In face, your goal in a negotiation is not always to get
  the lowest possible terms. Your goal is to understand the
  needs of your partner and create win/win outcomes where 
  both sides are incentivized to continue to want to work 
  hard together – now and into the future. Sometimes that 
  means you want the absolute best deal you can get. Other 
  times it doesn’t.

That's a lesson that applies to employee salary negotiations as well. I've seen too many instances of employers trying to take advantage of an employee's lack of negotiation skills, trying to squeeze out that last $5k/year. It's much more important to have an employee who is happy with their compensation and dedicated to your company than to shave a few grand off your annual payroll.

I'm glad to hear someone who likes to negotiate talk about the downsides of getting too good of a deal. It's a dimension too often ignored by people who forget that if the other guy isn't happy you might end up with far worse of a product/service/employee, etc.

There are even times when it makes sense to pay more than the asking price for better service or for the long term sustainability of the deal.

And why is that, Michael? Which bits did you find objectionable? What would you prefer to hear? People negotiate. We can pretend they don't, but they do. For business people it's important to understand that.

But I'm all ears if you think I missed something.

Mark, thanks for the post, I really look forward for your nexts posts about negotiation. Don't be discouraged by comments like the one above.

Personally I think negotiation skill is one of career skills that programmers can benefit most of.

Don't feed the trolls.

Actually that post was fine, if a bit banal. It was your "busy execs hate lunches" idiocy that inspired the comment, which still stands.

Ok. Fair enough. Thanks for expanding. FWIW, in the busy execs hate lunches post - I was really just trying to offer honest advice to young entrepreneurs. I do lunches all the time. But I also get requests from random people I don't know to do lunch or dinner. I thought it was worth educating some of these younger people about what common-sense etiquette is. I know you think it's obvious - but based on my sample data it isn't always.

Why? This is the most useful post on the HN front page at the moment.

Negotiations are performed almost in every area of human life. Negotiation and rituals around it are actually quite fascinating if you think about it. Two or more parties, who often don't know each other, try to exchange information to find an agreement that all parties are happy with.

Have you read his other blog posts?

I found Mark's blogs to be very informative. They contained actionable insights that I used often as I launched my start-up.