Searching for outliers | benkuhn.net

most important things are outlier-driven • draw lots of samples • filter for maybe-amazing, not probably-good • learn where your bar should be • expect to fail a lot

Shortly after I started blogging, because I was a college student and had nothing better to do, I set a goal to write every week. I started in September 2013 and wrote around 150 posts between then and when I started working at Wave. (At that point I stopped having nothing better to do, so my blogging frequency tanked.) The outcomes of these 150 posts were extremely skewed: Two made it big on the Hacker News frontpage ( What happened to all the non-programmers and Readability, hackability, and abstraction ). After seeing the second post on HN, Dan Luu subscribed to my blog and started submitti

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