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What if You Only Invested at Market Peaks?
What happens when you only invest at the peaks of the market by being the world's worst market timer.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,308 posts.
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Fast
San Francisco proposed a new bus lane on Van Ness in 2001. It opened in 2022 , yielding a project duration of around 7,600 days. “The project has been delayed due to an increase of wet weather since the project started,” said Paul Rose, a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency spokesperson. The project cost…
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Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
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What Startups Are Really Like
October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the…
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EA: The Human Story (2004)
My significant other works for Electronic Arts, and I'm what you might call a disgruntled spouse. EA's bright and shiny new corporate trademark is "Challenge Everything." Where this applies is not exactly clear. Churning out one licensed football game after another doesn't sound like challenging…
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Why airlines tend to be unionized
The explanation lies in the interaction of labor laws and aviation regulations. Let's consider labor laws first. The law compels a company to negotiate with a labor union. If it cannot reach an agreement, however, and the union goes out on strike, the company is able to hire replacement workers and continue its…
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How Not To Run An A/B Test
Are you falling victim to the peeking problem? Learn how to design and run an experiment properly.
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The Power of the Marginal
June 2006 (This essay is derived from talks at Usenix 2006 and Railsconf 2006.) A couple years ago my friend Trevor and I went to look at the Apple garage. As we stood there, he said that as a kid growing up in Saskatchewan he'd been amazed at the dedication Jobs and Wozniak must have had to work in a garage. "Those…
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Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’…
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Google Maps' Moat
Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London—but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities.
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Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme…
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Hitting the High Notes
In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company: The common belief is that when you’re …
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Steve Blank What’s A Startup? First Principles.
Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill Everyone knows what a startup is for – don’t they? In this post we’re going to offer a new definition…
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How Completely Messed Up Practices Become Normal
Have you ever mentioned something that seems totally normal to you only to be greeted by surprise? Happens to me all the time when I describe something everyone at work thinks is normal. For some reason, my conversation partner's face morphs from pleasant smile to rictus of horror. Here are a few representative…
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The Future of Programming
I gave a talk at the DBX conference called The Future of Programming . Below are links and quotes from some primary sources I used, as well as links to wikipedia and elsewhere where you can learn more.
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Something is wrong with children's videos on the internet
I’m James Bridle. I’m a writer and artist concerned with technology and culture. I usually write on my own blog, but frankly I don’t want…
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Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
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The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
We began this analysis of corporate life by exploring a theoretical construct (the Gervais Principle ) through the character arcs of Michael and Ryan in The…
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Chicken and Egg Problem (2000)
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down (…
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Wolves, sheep, and gypsies
In 2012, the first Danish wolf in nearly two hundred years was discovered in the northwestern part of the country. Their numbers increased slowly in the years that followed, and by 2020, fewer than ten wolves were still being tracked. But then the population began to rise sharply: around 14 in 2021, 30 in 2022, as…