Top all-time · #1372
Steve Yegge
Personal blog · steve.yegge.googlepages.comprogrammingcareerwriting
Steve Yegge writes steve yegge, a personal blog at steve.yegge.googlepages.com about programming, career and writing. Since 2007, 54 different Hacker News readers have linked it 75 times, most often “Steve Yegge's five essential phone-screen questions”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Steve Yegge's Home Page Ummmm... Welcome! New! This page is the subject of the Dumbest Reddit Thread Ever. Slow news day, I guess. Feel free to visit my old drunken blog rants, or my newer plain old blog rants. NBL is JavaScript 2 / EcmaScript 4. http://www.ecmascript.org - take a look!
Most-linked posts?
- Steve Yegge's five essential phone-screen questions10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2007-06-12
- Effective Emacs8 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2007-05-06
- Tour De Babel -- Rant about programming languages5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2007-12-07
- Steve Yegge | Ancient Languages -- Perl 5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2008-02-28
- Math Every Day 5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2007-12-10
- You Should Write Blogs3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2007-03-08
- Steve Yegge on ten great books 3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-04-26
- Steve Yegge's predictions from 20042 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-06-16
- The Emacs Problem (February, 2005)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-09-12
- Being the Averagest2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2007-03-02
What Hacker News says?
http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...
Comment linking /five-essential-phone-screen-questions
on “Hacking a Google Interview - MIT's guide to Google interviews”Submitted Steve Yegge's predictions from 2004 as a story · 117 points
HN discussionI've had pretty good luck using the MAA recommendations list for libraries: http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/19/?pa=content&sa=viewDocum... I recommend reading Theodore Gray and Jerry Glynn's Brain Rot article for some ideas on what math skills are worth intensive study and development and which are less important: http://www.theodoregray.com/BrainRot/ There are several articles and blog postings on the topic of math se…
Comment linking /math-every-day
on “Ask HN: Best Mathematics book for complete noobie?”Submitted Math Every Day as a story · 70 points
HN discussionOnce you put in something like 10 hours towards learning Emacs, you'll become productive with it. After this initial investment, for every n minutes per day that you put it, you'll get m back in terms of increased productivity. In my experience |m| >> |n|. And remember that time saved = mt - n, where t is the number of days you have been reaping this productivity boost, and t tends to infinity. You won't "lose" any…
Comment linking /effective-emacs
on “Learn Emacs in Ten Years”Submitted Scheming is Believing (2005) as a story · 50 points
HN discussionJust adding another data point: Steve Yegge's essay [ http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ancient-languages-perl ] scared me off trying Perl.
Comment linking /ancient-languages-perl
on “Perl: Love it, or hate it, but don't ignore it”Submitted Steve Yegge's five essential phone-screen questions as a story · 48 points
HN discussionI did all this: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/effective-emacs and I am very happy.
Comment linking /effective-emacs
on “Configuring vim right”Submitted Tour De Babel -- Rant about programming languages as a story · 36 points
HN discussion>Python's author, Guido Van Rossum, also made some boneheaded technical blunders early on — none quite as extravagant as Larry's blunders, but a few were real doozies nonetheless. For instance, Python originally had no lexical scoping. But it didn't have dynamic scoping either, and dynamic scoping may have its share of problems, but it at least sort of works. Python had NOTHING except for global and local (function)…
Comment linking /tour-de-babel
on “Ask YC: Django vs Ruby on Rails”Submitted Steve Yegge: Singleton Considered Stupid as a story · 33 points
HN discussionYou have two things to consider: Python vs. Ruby and Rails vs. Django. Steve Yegge has made a good write-up on languages: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babel . Steve is a top notch programmer with brains and eloquence. He was one of the first hackers at Amazon. Now he works at Google, and Google has chosen Python and JavaScript as company languages. Which has pissed off Steve quite a bit, because he has…
Comment linking /tour-de-babel
on “Ask YC: Django vs Ruby on Rails”Submitted Ten Challenges as a story · 31 points
HN discussionI'd second this. In fact, Steve Yegge once said this about K&R ( http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/ten-great-books ): This is an odd little book. It's frequently mistaken for an introductory programming book, which inevitably leads to frustration. It's not a good way to learn how to program; it expects that you're already familiar with machine architecture, assembly language, compilers, and at least one other high-…
Comment linking /ten-great-books
on “Ask HN: Learning C”Submitted Steve Yegge on ten great books as a story · 31 points
HN discussionFor example, Steve Yegge's Five essential phone screen questions: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre...
Comment linking /five-essential-phone-screen-questions
on “Some “Developers” Just Can’t Develop”Submitted Effective Emacs as a story · 31 points
HN discussionAnd in a similar vein, Steve Yegge's post on practicing programming: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/practicing-programming
Comment linking /practicing-programming
on “Twelve Tips to Master Programming Faster”Submitted The Emacs Problem (February, 2005) as a story · 29 points
HN discussionMerry Christmas to you! Also, I do kind of like your idea, and I wholeheartedly agree with this: New users aren't going to know what "M-x describe-mode" refers to (or even what "M-x" is). Half the battle in learning Emacs is to get really, really used to all the help commands. You need to play with all of them, and you need to use them a lot , and somehow the documentation didn't really get this through to me at fir…
Comment linking /effective-emacs
on “"Text editors should take a lesson from video games."”Submitted Choosing Languages as a story · 24 points
HN discussionI first learned about this book from Yegge's blog (back when he was still at amazon) where he wrote: "We've been studying the available research, and all roads lead to the same set of conclusions, one of which is that Functional Programming is going to be a necessity in this new world. It's a foregone conclusion. And that, in a roundabout way, brings me to this book by Chris Okasaki. It is absolutely unique. It's th…
Comment linking /ten-challenges
on “"Purely Functional Data Structures" by Chris Okasaki [pdf]”Submitted Google disables Steve Yegge's site as a story · 22 points
HN discussionI would quote Stevey's Blog here. It says: "The right way to learn math is breadth-first, not depth-first. You need to survey the space, learn the names of things, figure out what's what." It comes from his own experience. He decided to renew his math skills and declared plan "Math every day". After 15 months he posted another article about results of this experiment. You can read both articles as they are inspirati…
Comment linking /math-every-day
on “I suck at math, please divulge resources”Submitted Lisp Wins (Steve Yegge article) as a story · 19 points
HN discussionSteve Yegge, too: "I've often idly wondered what the ideal innovation environment is. I know it's not at home -- staying up all night just to get some free time for innovation doesn't scale well when you have a family and a day job. Home has its share of distractions. And I know it's not in the office, at least not the space we're in today. Every time I let my thoughts wander on this subject, the same vision comes t…
Comment linking /innovation-101
on “John Carmack on hacking Doom and Quake (.plan file from 1998)”Submitted You Should Write Blogs as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSee also "Area Number Three" in http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/five-essential-phone-scre... Being able to create that line-noise is, in most cases, significantly more useful than taking 3 months to create a perfectly engineered recursive phone-number finding program.
Comment linking /five-essential-phone-screen-questions
on “Famous Perl One-Liners Explained, Part II: Line Numbering”Submitted Ten Predictions as a story · 7 points
HN discussion
