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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 Art of Writing One-Sentence Product Descriptions
A look back at early interviews with Facebook and Uber CEOs illustrates an ingenious way to communicate hard-to-describe products.
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Why Twitter Is Failing to Grow
No, it's not rampant abuse, weak leadership, or a product that intimidates new users. The roots of Twitter's stagnation go back to 2010.
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Climbing the wrong hill (2009)
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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How not to monetise a popular blog
The story of how I created a hugely popular meme website and then failed (fail being the operative word throughout this article) to make any money from it. Warning: also includes lolcats. </p> It started when I read something about a girl making $70,000 a month from a MySpace graphics service. This...
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How United Onboards New Users (design)
Approx. reading time: just a couple minutes, despite insane slide count (it's a lot of tiny changes from one to the other)
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United Airlines made passenger abandon mobility device at gate before honeymoon
I did everything right, according to both United and TSA’s disability policies. The TSA told United it was OK.
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Why the Dow is a useless market index
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (or 'the Dow', ^DJI, DJIA), is a stock market index created back in 1896 by Charles Dow, a journalist. The goal of the index is provide a view of the stock market's health. The Dow is an index of just 30 (arbitrarily chosen) stocks, weighted by the stock prices of its component…
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Textbook manifesto (2016)
Allen Downey's textbook manifesto: students should read and understand textbooks, so why are so many textbooks written as if nobody expects them to?
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How a Large Customer Can Kill a Startup
I often hear a founder get very excited about the prospect of a large customer. The implied expectation is that this out-sized customer is going to shower the startup with cash & confer on them the imprimatur of legitimacy. However, when I hear a founder start talking about “the big one” I cringe. I start …
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Does it scale? Who cares (2011)
Web developers the world over are always terminally worried about whether or not their application will scale orders of magnitude without keeling over.
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Unkown Unknowns: Why you should release early
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. - Mark Twain
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A Thank-You Note to the Hacker News Community from Ubuntu
A huge THANK YOU to the entire HackerNews community, from the Ubuntu community! Holy smokes...wow...you are an amazing bunch! Your f...
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How Bank of America Gave Away My Money
TLDR: Bank of America is a horrible business and it should be ashamed by how bad it is. Two weeks ago, I suddenly received emails informing me that my Bank of America…
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At Scale, Rare Events Aren’t Rare
I’m a connoisseur of failure. I love reading about engineering failures of all forms and, unsurprisingly, I’m particularly interested in data center faults. It’s not that I delight in engineering failures. My interest is driven by believing that the more faults we all understand, the more likely we can engineer…
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The Mac Pro Lives
Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them…
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Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse
I’ve been on Twitter since April 2011 — nearly six years. A few weeks ago, for the first time, something I tweeted broke the thousand-retweets barrier. And I am really unhappy about it.…
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Tech Workers' Values
For good and bad, technology has become a central force in all our lives. As members of the community, we're interested in ways in which tech companies can use their collective power to protect...
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Cars and second order consequences
Electric and autonomy are rolling through the car industry, changing everything about it. But though they transform gasoline and car accidents, they could change a lot more besides - everything from cigarettes to parking. It's the second-order consequences that are hardest to see, but most interesti
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Open Source License Business Perception Report
the pain and confusion of common open licenses, roughly quantified
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The Arrival of AI
What is artificial intelligence? Is it really any different than technology? In my estimation machine learning is truly something new, and the effects on society will be significant.
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[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ
[This is a repost of the Non-Libertarian FAQ (aka “Why I Hate Your Freedom”), which I wrote about five years ago and which used to be hosted on my website. It no longer completely refle…
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LA Times and ads
The LA Times is a good newspaper and is currently doing the best political coverage in California. They are also the most aggressive ad shoveling website I have ever seen. Their ad blocker blocker …
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What's The End Goal for Wealthfront and Betterment? (2016)
There are three ways to make money in the asset management space: Have a large amount of assets under management ( AUM ) and charge fairly modest fees (mutual funds) Have a relatively low amount of AUM and charge high fees (hedge funds, venture capital funds) Have a relatively low amount of AUM,