The 48 Laws of Power

What Hacker News says

1. PaulHouleJul 2026
   Well I think one reason I've enjoyed this career for as long as I have is that I want to learn. Like, I had a summer job programming Java applets when Java was still in beta and one thing I love about LLM-assisted programming is that I am still learning new things about Java.

   So far as your article goes it seemed poorly organized to me. Like on a site like HN a lot of articles go by and people cannot give every article the attention the author might want, so you have to write things in an "inverted pyramid" style where a few paragraphs at the top lay out the most important points, then you might have a list of principles or heuristics and then you could go through and describe them in details and break out tables about their characteristics. I can't entirely agree with the mindset of Greene's 48 Laws of Power but I think that book is a masterclass in good organization.

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2. stuffnDec 2025
   > and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

   Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.

   To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.

   > Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

   You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.

   > It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

   Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.

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3. muzaniNov 2024
   It's a very broad question. If you're looking into 5000 years of human history, there's the Robert Greene books - 33 Strategies of War, 48 Laws of Power, human nature, mastery, etc. The guy did classical history, then had his run of politics in Hollywood; so this sounds like what you're looking for.

   Also nobody likes this answer, but religion writes the manuals to life. All major religions have done their research and wrote books. There's a stark contrast between ancient Greek philosophy to when Christianity came in. There were unsolveable problems that the philosophers couldn't tackle, like Aristotle believed that if a great made a mistake they were done for. And then Jesus came in with the idea of repentance and flipped this on its head. The word "hamartia" changed from "missing the mark" to "sinning", and sins are recoverable.

   Then Islam based the ideal lifestyle around every behavior and action by the Prophet Muhammad, from sleeping, headaches, eating, treating guests, treating enemies, and so on. Philosophy became necessary because later there would be scenarios where there was no precedent for decision making, so they wanted analogies. Aristotelian philosophy became a tool for this. Then you had Avicennian philosophy, which developed into inductive logic... things we take for granted today like symptoms. Then al-Ghazali came in and labeled all of the philosophers as nonsense, and Greek philosophy was buried until the 19th century.

   So if you want a tldr, read al-Ghazali. His big work was Tahāfut al-Falāsifa ("Incoherence of the Philosophers"), but if you want something simpler and much more practical, try Ayyuhal Walad ("Advice to a Son/Student"). It's hard to find an English translation that properly captures the sarcastic bite in his writing though. Plenty of religious figures were funny and sarcastic too.

   Honestly, as a society, I think we've gone full circle. We're rediscovering meditation/mindfulness. Which is a fair point - approach all decisions from a fresh mind. But that works up to a point. There's just so much that it takes a while just to go over what to cover and what not to cover.

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4. mu53Nov 2024
   Never criticize anything. Do your best to blend into walls. Let other speak up and support them.

   "48 laws of power" is a book that everyone should read to understand politics. Its all ego and narcissism.

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5. muzzy19Oct 2024
   48 Laws of Power. Gave a deep understanding of how people manipulate each other to gain influence and dominance. A must read if you want to advance your career or avoid being manipulated at work.
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6. teqsunOct 2024
   I recommend reading the book "The 48 Laws of Power". Learning how the game of power is played on these sorts of stages was very elucidating to me.
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