5851
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,982 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
5852
The Idiot's Guide to High Frequency Trading
First, let me say what you read here is going to be wrong in several ways. HFT covers such a wide path of trading that different parties participate or are impacted in different ways. I wanted to put this out there as a starting point . Hopefully the comments will help further educate us all
5853
Michael Lewis: shilling for the buyside?
Journalism, in the ideal world, is supposed to inform the citizenry of facts important to their well being. Modern journalism seems to involve issuing press releases from the oligarchical reptiles …
5854
5855
The Next Mission
Slides for the brief talk that I gave at a Harvard seminar on privacy and user data organized by John Taysom last week.
5856
5857
A nation of slaves
Back to: April Fools Day is Cancelled this Year. | Forward to: Yet another bad idea
5858
How to get beyond the parasite economy
It is time to get parasitic structured finance out of our economy - and we should start with the musical instrument industry.
5859
My Surreal UberX Experience
A VC's perspective on how modern tech platforms like Uber break down communication barriers and enable seamless interactions - even between hearing and deaf users.
5860
Crowdfunding the Novena Open Laptop
We’re launching a crowdfunding campaign around our Novena open hardware computing platform. Originally, this started as a hobby project to build a computer just for me and xobs – something that we would use every day, easy to extend and to mod, our very own Swiss Army knife. I’ve posted here a couple of times about…
5861
Tarsnap price cut
This will no doubt annoy my friends Patrick McKenzie and Thomas Ptacek , who for years have been telling me that I should raise Tarsnap's prices. But while Thomas accuses me of running Tarsnap like a public utility rather than a business, and thinks this is a characteristic to be avoided, I see this as a high…
5862
409A as a Service: Cash Cows Get Slaughtered
Background: 409A is a set of tax rules passed, in part, to stop companies from avoiding taxes through issuing underpriced (cheap) equity as compensation. While well-intentioned, it spawned a cottage industry of third-party valuation firms/i-bankers who charge companies, including startups, thousands (sometimes…
5863
The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
Update: I originally quoted the average price of office space as $36 / square foot / month, where ...
5864
5865
Coffee and its Effects on Feature Creep (2011)
Starting in mid-2004 and until the end of 2006, I worked at a small DNS and DHCP software company called Nominum . These days Nominum offer...
5866
5867
Threes: The Rip-offs and Making Our Original Game
It’s been a weird and awesome couple of months. Our expectations for our tiny game were well, fairly tiny. Basically, we hoped it’d do better than Puzzlejuice. It did. By a lot. It’s still hard to address the world’s response with something beyond a wide-eyed daze but essentially we couldn’t be more thrilled. Duh.
5868
5869
Tarsnap now accepts Bitcoin
There is a significant commonality between Tarsnap and Bitcoin — both rely crucially on strong cryptography, and anecdotally it seems that many Bitcoin users rely on Tarsnap to back up their "wallets" (I have no concrete data since I can't tell what data people are backing up ) — so it's not surprising that many…
5870
After reviewing about 30 YC applications, here's some general advice
Demo day just wrapped up for Beacon. We feel pretty good about what we've done since starting YC in January. But it's been a long and winding road to get here. One of my cofounders (@dmitric) and...
5871
MLB.com is using my Google Analytics code
After seeing a little spike in traffic on Analytics I did some further investigation. Lo and behold Websanova is tracking MLB.com!
5872
5873
We’re Fucked, It’s Over: Coming Back from the Brink
In 1997, about a year after launch, Hotmail was growing exponentially, adding thousands of new users every day. We were on fire. And then one night, it all seemed to unravel. We had a program called the “janitor” that ran as an overnight batch process and it erased all of the email that users put...
5874
Top Inventions at Browserling
Today is 4 years since I and my co-founder James Halliday have been working at Browserling Inc. I thought I'd share what I think are the top 10 inventions at our company. The first two choices are obvious. They're our products Browserling and Testling. The next eight choices are useful and popular open source…
5875
Brendan Eich becomes Mozilla CEO
A quick note to update everyone on Mozilla news. Our Board of Directors has appointed me CEO of Mozilla, with immediate effect. I’m honored and humbled, and I promise to do everything I can to lead Mozilla to new heights in this role.
5876
It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays
Randy Olson explains why it's impossible to work your way through college nowadays.
5877
Principles of good data analysis
Good, thorough data analysis is difficult. Throughout my work, I've found it useful to follow these principles in order to ensure quality and consistency.
5878
Using GameStop as a bank
An anonymous user of 4chan has come up with a brilliantly harebrained scheme for their personal banking. They use video game retailer GameStop as a bank. Here’s
5879
5880