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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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Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
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The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)
My neighbor introduced me to The Office back in 2005. Since then, I've watched every episode of both the British and American versions. I've watched the show…
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How to Make Wealth
May 2004 (This essay was originally published in Hackers & Painters .) If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very…
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Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
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Startup = Growth
September 2012 A startup is a company designed to grow fast. Being newly founded does not in itself make a company a startup. Nor is it necessary for a startup to work on technology, or take venture funding, or have some sort of "exit." The only essential thing is growth. Everything else we associate with startups…
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Do Things that Don't Scale
July 2013 One of the most common types of advice we give at Y Combinator is to do things that don't scale. A lot of would-be founders believe that startups either take off or don't. You build something, make it available, and if you've made a better mousetrap, people beat a path to your door as promised. Or they…
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How to Get Startup Ideas
November 2012 The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others…
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Commoditize your complements (2002)
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u…
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The CADT Model
In February 2003, a bunch of the outstanding bugs I'd reported against various GNOME programs over the previous couple of years were all closed as follows:
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The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)
The Tyranny of Stuctureless by Jo Freeman
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Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas
March 2012 One of the more surprising things I've noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I'm going to demonstrate this phenomenon by describing some. Any one of them could make you a billionaire. That might sound like an attractive prospect, and yet…
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How to Start a Startup (2005)
March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard Computer Society.) You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A…
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Schlep Blindness
January 2012 There are great startup ideas lying around unexploited right under our noses. One reason we don't see them is a phenomenon I call schlep blindness . Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. It means a tedious, unpleasant task. No one likes schleps, but hackers…
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Choose Boring Technology
Probably the single best thing to happen to me in my career was having had Kellan placed in charge of me. I stuck around long enough to see Kellan’s technical decisionmaking start to bear fruit. I learned a great deal from this, but I also learned a great deal as a result of this. I would not have been free to become…
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TikTok's Enshittification
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
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What We Look for in Founders
(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.) 1. Determination This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most…
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I Hate the News (2006)
Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody…
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The Simple Math Behind Early Retirement
This is the blog post that shows you how to be wealthy enough to retire in ten years. Here at Mr. Money Mustache, we talk about all sorts of fancy stuff like investment fundamentals, lifestyle chan…
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Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
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The Elves Leave Middle Earth – Sodas Are No Longer Free (2009)
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers. We Hired the CFO Last week as a favor to a friend, I sat in on a board me…
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How to Price Software - Economics vs. Pyschology
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. …
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Considerations on Cost Disease
I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some ar…
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My First BillG Review (2006)
In the olden days, Excel had a very awkward programming language without a name. “Excel Macros,” we called it. It was a severely dysfunctional programming language without variables (yo…
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Ideas for Startups (2005)
October 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. ) How do you get good ideas for startups ? That's probably the number one question people ask me. I'd like to reply with another question: why do people think it's hard to come up with ideas for startups? That might seem a stupid thing to ask…
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Spolsky on "Commoditizing Your Complements"
When I was in college I took two intro economics courses: macroeconomics and microeconomics. Macro was full of theories like “low unemployment causes inflation” that never quite stood u…
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A Plan for Spam
August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc . An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering .) I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the…