| 1 | May 25, '24 | Interpreting jokes in real time is murderously difficult. Here’s a classic Japan story and then one from me: | 121× | 4.7M | 21k | 586 | 3.8k |
| 2 | Jul 25, '24 | This sounds like a trivial observation and it isn’t: No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win. | 46.6× | 1.8M | 7.2k | 460 | 843 |
| 3 | Dec 13, '24 | A contractor said something during this project which I thought was both compassionate and the sign that he was a skilled professional, and I thought I’d share: Scene: My mother, w | 35.4× | 1.4M | 19k | 1.3k | 2k |
| 4 | Oct 25, '24 | This is sort of a niche financial product but I’ll explain mechanics since plausible a few readers will eventually be able to use it: Banks want you to have ~20% equity in your hou | 29.7× | 1.2M | 2.8k | 102 | 3.8k |
| 5 | Oct 25, '23 | Japanese bank: And how can we help you today? Me: I will need to send a domestic transfer to complete a startup investment. “Absolutely Mr. McKenzie. Will this be to someone you ha | 28.9× | 1.1M | 3.2k | 142 | 390 |
| 6 | Nov 10, '25 | "So great to know my code has been accepted into your codebase. I charge very reasonable rates for IP assignment. You'll receive an invoice shortly." | 27× | 1.1M | 16k | 487 | 992 |
| 7 | Mar 20, '25 | The Atlantic has an interesting piece on credit card processing. The thesis is that interchange fees redistribute money from poor to rich. I do not subscribe to this thesis. | 26.7× | 1M | 3.1k | 157 | 2.8k |
| 8 | Jun 27, '24 | I like this anecdote of a CEO directing a particular “If you’re making this phone call we’ve already lost a shed load of money and the priority is not to lose more” decision, recou | 26.1× | 1M | 4k | 271 | 1.1k |
| 9 | Jul 31, '24 | The good news: we got much better at running The Sort. The bad news: we got much better at running The Sort. | 25.5× | 993k | 2.3k | 113 | 1.3k |
| 10 | Dec 15, '24 | *two sick and miserable kids* Nurse: What brings you in today? Me: The kids attended a party with other children whose parents have subsequently told us have received strep diagnos | 23.4× | 912k | 3.1k | 35 | 435 |
| 11 | Jun 3, '23 | Apparently Walgreens is testing, in Chicago, a “new” concept: almost all goods (save two aisles of “essentials”) behind a barrier, passed over it to the customer in response to an | 21.1× | 822k | 3.1k | 135 | 165 |
| 12 | Jul 30, '23 | I learned a bit about fracking today and even relative to my prior expectation holy cow does it sound like sorcery. As one example of many, how do you think they get information fr | 20.9× | 814k | 2.3k | 262 | 722 |
| 13 | Feb 14, '25 | Friendly neighborhood Dangerous Professional advice: If you are ever at a meeting taking notes, and someone at the meeting expresses umbrage that notes are being taken of the meeti | 20.7× | 806k | 7.1k | 411 | 1.7k |
| 14 | May 7, '24 | A lot of what people presume is fixed about airline tickets is a social fiction that the airline empowers tens of thousands of people to waive if you ask nicely. (And there are oth | 19.3× | 753k | 2.3k | 91 | 983 |
| 15 | Dec 23, '23 | I miss Japan. Anyhow, as someone who was a professional translator for a few years, if I had written this card it would have been among the best work of my career. It is a work of | 18.8× | 730k | 7.8k | 341 | 843 |
| 16 | May 1, '24 | Insurance: Oh and another thing while I have you on the phone about your new policy: you don't have life insurance with us. Me: I am surprised by that statement. Ins: So I have a r | 18.1× | 704k | 2.3k | 77 | 782 |
| 17 | Oct 24, '23 | This demo is not perfect but outperforms probably four nines of all non-heritage Japanese majors in the U.S. Yiiiiiiiiikes that was not on my bingo card for this year. | 17.4× | 678k | 1.8k | 130 | 460 |
| 18 | Jun 4, '25 | (n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than author | 16.4× | 639k | 6.5k | 186 | 1.2k |
| 19 | Jun 10, '24 | A memorable moment in new employee training for me was when the trainer said that most people working professionally in our field could not whiteboard out funds and data flow betwe | 15.8× | 613k | 2.2k | 100 | 1.1k |
| 20 | Jan 24, '25 | One of the reasons why PDF files that purport to be bank statements are believed to be reliable is that all serious adults understand that if you *$#(%( with one for advantage over | 15.6× | 608k | 2k | 48 | 743 |
| 21 | Apr 18, '24 | Bank: Can you get us account statements of all of your bank accounts to underwrite the mortgage? Me: *sigh* And this is why collecting checking accounts is eventually a painful hob | 15.4× | 600k | 1.8k | 21 | 141 |
| 22 | Aug 16, '23 | Ruriko: So when do we register with Chicago? Me: We don’t. R: So how does Chicago know everyone who lives in Chicago? Me: It doesn’t. R: … Does America have a government? How do yo | 14× | 544k | 2.8k | 239 | 383 |
| 23 | Mar 29, '24 | This is the paradigmatic example of why we have securities laws: | 13.3× | 517k | 2.5k | 194 | 332 |
| 24 | May 21, '23 | In the “Japan does a better job at hotels” and “Japan does a better job at taking children seriously”, for ~$12 our hotel had a 20 minute cooking class for children where they got | 12.8× | 499k | 3.3k | 145 | 253 |
| 25 | Dec 27, '23 | You’d be surprised of how much of management, consulting, teaching, senior ICing, etc is: “I want to X.” “Have you written down a plausible plan to get to X with steps listed in or | 12.8× | 497k | 2k | 163 | 2.4k |
| 26 | Nov 9, '23 | Culture is a real thing in the world, and in a healthy engineering culture, someone not involved in immediate firefighting would take that engineer aside within minutes and say “Yo | 12.7× | 494k | 1.6k | 117 | 271 |
| 27 | Oct 18, '25 | @patrickc I think there is also a component of leaders and broader society needing to have the “will to have nice things.” Every fountain everywhere will lose a battle with entropy | 12.6× | 489k | 2.9k | 127 | 320 |
| 28 | Jun 21, '24 | Two weeks ago my buddy @fulligin pulled me aside and said "I have something to show you." That something was the Daylight Computer, which I was previously unaware of. I've since bo | 12.3× | 478k | 1.7k | 88 | 964 |
| 29 | Oct 11, '24 | I am reminded of the absolutely enormous detection of embezzlement as restaurants switched to cash registers, a switch which was not motivated by concerns of embezzlement. | 10.7× | 417k | 3.1k | 146 | 596 |
| 30 | May 27, '25 | Apparently Japan Post is debuting the most obvious improvement in addressing for last two decades: address virtualization. You sign up with them and get a short alphanumeric code. | 10.5× | 410k | 5.8k | 321 | 904 |
| 31 | Sep 23, '24 | It’s a bit uplifting, and terrifying, to think “What other graphs do we have which are one (1) competent executive from hockey sticking?” | 10.5× | 410k | 3.9k | 268 | 473 |
| 32 | Nov 11, '24 | It is useful to understand when you are dealing with a person who can be persuaded and when you are dealing with a state machine which has formal transitions for some things you co | 10.3× | 402k | 3.7k | 130 | 1.3k |
| 33 | Feb 21, '25 | After feeling the difference between an 800 and a 2,000 over many months, in an impressionistic rather than rigorously journaled fashion, I have one of these permanently in home/ho | 9.8× | 380k | 2k | 87 | 1.3k |
| 34 | Nov 21, '24 | Meta comment: this is going to be one of the longest and most heavily cited research results in the software industry. | 9.5× | 370k | 2.4k | 74 | 1.1k |
| 35 | Jan 6, '25 | You ever wonder what the conferences between Japanese and U.S. public transit operators sound like? Japan: So core recent concerns: falling ridership in rural areas and whether the | 9.5× | 369k | 2.8k | 193 | 432 |
| 36 | Mar 8, '25 | One of the cultural quirks of capitalists is that there are many lies that one is allowed or even encouraged to tell in society, and capitalists are members of society, but are in | 9.4× | 366k | 2.6k | 97 | 417 |
| 37 | Nov 8, '23 | I do not want to break into the strategic popcorn reserve prematurely but the SEC’s legal writing is sometimes hilarious and devastating. | 9.2× | 359k | 2.2k | 260 | 168 |
| 38 | Mar 5, '25 | Last year, Vox Media (New York Magazine / The Cut) published a piece about a scam. You might remember it including $50,000 in a shoebox. I was skeptical, about one paragraph in par | 9.0× | 349k | 2.5k | 71 | 978 |
| 39 | Feb 25, '24 | Scaled crime is a result of a business process and it’s a very useful lens to understand how that business functions for the purpose of interdicting it. | 8.7× | 338k | 1.9k | 143 | 473 |
| 40 | Dec 27, '24 | Oof the second. | 8.4× | 329k | 1.9k | 59 | 162 |
| 41 | Jul 29, '24 | An extended anecdote to demonstrate the power of a Dangerous Professional incantation: “What are my options?” | 8.4× | 326k | 1.9k | 123 | 956 |
| 42 | Aug 4, '24 | Imagine you’re talking to a time traveler back in 2000: “Oh some good news: America does have end-to-end supply chain for high-value electronics.” “Really?” “Receivers for worldwid | 8.0× | 310k | 1.9k | 116 | 359 |
| 43 | Jan 6, '24 | I think many people would be surprised at the difficulties billionaires have in converting money into smart people and/or their outputs. | 7.9× | 307k | 1.6k | 56 | 229 |
| 44 | Dec 1, '17 | Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before. In that spirit | 7.2× | 0 | 6.7k | 2.3k | 1k |
| 45 | Oct 9, '25 | One of the reasons that professional legal, medical, and financial advice services are expensive is you are buying the right to sue someone. That is a reasonable thing to want. Ano | 6.5× | 252k | 2.4k | 213 | 353 |
| 46 | Jun 27, '24 | Banker: What brings you in today? Me: Wire transfer for a house closing. Customer #2: Congratulations we are also closing! Customer #3: So are we! Hey can I maybe ask you to be a w | 6.2× | 239k | 2k | 37 | 173 |
| 47 | Dec 28, '24 | I continue to think there’s a fairly titanic gap between the tech industry (as broadly understood) and someone in Columbus working as Network Administrator I at a mortgage company. | 6.1× | 237k | 1.9k | 81 | 310 |
| 48 | Apr 10, '24 | Lillian, doing homework: I hurried to get on time to school. Me: Word order. Lillian: Why? Me: It’s just a thing in English; there’s only 1 order that works. Lillian: And I’m just | 5.9× | 229k | 2k | 67 | 129 |
| 49 | Aug 19, '24 | If I had a dollar and could sell it for $1.03, and that required warehousing the dollar for a year, I’d want to shut down this process when the Treasury rate was above 3%. If OTOH | 5.2× | 202k | 1.6k | 49 | 211 |
| 50 | Jul 19, '24 | Me: *cash* Tradesman: Wait how did you get that with the banks down? Me: *explains* Tradesman: Oh that’s creative. Me: Nah. Next plan was creative. Tradesman: What was that? Me: Go | 5.2× | 201k | 1.7k | 57 | 181 |
| 51 | Sep 9, '17 | It occurs to me that my hobby in writing letters about the Fair Credit Reporting Act is suddenly topical! So some quick opinionated advice: | 4.9× | 0 | 4.7k | 2k | 23 |
| 52 | Oct 25, '23 | Me: “Well, it is the principle of the thing.” Bank: “Of course sir.” Me: “Oh and please check the box to remember their information for future transfers.” Bank: “Of course sir. Can | 4.7× | 184k | 3.9k | 40 | 61 |
| 53 | Dec 13, '24 | Him: Because no woman should see her kitchen destroyed like that. She’d have enough to worry about. So we suggest we put the cabinet just a little farther away, in the dining room. | 4.4× | 171k | 12k | 153 | 207 |
| 54 | Dec 13, '24 | Him: And I put the cabinet she wants there. And you try to move a wheelchair between them. That ain’t gonna fit. And that blocks her from getting from her own kitchen to her own li | 4.2× | 162k | 5.4k | 48 | 46 |
| 55 | Apr 25, '24 | TSA at O’Hare: Does anyone speak Spanish? crowd: *no takers* TSA: Really? Come on folks, need help. Me: I studied it for a few years but depending on the question it might be diffi | 3.9× | 153k | 1.8k | 2 | 53 |
| 56 | Jun 18, '21 | In honor of someone’s bad bug today, I will retell a story of my worst bug: Once upon a time I was the CEO and entire engineering team of a company which sent appointment reminders | 3.9× | 0 | 4.5k | 997 | 555 |
| 57 | Feb 28, '24 | Proud papa moment: Liam (7) doing math. “Some elephants are at a river. 2 leave. 13 are left. How many were there at the start? Write an equation and solve.” Liam: “I don’t know wh | 3.9× | 152k | 1.6k | 21 | 91 |
| 58 | Mar 26, '24 | Lillian (9) math homework: *picture of a leaf* What is the best estimate of the mass of this leaf? Lillian: That cannot POSSIBLY be enough information to answer this question. | 3.9× | 150k | 2.1k | 24 | 79 |
| 59 | Dec 13, '24 | Him: Nobody wants to get old and nobody wants their parents to get old, but it happens to everyone, and may God grant your mother many happy years. Me: Thank you for saying that. H | 3.9× | 150k | 4.2k | 39 | 44 |
| 60 | Dec 13, '24 | Then he takes me aside. Following conversation is indicative. Me: All sound reasonable? Him: I’ll build whatever you two decide on, but I wanted to have a conversation with you in | 3.8× | 149k | 4k | 33 | 33 |
| 61 | Dec 13, '24 | Him: Your mother isn’t going to be using this kitchen for one week or one month. Maybe at some point in future she comes back to it, and it’s in a wheelchair. That will not be a ha | 3.8× | 148k | 4.5k | 37 | 46 |
| 62 | Jan 14, '25 | You’ll notice that in society we have many competing classes of prophets. The ones who actually have to be right about the future are despised, while the ones who are never scored | 3.7× | 145k | 1.9k | 145 | 280 |
| 63 | Jul 27, '25 | Japanese toilets often have an exhortation about cleanliness but this one is the hardest I’ve ever seen. <Japanese>A soiled toilet reflects the filth of your soul.</Japane | 3.7× | 144k | 3.1k | 165 | 308 |
| 64 | Nov 26, '19 | Tokyo has positive population growth of about 100,000 people a year, and rents and home prices are roughly stable for last decade. How? Outconstructing NYC. And LA. And SF. And Bos | 3.1× | 0 | 4k | 1k | 141 |
| 65 | Dec 9, '17 | “How is Tokyo addressing its housing crisis?” “We don’t have one. We build homes.” “Do you discourage techies from moving into town?” “Techies live in homes so we build homes.” “Ho | 3.1× | 0 | 3.9k | 1k | 158 |
| 66 | Jan 23, '24 | Some people find air travel unpleasant, but every time I visit an airport, I feel like I’m witnessing an intricate worldwide logistical ballet which somehow functions absurdly well | 3.1× | 119k | 1.6k | 84 | 115 |
| 67 | Aug 21, '24 | I love Amazon’s “Can we bribe you with a $3 Kindle credit to delay a shipment by a day for cost-control reasons?” option. | 2.9× | 111k | 2.4k | 24 | 80 |
| 68 | Oct 13, '24 | If you’ll forgive me for getting on a frequent hobbyhorse, beyond the point about mission-driven enterprises, this is important due to the dignity of labor. Everyone is doing somet | 2.8× | 109k | 2.2k | 143 | 224 |
| 69 | Feb 14, '25 | … you should absolutely want to keep physical control of those notes, and you should prioritize that over social pressure you may perceive, and you should update very aggressively | 2.7× | 105k | 3.7k | 72 | 108 |
| 70 | Feb 14, '25 | You should also, immediately after the meeting, document the fact that you were taking notes at a meeting and asked to stop, and that you felt in that moment this ask was extraordi | 2.7× | 104k | 3.1k | 51 | 87 |
| 71 | Oct 4, '17 | The Equifax ex-CEO throwing an unnamed technician under the bus for the Equifax breach is positively maddening. Some thoughts: | 2.5× | 0 | 2k | 1.2k | 2 |
| 72 | Feb 14, '25 | You can keep that in your files, or you can email it to your boss as an FYI, but you want that time stamped and you want the fact of it having happened to be institutionally undeni | 2.5× | 96k | 2.7k | 39 | 67 |
| 73 | Dec 1, '17 | Startups are (by necessity) filled with generalists; big companies are filled with specialists. People underestimate how effective a generalist can be at things which are done by s | 2.5× | 0 | 3.2k | 860 | 70 |
| 74 | Mar 8, '19 | This is one of the reasons why "Can you describe what I'd need to do to buy a $50 book?" is a deceptively good question to ask during job interviews (or earlier) for getting a read | 2.4× | 0 | 3.1k | 716 | 159 |
| 75 | Feb 14, '25 | This thread is invariably going to be read as a subtweet of shenanigans happening in New York. It is. It is also sincere advice from someone who, once in a long career, was told to | 2.4× | 93k | 2.6k | 39 | 68 |
| 76 | Jul 3, '24 | Me: Has anyone seen my ring? Lillian, 9: Yes. It is in my pocket. Me: Why is my ring in your pocket? Lillian: Because I put it there when I found it in the bathroom, one of many pl | 2.3× | 91k | 2.4k | 41 | 63 |
| 77 | Feb 14, '25 | Immediately after the meeting I hand wrote a transcript from memory. I cannot tell you anything else, for obvious reasons, but I regret absolutely nothing about that decision. | 2.3× | 89k | 2.2k | 23 | 45 |
| 78 | Feb 14, '25 | “Is the transcript going to be seen as authoritative?” Dangerous Professional observes that memories are such fragile things but if there is only one contemporaneously produced tra | 2.1× | 80k | 1.9k | 25 | 51 |
| 79 | Mar 22, '20 | b285b048c5f1d12785b50c79e3ba30943f9a26f5968434ac65bd1a3e6fba77de255b5483b903253398f6f2775b34e1066bce13e17cba751b44e5f6ad02f30a04 | 2.0× | 0 | 1.9k | 123 | 519 |
| 80 | Apr 23, '18 | Periodic observation for the benefit of junior developers: You do not have to be embarrassed about not knowing a particular bit of syntax or API. Googling things efficiently is a c | 1.9× | 0 | 2.4k | 650 | 21 |
| 81 | Nov 10, '25 | Your lawyer, after facepalming hard enough to concuss themselves, will say that without an IP assignment you've infected the entire codebase (and thus the company) with a claim tha | 1.9× | 74k | 2k | 14 | 49 |
| 82 | Dec 23, '19 | I suppose I'll get in on the fun: 1 like = 1 opinionated thought about the intersection of technology and finance, up to a cap of 100. | 1.9× | 0 | 1.9k | 207 | 760 |
| 83 | Sep 24, '17 | Wife: "Hold hands when crossing the street." *2 year old grabs own hands* "OK Mommy." Me: "Oh you're going to be so good at programming." | 1.9× | 0 | 2.5k | 717 | 0 |
| 84 | Dec 1, '17 | Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will | 1.5× | 0 | 2k | 454 | 44 |
| 85 | Dec 23, '20 | An innovation in Japan which I think will arrive everywhere: double-blinded shipping, where neither the sender nor receiver know each other's address. This was negotiated by a larg | 1.5× | 0 | 1.8k | 276 | 252 |
| 86 | Nov 30, '22 | Credit cards are a legacy system. They are extremely important to commerce worldwide, but exhibit path dependence. Much of their functioning under-the-hood derives from decisions m | 1.4× | 0 | 1.6k | 147 | 462 |
| 87 | May 5, '21 | No UI choice I have ever seen is as user-hostile as this interaction. | 1.4× | 0 | 2.2k | 210 | 51 |
| 88 | Oct 18, '20 | FAQ: “How do I get better at writing?” Me: Write a million words. Follow up: “Hah but seriously.” Me: Start with 20,000 words. Everyone gets to that 50 times in their first million | 1.3× | 0 | 1.8k | 205 | 216 |
| 89 | Dec 1, '18 | This is one of the best UX innovations I have ever seen. | 1.3× | 0 | 1.8k | 447 | 27 |
| 90 | Apr 9, '19 | Engagement is a toxic metric. Products which optimize for it become worse. People who optimize for it become less happy. It also seems to generate runaway feedback loops where most | 1.3× | 0 | 1.7k | 344 | 107 |
| 91 | May 2, '19 | Stripe is doubling down on remote engineering. We’ll hire 100+ remote engineers this year. | 1.3× | 0 | 1.8k | 295 | 74 |
| 92 | Apr 8, '21 | A mindset I learned the last few years which I'm getting a lot of use out of recently: "What is the much more ambitious version of that?" | 1.3× | 0 | 1.7k | 141 | 327 |
| 93 | Dec 1, '17 | There is no hidden reserve of smart people who know what they're doing, anywhere. Not in government, not in science, not in tech, not at AppAmaGooBookSoft, nowhere. The world exist | 1.3× | 0 | 1.6k | 387 | 81 |
| 94 | Nov 12, '22 | Crypto, as an ecosystem, is going to be in a much worse state Monday than it is popularly believed to be today. | 1.3× | 0 | 2k | 146 | 98 |
| 95 | Sep 30, '22 | It doesn't matter what a PM at Google tells you; they'll rotate outwards after next perf cycle and it will be a new PM who will be utterly powerless to stop Google's mismanagement | 1.2× | 0 | 1.7k | 171 | 202 |
| 96 | Jun 4, '25 | As I've mentioned previously, solemnization is a sociolegal tripwire to say "There are many situations in society and in business where you're Just Talking and up until this exact | 1.2× | 47k | 2.1k | 50 | 117 |
| 97 | Nov 6, '22 | Have you ever wondered if perhaps we did not understand the sense of humor of the ancients as they would have expressed through Tiktok had they had Tiktok? Because this is *definit | 1.1× | 0 | 1.6k | 175 | 137 |
| 98 | Dec 1, '17 | This concludes, for the moment, an off-the-cuff list of things which would otherwise be too obvious to bring up in conversation. Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) h | 1.0× | 0 | 1.6k | 185 | 66 |
| 99 | Feb 12, '20 | Show of hands: how interested would people be in an essay about software private equity? | 1.0× | 0 | 1.7k | 13 | 73 |
| 100 | Jun 18, '21 | I fixed the idempotency issue and added MANY safeguards. We never unintentionally duplicated a call again for the life of the company. Nobody remembers this now except me, and engi | 0.9× | 0 | 1.7k | 32 | 31 |
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