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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
When good ideas make bad business
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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Software effort estimation is mostly fake research
Effort estimation is an important component of any project, software or otherwise. While effort estimation is something that everybody in industry is involved with on a regular basis, it is a niche topic in software engineering research. The problem is researcher attitude (e.g., they are unwilling to venture into the…
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An Economic Analysis of Ethereum
Originally published: January 2021 The anonymous founder of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, solved the hard problems associated with digital scarcity with a white paper in 2008, and launched Bitcoin in 2009. After that invention, numerous other projects came in its wake. There are now over 8,000 separate digital assets…
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The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine
This is the story of a Bitcoin trade — the most financially impactful trade I’ve ever made in my life. It’s also the story of the…
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Machine Learning: The Great Stagnation
The bureaucrats are running the asylum
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Intel is dying and we can’t save it
How I realized that this is truly the end of the Intel era.
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I believe US could see rolling series of “Ireland events” over next 2 months
I believe there is a non-trivial chance that the United States will experience a rolling series of “Ireland events” over the next 30-45 days, where the Covid effective reproductive number (Re not R0) reaches a value between 2.4 and 3.0 in states and regions where a) the more infectious UK-variant (or similar) Covid…
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Milestone: Half a million downloads for VideoLAN packages in the .NET ecosystem
This page has moved to https://martinfinkel.com/blog/half-a-million-downloads/ .
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SolarWinds: What Hit Us Could Hit Others
New research into the malware that set the stage for the megabreach at IT vendor SolarWinds shows the perpetrators spent months inside the company’s software development labs honing their attack before inserting malicious code into updates that SolarWinds then shipped to thousands of customers. More worrisome, the…
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The Lies that can Undermine Democracy
Recent events highlight our need to take serious measures to counter lies that are undermining democracies.
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How Silicon Valley destroyed Parler
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics, while liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
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Internet 3.0 and the Beginning of (Tech) History
The actions taken by Big Tech have a resonance that goes beyond the context of domestic U.S. politics. Even if they were right, they will still push the world to Internet 3.0.
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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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75% of the original Disney+ executive team is no longer at Disney
Ricky Strauss' departure was a longtime coming
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We need a new media system
If you sell culture war all day, don’t be surprised by the real-world consequences
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What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
I've worked at various tech companies: from "traditional" shops and consultancies, through an investment bank, to high-growth tech firms. I've also talked with software engineers working at startups, banking, automotive, big tech, and more "traditional" companies. This mix had a healthy sample of Silicon-Valley…
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Amazon Co-founder Mackenzie quietly gave over $4B to 384 organizations in 2020
“” is published by MacKenzie Scott.
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No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
I started Gumroad in 2011. In 2015, we reached a peak of 23 full-time employees. In 2016, after failing to raise more money, I ended up back where I began: a one-person company.
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Startup Studios
Welcome to the golden age of the product studio
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Designing Engineering Organizations
How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.
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New Defaults
The pandemic and vaccine rollout have highlighted where the West has lost its way; we need new defaults about information, change, and speed.
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After spending $57M on Facebook ads, I was kicked off
The purpose of this article is to share my story in hopes of connecting to the right people at Facebook who can help me save my businesses…
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BadEconomics: Putting $400M of Bitcoin on your company balance sheet
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Openstreetmap’s product fails to compete with Google Maps
The landscape of OpenStreetMap-based mobile apps
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Looks vs. Results: My ugly ad got 150% more clicks than a professional design
Making things look nice can take a long time, either due to lack of resources or abundance of opinions. This could delay launches, frustrate people, and waste precious energy. Those are high costs for startups or companies hoping to move fast. Is it worth it? Long ago I got fed
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The Great Software Stagnation
Software is eating the world. But progress in software technology itself largely stalled around 1996. Here’s what we had then, in chronological order: LISP, Algol, Basic, APL, Unix, C, SQL, O…