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Elon Musk Series: Introduction
A post about how Elon Musk became the real world Iron Man.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,308 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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Human Task Switches Considered Harmful
When you’re managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. That’s just a five-dollar word for giving people things to do. It&…
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bliki: Anemic Domain Model
If you use an object-oriented domain model, and you don't put behavior in your objects, you're missing out on most of the benefits of that pattern.
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Incentive Pay Considered Harmful
Mike Murray, a surprisingly hapless HR manager at Microsoft, made a number of goofs, but the doozie was introducing a “Ship It” award shortly after he started the job. The idea was that…
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Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
I’m surprised that you’re surprised
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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage
There is such a thing as a free lunch
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Apple's Mistake
November 2009 I don't think Apple realizes how badly the App Store approval process is broken. Or rather, I don't think they realize how much it matters that it's broken. The way Apple runs the App Store has harmed their reputation with programmers more than anything else they've ever done. Their reputation with…
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John Resig: Redefining the Introduction to Computer Science at Khan Academy
I’m incredibly excited to take this opportunity to announce a new project that I’ve been leading here at Khan Academy: Khan Academy Computer Science .
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Trump
I'm going to say something very unpopular in my world: Trump is right about some big things. He's right that many Americans are getting screwed by the system. He’s right that the economy is not...
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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about
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Shortwave Trading: The West Chicago Tower Mystery
Since 2014 this blog has extensively covered the wireless networks built by high-frequency trading (HFT) firms or network providers to reduce latencies between the different exchanges around the wo…
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Metakovan, the mystery Beeple art buyer, and his NFT/DeFi scheme
At the end of the day, this is a straight-up ICO-style index fund to speculate on NFTs.
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Why American Construction Costs Are So High
I am embarking on a long-term project to investigate why US construction costs are high using case studies, so everything I’m going to say so far is tentative. In particular, one of my favori…
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People can read their manager's mind (2015)
People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Managers often say they'll reward something – perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things.
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Why I Am Not an Austrian Economist
I was first introduced to Austrian economics during my senior year in high school, when I first read and enjoyed the writings of Mises and Rothbard. The summer before I began my undergraduate work at UC Berkeley, I was able to attend the 1989 Mises Institute summer seminar at Stanford, where I met Murray Rothbard and…
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Market is the most important factor in a startup's success or failure (2007)
An archive of the best articles from Marc Andreessen’s now defunct blog
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Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic
Writings on artificial intelligence, personalization, recommendations, and the tech industry.
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Show HN: Designing Web Applications
It's not that you set out to create a poorly designed product, but lots of mistakes—big or small—along the way left you with an interface that does its job, but is painful to use.
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Autoenshittification
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist…
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Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry’s popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to…
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Machine intelligence, part 2
This is part two of a a two-part post—the first part is here. THE NEED FOR REGULATION Although there has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of machine intelligence recently, there...
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Reflecting on my failure to build a billion-dollar company (2019)
In 2011, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life's work...
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How Much OpenAI Spends on Inference and Its Revenue Share with Microsoft
EDIT: I am updating this post to reflect that these numbers are based on accrual accounting, meaning that these amounts are from the quarters I am referencing. Anyone telling you otherwise is misinformed. As with my Anthropic exclusive from a few weeks ago, though this feels like a natural premium