as curl binary epilog/prolog handle the non-http protocol items within the context of curl module/…
Comment linking /blog/streams-introduction
on “TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP”Submitted JavaScript Fatigue: Realities of Our Industry as a story · 132 points
HN discussionI frequently write at https://lucasfcosta.com . It's been on the front-page here quite often. Especially these posts: - Useful engineering metrics and why velocity is not one of them - https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/08/31/engineering-metrics.html - You don't need Scrum. You just need to do Kanban right. - https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/10/02/scrum-versus-kanban.html - Why deadlines are pointless and what to do instead -…
Comment linking /2022/09/15/deadlines.html
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Talking to your customers: a disruptive Agile framework as a story · 112 points
HN discussionI'm sure you have seen it already, but there has been some sound criticism of the DORA metrics: https://isthisit.nz/posts/2022/state-of-the-dora-devops-metr... Though I disagree with Logan about the change failure rate (see https://two-wrongs.com/you-can-reliably-measure-change-failu... ), I still think he is spot on in terms of MTTR. Strongly seconding Reinertsen for anyone interested in this, though. I think this…
Comment linking /2022/08/31/engineering-metrics.html
on “DevEx: What Drives Productivity”Submitted JavaScript Fatigue: Realities of our industry (2017) as a story · 83 points
HN discussionA couple of related articles: https://lucasfcosta.com/2021/09/20/monte-carlo-forecasts.htm... https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch... I've been trying to find out if there exists any out of the box solutions for getting cycle time for issues etc directly from the github api, and then do forecasting with confidence intervals - but so far I've drawn a blank.
Comment linking /2021/09/20/monte-carlo-forecasts.html
on “Agile Project Forecasting – The Monte Carlo Method (2015)”Submitted All About Recursion and Tail Calls in JavaScript as a story · 67 points
HN discussionSubmitted Beigels, software, and why you should control queues instead of cycle times as a story · 63 points
HN discussionSubmitted I'm still not using GUIs in 2019: A guide to the terminal as a story · 59 points
HN discussion
