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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,748 posts.
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Say No
Saying yes is so much easier than saying no, but nobody else will ever value your time as much as you do so you need to be a responsible steward of it. Say No to meetings. Say No to interruptions. Say No to things that are urgent but not important. Prioritize your time based on impact, be transparent about those…
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You only get 1,000 lines of code a week
Choose to do only the things that nobody else can do.
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What women in technology really think (150 of them at least)
What women in technology really think (150 of them, at least)
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Board Members
Over the last five years, there has been an incredible shift in leverage from investors to founders. It’s good in most ways, but bad in an important few. Founders’ desire for control is good in...
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Why talent agents for engineers don’t exist
People often ask me if I’m a talent agent for engineers, in the same way that actors have talent agents in Hollywood. In a lot of ways, the way I work is closer to a talent agent than a traditional recruiter — rather than sourcing for specific positions, I try to find smart people first, […]
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Sacrificial Architecture
Sometimes it's a good thing to be writing code that you expect to throw away in a couple of years time.
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The Toughest Adversity I've Ever Faced
This period began when my successful business (discussed here) failed overnight. After I discovered our accounts were closed, I checked if the dupe method still worked. To my surprise, it did! So I...
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Move Fast and Break Nothing
Things Zach Holman said.
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The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much
Academics constantly complain about being overworked, yet they also praise their freedom to decide how and when to work as one of the great ...
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Before the Startup
October 2014 (This essay is derived from a guest lecture in Sam Altman's startup class at Stanford. It's intended for college students, but much of it is applicable to potential founders at other ages.) One of the advantages of having kids is that when you have to give advice, you can ask yourself "what would I tell…
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A Path to Full-time Open Source
Two years ago today I released Sidekiq Pro, my commercial extension to Sidekiq, as an experiment to see if I could make OSS development financially viable for individual developers. I had no idea if anyone would trust me and buy it. Can you think of anyone else selling a Rubygem?
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Work Habits at Apple
In episode 47 of the Debug podcast, former Apple managers Lisa Melton and Nitin Ganatra talk about their work schedules at Apple and the questionable practice of being expected to work on weekends and vacations.
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This email may be worth millions of dollars in sales
We were comparing two SaaS applications. One gave us a better quote, so we asked the second if they would match it. They wouldn’t, but their founder, wrote us an email explaining: Why their...
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There are no B players
“Only hire A players! Fire the B players!” “If you hire B players, then they will hire C players!” “Over time, the A players will get frustrated with the B players and will leave to go to other companies and you’ll be left only with B and C players,
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If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else
When you look online for advice about entrepreneurship, you will see a lot of "just do it": The best way to get experience... is to start ...