Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,396 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
DHH Is Worse Than I Thought
DHH's politics are not normal. Maybe they used to be, I don't know, but as of right now the dude is way outside of what most people would consider moral or acceptable.
What’s Vivaldi’s business model?
Some browsers use your data in ad networks, push promoted content or use other invasive methods to fund their development. We don’t.
Remote: the new book by 37signals, coming fall 2013
On top of making Basecamp, we write books about what we’ve learned running our own business. They’re filled with practical advice you won’t find anywhere else.
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story).
Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!
When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people …
Why Amazon Has No Profits
Amazon is a bundle - it’s hundreds of separate businesses, all running on the same common internal platforms. The big, established ones are highly profitable, but Amazon chooses to reinvest those profits into new businesses, so that reported net income for the company overall looks low. This mask
Rees Re: OO
(Jonathan Rees had a really interesting response to Why Arc isn't Especially Object-Oriented , which he has allowed me to reproduce here.) Here is an a la carte menu of features or properties that are related to these terms; I have heard OO defined to be many different subsets of this list.
What’s behind the recent surge in the M1 money supply?
While the terms “money” and “wealth” often mean the same thing in everyday parlance, economists define money more narrowly as the component of wealth consisting of
Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivity and a Typical Worker’s Pay: Why It Matters and Why It’s Real
The data series and methods we use to construct our graph of the growing gap between productivity and typical worker pay best capture how income generated in an average hour of work in the U.S. economy has not trickled down to raise hourly pay for typical workers.
Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down (…
News
Everyone thinks they’re hiring the top 1%. Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to …
Adopting and Developing BSL Software
This FAQ addresses questions for developers & companies interested in working on Business Source License (BSL) software or adopting BSL for their own business.
Apple has locked my Apple ID, and I have no recourse. A plea for help
Summary: A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple …
Where's the shovelware? Why AI coding claims don't add up
78% of developers claim AI makes them more productive. 14% say it's a 10x improvement. So where's the flood of new software? Turns out those productivity claims are bullshit.
Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework . Some of their results included (lower is better):
Cloudflare to introduce pay-per-crawl for AI bots
Pay per crawl is a new feature to allow content creators to charge AI crawlers for access to their content.
The Advertising Bubble
A few days ago VentureBeat published an article called The 7 martech buying trends shaping sales & marketing strategies in 2016 , a piece of sponsored prose remarkable not for its content, but for being at least four layers of advertising removed from any kind of productive economic activity.
Introducing Open Salaries at Buffer
At Buffer, we have the concept of "Open Salaries." We have a simple formula to calculate salaries and we share this with the whole team--and with you, too.
You Only Need to Test with 5 Users (2000)
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
Microsoft’s Bing uses Google search results—and denies it
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Is developer compensation becoming bimodal?
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is…
How to hire a programmer to make your ideas happen
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal
I feel for Google – Steve Jobs threatened to sue me, too. In 2003, after I unveiled a prototype Linux desktop called Project Looking Glass*, Steve called my office to let me know the graphica…