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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 320 posts.
Here's to the Next 3 Years (Yehuda Katz Moves On)
I officially joined Engine Yard on January 1, 2008, about a week before we announced our Series A funding, becoming its twenty-second employee. I was Engine Yard's very first "Engineering" hire, and I would spend the next year working on Ezra's Merb project, finally releasing Merb 1.
Extreme Pair Programming - Guy Steele and Richard Stallman
"We sat down one morning," recalls Steele. "I was at the keyboard, and he was at my elbow," says Steele. "He was perfectly willing to let me...
You can not buy ideas or talent
When it comes to acquisitions, there are only two things worth buying: products and customers. When you buy either, you’re buying a solid stream of revenue. All you have to do is not fuck it up. That’s harder than you think, but the good news is that there is room for error. Fuck it up …
No, you are not "running late", you are rude & selfish
This post may offend some readers, recruiters or not. But only because it’s going to cut close to the bone for many. And I don’t care if I sound old-fashioned, because actually it’s nothing to do with ‘fashion’ or ‘generation’. It’s got everything to do with basic good manners and respect for other people. So
PhD or Not PhD: that is the question
Every year I am approached by students asking about grad school in Computer Science. I generally sit down with them for an hour or so and g...
I’m a Female Y Combinator Founder and You Can Be Too
Sometimes when talking to people about YC I get this reaction: “hey, I’d love to apply but I am sorely unqualified and don’t even know where to begin.” As the summer has officially ended and I’m back in NYC I just wanted to put it out there that every single YC founder, at some point in time, was totally unqualified…
Easy Ways to Fail a Ph.D.
I'm supervising a lot of new grad students this semester, so for their sake, I'm cataloging the common reasons for failure.
Boys Rules, Girls Lose - Women at Work
My two daughters are now in college and have put their toes in the working-world with summer jobs. As they’ve grown older, they’ve heard their parent’s advice about women in the workforce. Th…
What A CEO Does
I am posting this as a MBA Mondays post. But I did not learn this little lesson at business school. I learned it from a very experienced venture capitalist early in my post-MBA career. I was working on a CEO search for one of our struggling portfolio comapnies. We had a bunch of them. I […]
What non-technical users don’t understand about your software
If you are writing consumer software you have to understand that you and your average user have a very different level of understanding of computers. When you first start doing support it can be a …