The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,148 posts.
This post has been languishing in my drafts folder for about a decade. It has recently become relevant again. When I was at Vodafone, selling ringtones was our top priority. They cost almost nothing to produce, supply, and market. Yet people would pay through the nose for them. I say people. I mean kids. We saw a huge…
Persuasion is as old as our species. Both democracy and the market economy depend on it. Politicians persuade citizens to vote for them, or to support different policy positions. Businesses persuade consumers to buy their products or services. We all persuade our friends to accept our choice of restaurant, movie, and…
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They seem dangerous and they are
Published December 2, 2020 Since autumn of 2019, I’ve been bearish on the dollar, meaning I have a longish-term outlook towards a weaker dollar. This view began forming when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in summer 2019, and then the view solidified with a catalyst after an overnight repo rate spike in…
Silicon Valley couldn't have designed a better way to further radicalize Trump voters
Explains through a model of selling coconuts while value added taxes distort the economy less than sales taxes.
A conversation with Matt Stoller about the new antitrust case and the real reason you should care about corporate monopolies
Have a pair of gangly Stanford grads built the perfect mousetrap?
In this final post of a three-part series, we discuss how Apple's approach to content is an anticompetitive slippery slope.
From the moment I started paying attention to the tech industry, Paul Graham was there. My first job out of college was in SoMa, around the corner from the Justin.tv offices, and his essays were just floating around in the ether, impossible to ignore. His popularization of Lisp was a small part of why I tried Clojure…
In September 2020, Brown University accused students of lying about their location; e.g.:
A decade after the late 2000s recession, much of the world is now back at the top of the economic cycle, and critically near the next…
Why I have stopped working with IPFS and the distributed web
The Agency knew that their best asset for selling their wars was Barack Obama -- the same reason so many in the security state were eager to get rid of Donald Trump.
Some classic (non-aggregation) monopolization!
Tragedy of the comments
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When I was a small child, I took an IQ test. One of the first questions I stumbled on was "A piece of candy costs 25¢. Jonny has a dime. How many nickels does he need to buy the candy?" My 7-year old brain popped. WTAF is a nickel? Or a dime for that matter? We don't have those coins in my country! We don't spend in ¢…
When leaders run out of unifying myths, division is the last currency. Why this Thanksgiving, America is a "death cult" versus "radical socialists"
The American Medical Association is not a charitable organization. The American Medical Association is not an educational organization. The American Medical Association is a tax-exempt hedge fund and licensing corporation, designed from the ground up to enrich its executives and serve its own bureaucratic interests…
