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Science upside for Starship
This blog is a direct follow up of Starship Is Still Not Understood, and is part of the series on popular misconceptions in space journalism. Now available in audio form. I think it is relatively s…
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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Digital Ocean said it would shut down my blog if I didn’t edit a blog post.
This is a story about how the VPS provider Digital Ocean required me to either delete a blog post or make it anonymous by removing any reference to the person I was writing about. If I refused to d…
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What's Amazon's market share? 35% or 5%?
Amazon is a big company, but what does that mean? How big is ‘big’? What does ‘dominant’ or ‘scale’ or ‘huge’ mean when US retail is $6 trillion every year?
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How My Book Launch Went
Greetings, superfans! When we last tuned in , I was just about to “launch” my self-published book . I put that in quotes because it’s an awfully serious-sounding word for what was really just doing some clicking on my laptop. If my last post was the climax of my book writing adventure, consider this the denouement…
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A simple explanation of how money moves around the banking system (2013)
Twitter went mad last week because somebody had transferred almost $150m in a single Bitcoin transaction. This tweet was typical: There was much comment about how expensive or difficult this would …
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Response to DHH
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. …
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John Gruber: I'll Tell You What's Fair
What’s goofy is the idea that Google would do this — to aggressively change Android from a BlackBerry/Windows Mobile competitor into an iPhone competitor — and that anyone would expect Apple not to retaliate, to instead just sit there and take it and allow all other aspects of their previous buddy-buddy corporate…
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Boeing 737 MAX crash and the rejection of ridiculous data
“Boeing 737 Max: What went wrong?” (BBC) contains a plot showing the angle of attack data being fed to Boeing’s MCAS software. Less than one minute into the […]
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The Economics of OnlyFans: Most accounts make less than $145/mo
OnlyFans has become part of the zeitgeist recently. The rise of e-girls and the prospects of making millions make it a fun thing to gawk at in a
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Wealth: The Toxic Byproduct (2013)
In a beautiful, rollicking piece last month for Aeon Magazine, web developer James Somers ponders the question, Are coders worth it?
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Trust but Verify
It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that…
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Inflation, part 1: On shelter futures
A deep-dive
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How the Canadian Tech Scene Encourages Finite Gameplay
Toronto is not the next great startup scene. Neither is Waterloo, or Vancouver, or anywhere in Canada. I’m sorry that I have to write this. I really am. I want it to work. But the growing cho…
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Inflation is differential and restructuring (2021)
When it comes to inflation, economists get it wrong. Inflation is always and everywhere differential.
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Open source confronts its midlife crisis
Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood have grown: the kids that were such a fresh adventure when they were infants and toddlers are now grappling with their own transition into adulthood – and you try to…
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The Decline and Fall of IBM
Bob's new eBook, The Decline and Fall of IBM, is finally available on Amazon.com.
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OpenAI and Anthropic Revenue Breakdown
Breaking down revenue growth, the consumer subscription businesses and the importance of partnerships to the API business
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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 […]
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Excerpts From the Diary of an [iTunes] App Store Reviewer
Not sure what a “lingam” is, but if it means what I think it means, just thinking about it is making mine swell. Jackpot. Rejected app for inappropriate content.
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The Shirky Principle (2010)
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →