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Employee benefits at Basecamp
Our headquarters in Chicago. I’m often asked about the benefits we offer at Basecamp. Potential employees are obviously curious, but most of the questions I get are from fellow business owners…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 648 posts.
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My Biggest Surprise: How Law Shapes the Business Landscape, and a Patent Puzzle
If there’s one thing I’ve been surprised by while trying to start startups, it’s the extent to which the business landscape is shaped by law. Skin Cancer One of my first serious s…
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Bye, Amazon
May 1 st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
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Embrace the Grind
Sometimes, programming feels like magic: you chant some arcane incantation and a fleet of robots do your bidding. But sometimes, magic is mundane. If you’re willing to embrace the grind, you can pull off the impossible.
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I accidentally saved my company half a million dollars
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
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How to be a -10x Engineer
To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:
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What It's Like to Fail
How one man went from writing jokes for Roseanne to homeless, and how he fought his way back using Craigslist.
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Individuals Matter
One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't…
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The gift of it's your problem now
Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...
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Boards are dangerous to founder/CEOs
Edit, 11/20/2023: If you like this post, it inspired a book co-written by me and Liz Zalman. You can find it here. One of my portfolio companies raised a round a few months ago and I left their boa…
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My startup banking story
As a relatively new member of adult society, and an absolute infant of the business world, I didn't think much about bank choice. I figured: you put money in, you take money out, they're all the same. I also figured a local branch of a global bank is just a fungible tentacle of the giant banking machine, so also…
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How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You
Best practices for code review when you’re the author.
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Design Docs at Google
One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of design docs for defining software designs. These are...
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Fix it, Fork it, Fuck off (2019)
I write and publish open source code. I quite often get bug fixes, patches, requests and questions regarding the things I have published. Most of the feedback is respectful and helpful. However …
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Software development and screen readers at 450 words per minute
Insights | Vincit
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Why I Left Google DeepMind
I fought against Google’s Pentagon AI deal from the inside. Powerful people and institutions failed to keep their AI ethics promises under pressure.
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How to Level Up as a Developer
How does a good developer become a great developer?
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The “API Mandate” memo at Amazon
The personal website of Christopher Laing.
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Good at programming competitions does not equal good on the job [video]
A couple of days ago I watched a How Computers Learn talk by Peter Norvig. In this talk, Peter talked about how Google did machine learning and at one point he mentioned that at Google they also applied machine learning to hiring. He said that one thing that was surprising to him was that being a winner at…
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The answer to "Will you mentor me?" is...No.
No. Thanks for understanding. Ok that was the nutshell version. If that answers your question, that's great. The more detailed answer ...
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The silent majority of experts (2012)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Why I did not go to jail (2014)
A lot of people have been asking me what my upcoming book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, will be like. Here’s a piece that I wrote for the book that did not make the cut. I still think it’s a pretty good story and gives you a flavor. I just tell the truth so...
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Suffering-oriented programming
Someone asked me an interesting question the other day: "How did you justify taking such a hu...