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
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New Hacker News Guideline: Avoid Gratuitous Negativity
The HN team members are some of the most thoughtful people about online communities I’ve ever met. So I’m always excited when they have a new idea to try. This idea is simple. We’re updating the guidelines to add: “Avoid gratuitous negativity.” Critical thinking is good; shallow cynicism, on the other hand, adds…
Sketch 3 released
Sketch puts the focus back on you and your work. Made by designers, for designers.
EA: The Human Story (2004)
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse. EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging…
Why airlines tend to be unionized
The explanation lies in the interaction of labor laws and aviation regulations. Let's consider labor laws first. The law compels a company to negotiate with a labor union. If it cannot reach an agreement, however, and the union goes out on strike, the company is able to hire replacement workers and continue its…
How Not To Run An A/B Test
Are you falling victim to the peeking problem? Learn how to design and run an experiment properly.
The Power of the Marginal
June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.) A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those…
Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’…
Testing Cliqz in Firefox
About a year ago, Mozilla announced a strategic investment in Cliqz GmbH, the Munich, Germany-based provider of search and privacy tools. Today, we want to tell you about an important ...
Google Maps' Moat
Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London—but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities.
Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
In most places, power from new renewables is now cheaper than new fossil fuels.
Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme…
Hitting the High Notes
In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company: The common belief is that when you’re …
Steve Blank What’s A Startup? First Principles.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition…
For most U.S. workers, real wages have barely budged in decades
Despite some ups and downs over the past several decades, today's real average wage in the U.S. has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And most of what wage gains there have been have flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative…
The Future of Programming
I gave a talk at the DBX conference called The Future of Programming . Below are links and quotes from some primary sources I used, as well as links to wikipedia and elsewhere where you can learn more.
Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet
I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want…
A/B Testing You'll Actually Use: Optimizely (YC W10) Launches Out of Beta
Everything marketing and digital teams need to create content fast, test and personalize, and prove business impact.
Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
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Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.