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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. 33 posts.
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Employee Equity
Startup employees often do not get treated very well when it comes to stock compensation. New ideas float around occasionally, but lawyers are usually averse to trying new things, and investors...
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Before the Startup
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
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Inclusiveness at Mozilla
I am deeply honored and humbled by the CEO role. I’m also grateful for the messages of support. At the same time, I know there are concerns about my commitment to fostering equality and welcome for LGBT individuals at Mozilla. I hope to lay those concerns to rest, first by making a set of commitments to you. More…
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Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats
⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that
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Selling to the Fortune 500, Government, and Other Lovecraftian Horrors
You really can sell SaaS/software to large enterprises, despite your perceived inability to do so. Read on for how.
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The Magpie Developer
I’ve often thought that software developers were akin to Magpies, birds notorious for stealing shiny items to decorate their complex nests. Like Magpies, software developers are unusually smart and curious creatures, almost by definition. But we are too easily distracted by shiny new toys and playthings. I no longer
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bliki: Frequency Reduces Difficulty
"If it hurts - do it more often". Good advice if the amount of pain raises exponentially with the time between actions, such as for integrating software.
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The Next Mission
Slides for the brief talk that I gave at a Harvard seminar on privacy and user data organized by John Taysom last week.
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Making Your Writing Work Harder For You
Using teaching -- via writing, speaking, and the like -- to sell more software.
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How to Minimize Politics in Your Company (2010)
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy
When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open…
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Farewell GitHub, Hello Immersive Computing
Today is my last day at GitHub. Recent events have given me a lot of time to reflect on what’s important to me, and I’ve decided to switch gears and focus on building something from scratch again. Since visiting the Oculus VR team at their office three months ago, I’ve come to believe that immersive computing (aka…
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Bored people quit (2011)
Much has been written about employee motivation and retention. It's written by folks who actively use words like motivation and retention and generally don't ha
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Great Programmers (2004)
I've seen a lot of discussion of great programmers, usually centering on how to find them, but usually what people really want to know is how to become one. Since I'm widely considered to be a great programmer, I'll give some advice. First of all there's raw coding ability. For this, practice makes…
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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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Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist
People often ask me if I’m a talent agent for engineers, in the same way that actors have talent agents in Hollywood. In a lot of ways, the way I work is closer to a talent agent than a traditional recruiter — rather than sourcing for specific positions, I try to find smart people first, […]
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Sacrificial Architecture
Sometimes it's a good thing to be writing code that you expect to throw away in a couple of years time.