Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,981 posts.
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...
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.
Wow, I remember how idealistic I was when I was about to bring on my first employee! After dealing with bad bosses over my career, after doi...
I was pretty hot on it for a minute. I wanted it to succeed and thought it had the bones to make it. Coil was the main startup trying to push it. They did the right thing by just making it work fir…
Camera sales are continuing to falling off a cliff. The latest data from the Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA) shows them in a swoon befitting a Bollywood roadside Romeo. All four bi…
Meta deserves a bit of a discount off of its recent highs, but a number of myths about its business have caused the market to over-react.
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October 2010 Silicon Valley proper is mostly suburban sprawl. At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. It's not the sort of place that has conspicuous monuments. But if you look, there are subtle signs you're in a place that's different from other places. 1. Stanford University Stanford is a strange…
Building software looks a lot like building a house, but selling the two couldn't be more different.
When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns. They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor files, and then they look at the problem of people sending…
On Twitter’s just-annoucned pan to require third-party clients to use OAuth.
At first sight, the idea of 1,216-page two-volume work on keyboards for $150 might seem like a heavy lift. But it was years in the making.
Many of my students have been asking questions lately about how to do technical interviews, so I've decided to write about my interviewing experiences. I will start by giving a number of anecdotes because they're interesting to everyone, but the later parts of this post are mainly targeted at prospective students who…
This article previously appeared in the Harvard Business Review. It’s been updated with new information about the U.S. Paycheck Protection program and the Economic Injury Disaster Loan progra…
When I first started to get serious about making money I ran into this book written in 1978 by a hippy-hacker living in Arizona. His advice was aimed at “craft and technical” types who wanted to create a small business “doing their thing” whether that was creating ceramic pots, designing outdoor gear, or writing…
I came across this recent video from Vicky Zhao last week and loved her brief summary of how she grew in her ability to clearly articulate ideas on the spot by getting to the point, using story str…
For the past 11 years, the Breakthrough Prize awards have “celebrated outstanding scientific achievements, honoring scientists driving remarkable discoveries in
A $750,000 a month advertiser has left Twitter. One of hundreds. But in her post she explained the bases for the decision vis-a-vis her advertising investment in a neutral, non-ideological way. Peo…
What is OpenAI? I realize you might say "a foundation model lab" or "the company that runs ChatGPT," but that doesn't really give the full picture of everything it’s promised, or claimed, or leaked that it was or would be. No, really, if you believe its leaks to
Late 2018 edition
Productivity growth has not been as fast as proponents of the "digital revolution" expected. Besides a short burst of higher productivity growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s (the higher slope portion), it is hard to see the impact.
