Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 126 posts.
How To Get Media Coverage For Your Startup: A Complete Guide
How to get the press and media to spread your startup's story. A detailed and comprehensive guide for mere mortals.
You're solving the wrong problem
Problem-solving is an important part of everyday life, from organizing your video library to deciding whether to buy a car. Small problems (like trying to
Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is the world’s largest nonprofit membership organization serving all individuals who create games. We advance the careers and enhance the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating for the…
How Copyright Industries Con Congress
I’ve yet to encounter a technically clueful person who believes the Stop Online Piracy Act will actually do anything to meaningfully reduce—let alone “stop”—online piracy, and so I haven’t bothered writing much about the absurd numbers the bill’s supporters routinely bandy about in hopes of persuading lawmakers that…
Sortfolio: Going once, going twice...
A year ago we put Sortfolio up for sale. We entertained a variety of offers, met with a few potential suitors in person, and negotiated numbers. Ultimately nothing came together. Then we shelved the process so we could focus all of our efforts on designing and building the new Basecamp. Sort…
The Hardware Renaissance
October 2012 One advantage of Y Combinator's early, broad focus is that we see trends before most other people. And one of the most conspicuous trends in the last batch was the large number of hardware startups. Out of 84 companies, 7 were making hardware. On the whole they've done better than the companies that…
AskPatents.com: A Stack Exchange To Prevent Bad Patents
We’ve all heard the stories of seemingly trivial patents being used to mug technology companies. There was the patent on the “Interactive Web” which a troll named Eolas used to extract $521 million from Microsoft--until a jury in East Texas threw out the patents . There are the four patents Lodsys is using to send…
Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about *something*; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.
OpenStreetMap: Welcome Apple
Yesterday Apple launched iPhoto, its photo management app, for the iPad and iPhone… and we’re rather pleased to find they’re the latest to switch to OpenStreetMap.
An Alternate Universe (Microsoft Surface)
On the way to the Apple Store today to buy AppleCare+ for my wife’s new iPhone 5, we passed the new Microsoft Store , coincidentally in the middle of their Surface with Windows RT launch. (That is actually the product’s name. “Surface with Windows RT”.)
Jack Daniels writes the politest cease and desist notice ever.
Learn why professors appreciate storytelling in essays and how students can use narrative techniques to write stronger academic papers. Practical tips and examples included.
Why the Movie Industry Can't Innovate and the Result is SOPA
This year the movie industry made $30 billion (1/3 in the U.S.) from box-office revenue. But the total movie industry revenue was $87 billion. Where did the other $57 billion come from? From source…
Why Tarsnap doesn't use Glacier
On the surface, Tarsnap sounds like the perfect use case for Glacier. Out of every TB of data stored on Tarsnap, in any given month approximately 100 GB of data will be deleted, while only 33 GB of data will be downloaded; in other words, Tarsnap is very much a "write once, read maybe " storage system. Tarsnap's…
The Critical Security Flaws that Resulted in Last Friday's Hack
A core value CloudFlare is that security information should be shared between organizations to make the entire Internet safer. That is how CloudFlare's systems work: if one site is attacked, data about that attack is immediately shared with the rest of the network so other sites can be safe.
The secret guild of Silicon Valley
A couple of weeks ago, I was drinking beer in San Francisco with friends when someone quipped: “You have too many hipsters, you won’t scale like that. Hire some fat guys who know C++.” It’s funny, but it got me thinking. Who are the “fat guys who know C++”, or as someone else put it, “theContinue reading "the secret…