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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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The Making of Apple’s Emoji
When design leads to friendship, and that friendship leads back to design, magic happens. This is the story of how an intern and her…
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Browserling goes viral with cheap phone users trying to use WhatsApp
The most random and amazing things happened at my company Browserling in the last few weeks. Someone in India discovered that they can use WhatsApp on very cheap $20 phones (Jio Phones) via Browserling. These cheap phones can't run WhatsApp but if you go to Browserling, you can use it via web.whatsapp.com. He made a...
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Products Over Projects
Projects are a popular way of organizing software efforts, but long-running product teams are often superior
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XPS 13 developer edition 7th generation available
-> Updated June 22, 2018 – Three 16GB/FHD configs added to the line up in the US -> Updated Jan 26, 2018 – Added list of countries that offer the XPS 13 developer edition offline.…
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How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine
Atlassian didn't jump through the standard hoops. Instead, they chose an unconventional path that would ultimately help them build a $10 billion business.
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Show your work: The new terms for trust in journalism
The transparency movement has finally come of age. Power has shifted to the users. Their trust has to be earned in different ways now.
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Brittleness comes from “One Thing”
Brittleness is when the company fails because just one component breaks. Learn some strategies for fixing Brittle Points.
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Economics of Minecraft
anecdotes from working over a minecraft economy
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The Digital Advertising Duopoly
This chart from eMarketer really brings it home. We have a digital advertising duopoly. The difference between second and third place is massive. I don’t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this market failure. I want to see the technology industry adopt new approaches to monetization, ideally not…
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Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
It’s both more serious and less serious than we’ve admitted
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Candy Japan 2017 Year in Review
This was another tough year for Candy Japan, with many factors combining to a sharp decline in subscriber numbers. Contains revenue numbers, site statistics and learnings from 2017.
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Bitcoin is Eating Itself
Fees keep going up. And every time they go up, more of the money stored on the blockchain becomes worthless.
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Clever ideas that failed (2010)
The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. Brian Kernighan once said that “debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” I have built many things that I wasn’t…
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Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
(Sequel here: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future.)
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Four DB2 Code Bases?
Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a single code base…
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Making Millions by Distributing Pirated Movies
Introduction Did you know that piracy is about making money? Most people don’t seem to be aware of that. Piracy is about money. It’s serious business. It doesn’t have to be though…
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Chrome is Not the Standard
No single browser vendor represents ”the future of the web.” Each ships in line with its own business priorities. And that's a good thing.
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Selling Bitcoins in Canada
In 2013, I bought a few Bitcoins from a dude in a coffee shop, paying with hundred-dollar bills. Later that year I sold enough to get my money back . Then I forgot about them, Bitcoin’s price gyrations occasionally registering in a corner of my mind. But earlier this month I decided to find out if the remainder could…
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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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Why you can’t cash out part 1: Bitcoin’s “price” is largely fictional
Public discussion and media coverage of Bitcoin assumes certain things about Bitcoin: • Bitcoin has a price, that you could expect to buy or sell it around. • Bitcoin is like buying a share in a co…
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What People Think You Can’t Say in Silicon Valley
Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Tim Ferriss, and most recently Sam Altman (but see his clarification) think there are too many opinions…
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Amazon's Fake Review Problem
Update – the fake reviews featured below were removed shortly after this post blew up on Hacker News.
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Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring
Four years ago, I broke my comment section by declaring that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposal had no merit, combining technical criticism with expressions like “barf ride” and ̶…