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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. 86 posts.
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Audion - The Story behind Panic's 2nd product
Is it just me? I mean, do you ever wonder about the stories behind everyday products?
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Dev stays without pay to finish Mac Graphing Calculator as skunkworks project
Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo , and later became part of FrameMaker . Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under…
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Ramen Profitable
July 2009 Now that the term "ramen profitable" has become widespread, I ought to explain precisely what the idea entails. Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses. This is a different form of profitability than startups have traditionally aimed for. Traditional…
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Startups in 13 Sentences
February 2009 One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what…
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Goodbye Google: "Visual Design Lead" leaves Google
Part 1 of 2 (here’s Part 2) Today is my last day at Google. I started working in-house at Google almost three years ago. I built a team from scratch. I was fortunate to hire a team of a very…
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What Startups Are Really Like
October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the…
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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…
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The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle ) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The…
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The Anatomy of Determination
September 2009 Like all investors, we spend a lot of time trying to learn how to predict which startups will succeed. We probably spend more time thinking about it than most, because we invest the earliest. Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. We learned quickly that the most important predictor of success is…
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Steve Jobs to 2005 graduates: ‘Stay hungry, stay foolish’
Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams and see the opportunities in life’s setbacks—including death itself—at the university’s 114th Commencement on Sunday in…
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Fog Creek Compensation
At Fog Creek Software, the way we make sure that people are paid fairly and rewarded for excellent work is based on a professional ladder. Historically, our ladder is based on Microsoft’s pro…
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Undergraduation
March 2005 (Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.) Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. But I took so many CS classes that most CS…
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Why I gave away my company to charity
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.
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Minimum Viable Product: a guide
One of the most important lean startup techniques is called the minimum viable product . Its power is matched only by the amount of confusi...
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Getting Real
The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application
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bliki: Anemic Domain Model
If you use an object-oriented domain model, and you don't put behavior in your objects, you're missing out on most of the benefits of that pattern.
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Apple's Mistake
November 2009 I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken. The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with…
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Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
Get Satisfaction, a third-party customer service app/community, allows customers to offer feedback, make suggestions, get their questions answered, and generally get help with a product or service. A good idea Building support/community infrastructure is a pain point for a lot of companies. The…
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Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to…
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