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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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E Pur Si Muove
Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel...
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The End to Apple’s Cash Dilemma
With the U.S. Senate passing its tax bill earlier this month, the probability of a U.S. corporate tax overhaul has never been higher. While differences between the House and Senate tax bills still have to be reconciled in conference, the end to Apple's cash dilemma is in sight. Both bills move the U
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The Amazon Machine
Amazon is a machine to make a machine, and the machine it makes is more Amazon.
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Good engineers make terrible leaders
Yuval Noah Harari in his highly celebrated book Sapiens says that human values are shared myths and that there is no objective basis in humanism. I agree with him. In several separate exchanges on Twitter, I’ve debated the claim that technology has caused progress in human society or that there’s never been a better…
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Larry Ellison allegedly tried to have a professor fired for benchmarking Oracle
In 1983, at the University of Wisconsin, Dina Bitton, David DeWitt, and Carolyn Turbyfill created a database benchmarking framework . Some of their results included (lower is better):
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A Hacker Writes a Children's Book
[2018 Update: After posting this article and making it to the top of r/programming and HackerNews sales of the book increased noticeably. The book is now nic...
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The Merge
A popular topic in Silicon Valley is talking about what year humans and machines will merge (or, if not, what year humans will get surpassed by rapidly improving AI or a genetically enhanced...
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Is there data on the quality of management decisions?
A statement I commonly hear in tech-utopian circles is that some seeming inefficiency can’t actually be inefficient because the market is efficient and inefficiencies will quickly be eliminated. A contentious example of this is the claim that companies can’t be discriminating because the market is too competitive to…
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This Dumb Industry: Wilson Boxes
Last week I linked to this video by Skill Up , which talks about how the concept of loot boxes developed inside of EA and how we got to where we are today. This time let’s talk about it in detail.
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Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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When the Judge Distrusts Your Lawyers
Uber is in trouble. The trial between Alphabet’s Waymo and Uber over Waymo’s self-driving car trade secrets was scheduled to begin on December 4th before Judge William Alsup, of Oracle v. Google fame. (Readers familiar with coverage of that case know how smart and tough he is). According to published reports, at the…
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Pro-Neutrality, Anti-Title II
Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
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As a solo developer, I decided to offer phone support
This year, around February, I started offering telephone support for Taxnote, which I hadn’t done up until then, because the idea made me anxious. I intended to quit if, at any time, I thought it was tough for me to do; but, so far, I have continued with it for over half a year, so
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Ajit Pai is right
Any regulation, including those around net neutrality, should be put to a cost-benefit analysis. In this case regulation advocates come up short.
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American Equity
I’d like feedback on the following idea. I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP. I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of...
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What AlphaGo Zero teaches us about what’s going wrong with innovation
It is hard not to be impressed — and perhaps a little alarmed — by the progression. In 1997, IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue beat the world’s greatest chess player, Garry Kasparov. It was a hugely ex…
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Photovoltaic growth: reality versus projections of the IEA
This is a guest blog by Auke Hoekstra, senior adviser electric mobility at the Eindhoven University of Technology and developer of agent-based models for electric vehicles and renewable energy adop…
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Driving for Uber and Lyft
About two years ago, I switched from taking my personal car to the airport, to hailing Ubers and Lyfts. The math of it was pretty simple: Uber was cheaper than paying for my driving and parking*. A…
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How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
Many of us rely on a Qwerty keyboard, at least when we are typing at a laptop. It is often said that the Qwerty keyboard is inferior to clearly better alternatives like the Dvorak keyboard. However, this appears to be largely a myth backed by dubious science. There is the similarly often repeated story of … Continue…
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Can the new Firefox Quantum regain its web browser market share?
When Firefox was introduced in 2004, it was designed to be a lean and optimized web browser, based on the bloated code from the Mozilla Suite. Between 2004 and 2009, many considered Firefox to be t…
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The Cost Center Trap
In the 1960’s, IT was largely an in-house back-office function focused on process automation and cost reduction. Today, IT plays a significa...
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Vision Insurance Is Making Glasses More Expensive
A geeky optician lending his expertise and interests to everyone who wears eyewear.
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Amazon Is Becoming the New Microsoft
Amazon.com is hugely dominant in cloud computing and behaving like Microsoft did in the 1990s