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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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How to make $100k in Open Source by working hard
My Sidekiq project isn’t just about building the best background processing framework for Ruby, it’s also a venue for me to experiment with ways to make open source software financially sustainable for the developers who work on it hundreds of hours each year (e.g. me). Let’s review.
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How to get your first ten customers (2013)
Preface: the assumption for this essay is that you’re building a B2B app, and you have something built but you’re having trouble getting people to pay for
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Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
Picture by Scott Vandehey This morning I ran across a wonderful open source project called “Crime doesn’t climb”, analyzing how crime rates vary with altitude in San Francisco. Th…
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Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google?
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Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
There is an extremely important question about the near-future of AI that almost no-one is asking. We’ve all seen the graphs from METR showing that the length of tasks AI agents can perform has been growing exponentially over the last 7 years. While GPT-2 could only do software engineering tasks t
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Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record
I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as much as you'd expect…
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PostgreSQL community impact of 2nd Quadrant purchase
This blog is about my work on the Postgres open source database, and is published on Planet PostgreSQL. PgLife allows monitoring of all Postgres community activity.
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Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
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Eight Years at Roblox
I joined Roblox at the end of 2012 as a rendering engineer; I had just spent more than a year working on various titles from FIFA franchise after years of console game development and was becoming a bit tired of the “big game development”. My work on FIFA was as a contractor and I got an offer for a full-time…
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I quit – Peak indifference, big tobacco
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
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The fall of the theorem economy
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
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Bloomberg’s ‘The Big Hack’
One way or the other, there is more to come on this story, and either Bloomberg’s or Apple’s and Amazon’s credibility is going to take a significant hit.
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Apple curl security incident 12604
tldr: Apple thinks it is fine. I do not. On December 28 2023, bugreport 12604 was filed in the curl issue tracker. We get a lot issues filed most days so this fact alone was hardly anything out of the ordinary. We read the reports, investigate, ask follow-up questions to see what we can learn … Continue reading the…
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You Can't Buy Integration
The usual build-versus-buy rules for applications don't apply to integration
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Skype 5 for Mac
A while back, when Skype's group videochat feature was still free, a friend of mine sent me a Skype message, asking me whether it was possible to do videochat with more than one person in Skype. "Sure," I replied, "you can do that, but you need to install the new Skype 5 beta." I sent her the link. A few minutes…
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Japan has changed in important and visible ways
The 2020s are not the 1990s.
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Success, and Farming vs. Mining
Let’s come up with an analogy and then torture it like we’re the Cheney administration: imagine you’ve just purchased a plot of land. What a...
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Tempering Expectations for GPT-3 and OpenAI’s API
GPT-3 is indeed a large step forward for AI text-generation, but there are very many caveats with the popular demos and use cases.
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What Happened at the Satoshi Roundtable
Last weekend I attended the Satoshi Roundtable conference along with Charlie Lee and about 70 other members of the bitcoin community.