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How Software Companies Die (1995)
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,308 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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When did SVB insiders begin to realize they were in trouble?
When did Silicon Valley Bank insiders begin to realize they were potentially in trouble?
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Organizational debt is like technical debt, but worse
Startups focus on speed since they are burning cash every day as they search for product/market fit. But over time code/hardware written/built to validate hypotheses and find early customers can be…
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On Succeeding Steve Jobs
A new Apple CEO would need credibility with two highly disparate factions: Apple’s rank-and-file employees, and Wall Street. The only candidates who could satisfy both factions, to any degree, already work at Apple.
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How Google keeps employees by treating them like kids (2006)
I was talking with a friend the other day about that perennial subject of conversation in the Valley, Google. And finally she gave me the clue that made the whole place make sense. “It’s about infantilizing people,” she explained. “Give them free food, do their laundry, let them sit on bouncy brightly-colored balls…
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Early employees take the most risk today
Why are we still using old 1990’s cap tables and the same tiny option grants for employees as we did back then? Is that fair? To whom? Is…
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How to build great products
If you believe that sales fix everything, it follows that most startups fail because they don’t ship a great product in a growing market before they run out of money. Assuming you’ve picked an explosive market, how do you go about building a great product?1
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Today I saw the future
Mozilla and OTOY deliver the power of native PC applications to the Web, unveil next generation JavaScript video codec for movies and cloud gaming
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Resumes suck for hiring engineers
In this experiment, I wanted to see how good engineers and recruiters were at resume-based candidate filtering. Going into it, I was pretty sure that engineers would do a much better job than recruiters. However, that’s not what happened at all. As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the…
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The unprofitable SaaS business model trap
Marketo filed for IPO. They have $60m in revenues and a nice growth rate; unfortunately they're *losing* $35m/year. Why do SaaS business fall into the trap of being forever unprofitable, and what is the secret to the ones who overcome this trap?
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Lessons from GitHub's First Year
The end of the year is a great time to sit down with a glass of your favorite beverage, dim the lights, snuggle up next to the fire and think about what you’ve learned over the past twelve months.
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Microsoft makes 5 times more income from Android than from Windows Phone
Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning. Microsoft is getting that money thanks to a p…
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Extramaze: Using Racket, PostgreSQL, AWS, but no ads or JavaScript (2018)
Update: Due to lack of interest/use, in June 2021 this site was shut down and user data (emails, names, search alerts) deleted from all systems and backups. For Extramaze LLC I'm using Racket in a commercial project -- a search engine with email alerts fo...
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The Paywalled Garden: iOS is Adware (2020)
Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and…
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Fred Wilson's response to "Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies"
I don't disagree with PG when he says that Facebook's IPO performance (or lack thereof) has the potential to impact valuations in startup land. I think it will be particularly impactful on the late stage and secondary markets where most of the IPO valuation speculation is happening. But let's put Facebook's current…
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New 2GB Raspberry Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings
Raspberry Pi launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip. This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5's shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said: The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the…
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OpenAI
I have some exciting news (for me, anyway). Starting next week, I’ll be going on leave from UT Austin for one year, to work at OpenAI. They’re the creators of the astonishing GPT-3 and …
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Elon Musk and the Hyperloop
For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on…
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Free Transactional Email Services – The Best Alternatives to Mandrill and Co
Round-up and comparison of several popular and free transactional email services and Mandrill alternatives.
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Clearing up some things about LinkedIn mobile’s move from Rails to node.js
There’s an article on highscalability that’s talking about the move from Rails to node.js (for completeness: its sister discussion on Hacker
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Startup Idea: User Retention as a Service
An in-depth blog post talking user retention and lifecycle email marketing for startups.
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Jonathan Coulton on MegaUpload and piracy
I wrote this thing on Twitter this morning about the MegaUpload shutdown, and it’s gotten some crazy traction on the old internet. In addition, I’ve just done a couple of interviews for NPR on the subject, and I think I may have said some crazy, provocative things. There are many comments and questions out there…
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Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
If you skim this blog entry too quickly or just read the title, you might think I am someone who does not like F#. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the last several months, I have become a big F# fan. It has become my preferred language for personal projects.
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