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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…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,396 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
482
Who makes minimum wage?
Perhaps surprisingly, not very many people earn minimum wage, and they make up a smaller share of the workforce than they used to.
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Claude Opus 4.7
Claude Opus 4.7 is now generally available, with notable gains over Opus 4.6 in advanced software engineering and the most difficult tasks.
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Apple restricts Pebble from being awesome with iPhones
I’m surprised that you’re surprised
486
Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage
There is such a thing as a free lunch
487
Privacy is priceless, but Signal is expensive
Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal Protocol—our end-to-end encryption technology—has become the de facto standard for private commu...
488
Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database
Over my 17 years at Amazon, I have seen that my colleagues on the engineering team are never content to leave good-enough alone. They routinely re-evaluate every internal system to make sure that it is as scalable, efficient, performant, and secure as possible. When they find an avenue for improvement, they will use…
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Mullvad VPN was subject to a search warrant – customer data not compromised
On April 18 at least six police officers from the National Operations Department (NOA) of the Swedish Police visited the Mullvad VPN office in Gothenburg with a search warrant. They intended to seize computers with customer data.
491
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…
492
Two HN Announcements
The HN community feels like it owns HN, and we like it that way. HN has become an important institution in the tech community, and though it was initially developed for YC founders it’s clearly evolved into much more than that. We’ve always felt that the best way for HN to benefit YC is simply for it to maximally…
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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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Block: Inflated user metrics and “frictionless” fraud facilitation
Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we have taken a short position in shares of Block, Inc. (NYSE: SQ). This report represents our opinion, and we encourage every reader to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
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Cloudflare's abuse policies and approach
Cloudflare launched nearly twelve years ago. Over that time, our set of services has become much more complicated. With that complexity we have developed policies around how we handle abuse of different features Cloudflare provides
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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...
499
Jason Fried: Get Satisfaction is "awfully close to blackmail"
Get Satisfaction, a third-party customer service app/community, allows customers to offer feedback, make suggestions, get their questions answered, and generally get help with a product or service. A good idea Building support/community infrastructure is a pain point for a lot of companies. The…
500
WP Engine is not WordPress
It has to be said and repeated: WP Engine is not WordPress. My own mother was confused and thought WP Engine was an official thing. Their branding, marketing, advertising, and entire promise to cus…
501
Startup Metrics
We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company. Sometimes, however, the metrics may not be the best gauge of what’s actually…
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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.
506
Announcing the New AWS Secret Region
The AWS Secret Region can operate workloads up to the Secret U.S. security classification level. Cloud security at AWS is the highest priority. AWS customers benefit from data center and network architecture built to meet the requirements of the most security-sensitive organizations. AWS supports more classification…
507
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…
508
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.
509
Goodbye, section 2.8 and hello to Cloudflare’s new terms of service
We’re excited to announce new updates that will modernize our terms of service and hopefully cut down on customer confusion and frustration.
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Apple announces first states to adopt driver’s licenses and IDs in Apple Wallet
Apple is working with states across the country to roll out the ability for their residents to add their driver’s license or state ID to Wallet.