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Camels and Rubber Duckies
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. …
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 45 posts.
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Developers’ side projects
If you’re a developer working for software company, does that company own what you do in your spare time?
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We built voice modulation to mask gender in technical interviews
We built software to mask gender in technical engineering interviews. See what we learned and why it matters.
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“It's The Future”
The CircleCI blog is your home for DevOps, continuous integration and delivery, and engineering productivity. Explore tutorials, guides, and best practices.
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Welcome to Rands Leadership Slack
For a role as crucial as leadership, there is a shocking lack of required training on the topic. Combined with a tremendous collection of impenetrable literatur
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We only hire the trendiest
An acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Mike, is looking for work after getting laid off from a contract role at Microsoft, which has happened to a lot of people I know. Like me, Mike has 11 years in industry. Unlike me, he doesn't know a lot of folks at trendy companies, so I passed his resume around to some…
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What I Learned Selling a Software Business
Some lessons learned in selling a bootstrapped software business. Relevant to buyers or sellers.
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The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster
Business is noisy. Business is full of people worrying loudly about projects, processes, and other people. These people have opinions, and they share them all
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Markets, discrimination, and "lowering the bar"
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here's a quote from Marc Andreessen that sums up a common view 1 .
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Developer hiring and the market for lemons
Joel Spolsky has a classic blog post on "Finding Great Developers" where he popularized the meme that great developers are impossible to find, a corollary of which is that if you can find someone, they're not great. Joel writes,
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Dash developer's response to Apple's response
Dash provides instant offline access to 200+ API documentation sets, code snippets, and cheat sheets. Features MCP support for AI integration with Claude and other AI agents.
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Farewell, App Academy. Hello, Airbnb – Part 2
(Note: this is the second part of this story. You can read the first part here.) Despite the rejection from 23AndMe, I kept pushing. I applied to all the big hiring websites. Hired rejected me from...
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Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
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Bionic Office
Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a repl…
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BYOT: Bring your own team
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes.
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Happy people don’t leave jobs they love
Resignations happen in a moment, and it’s not when you declare, “I’m resigning.” The moment happened a long time ago when you received a random email from a goo
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The Lack of Options for Startup Employees’ Options
One of the many tradeoffs that early startup employees choose to make is between cash, and options. For some employees however this may end up being a Faustian bargain of sorts. At first glance, the calculus seems simple: the employee will take more stock options for less cash, because over time the payoff could be...
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Google's “Director of Engineering” Hiring Test
Proof that job interviews done by incompetent people are irrelevant.
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What If I Don't Actually Like My Users? (2008)
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Firing People
Firing People: a talk about firing people, by Zach Holman.
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10-Year Exercise Periods Make Sense
Scott Kupor at Andreessen Horowitz has a post today on some potential downsides of 10-year exercise periods for startup employees’ stock options. I’d recommend reading the whole thing for context here, but to summarize: * He argues that allowing employees who leave a company to keep their optio...
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The Tools of a Blind Programmer
The Life of a Completely Blind Programmer in the Netherlands
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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…
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How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
So you know the first 6 rules. You’ve maneuvered through the initial offer conversation, you’ve lined up counteroffers from other companies, and now it’s time to move into the actual negotiating. N...
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Nick Farr's 30c3 Jake Appelbaum story of abuse and harassment
Hi. I’m Nick Farr. (@nickf4rr) You can read what you probably came here for at archive.org But if you’ll allow me first: Bringing people together is my life’s work. The text that was originally …
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Is group chat making you sweat?
Is this you? Are you making other feel like this? Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. In 2006 we launched Campfire, the first modern SAAS group ch…