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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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My Time Working at Stripe
Jon's personal site.
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The rise of the U.S., the rise of China
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th…
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Democratising publishing
Thoughts on open source governance and how to create trust within technology, communities, and media.
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Gross Apple Marketing
I’m not sure what’s going on over in Cupertino for them to …
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Swift – A great language strangled by governance?
A great language strangled by governance
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Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem
My best guesses as to why our early stage data startup failed. This isn’t a retrospective, but something closer to advice for past me. Or maybe just exorcism.
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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
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Why so few Matt Levines?
Why are popularizing educational newsletter-frequency writers of important fields like Matt Levine for finance so rare? Because most fields are too slow or ambiguous, and writers of the right combination of expertise, obsession, and persistence are also rare.
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Buy payphones and retire
Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though, and it…
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They want your ethics for $105
If you have a blog, you've probably gotten those emails that want to "collaborate" on a guest post—which often means "let us post sketchy links for SEO purposes." Recently, I got one which was a little different flavor than the usual spam, so I bit and replies. The end result was at the same time fascinating…
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Psychological safety vs. high standards: A misunderstood dynamic
The term “psychological safety” is often misleading. When managers hear safety, many dismiss it as a soft style that implies complacency. Meanwhile, psychology implies too much mumbo jumbo. High-profile figures like Elon Musk advocating for a “hardcore” style perpetuate this misconception. But this is a fundamental…
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Platform Strategy and Its Discontents
Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress.
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Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech
Now that we’re increasingly concerned about the dominance of ‘big tech’, Open Source is often mentioned as an alternative, especially since our governments are carrying out a Total Migration to Microsoft. This is the English version of this Dutch piece. In Dutch we say you can’t compare apples and pears, but that’s…
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Goodhart’s law isn’t as useful as you might think (2023)
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
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Care Doesn't Scale
I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…
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The AI Investment Boom
AI Demand is Driving Skyrocketing US Investment in Computers, Data Centers, and Other Physical Infrastructure
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Ribbonfarm Is Retiring
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I've decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com…
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Did Automattic commit open source theft?
The maker of WordPress took 2M customers from its biggest rival: has a red line been crossed?
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Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?
I realize that many people may not know or care who or what Matt Mullenweg and WordPress are, or why some people are upset about them, but after giving it a lot of thought (okay, about 10 minutes of thought) I decided to write about it anyway. I'm writing
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Qualcomm cancels Snapdragon Dev Kit, refunds all orders
This afternoon I received the following email from Arrow, regarding the Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows: Dear Valued Customer, Please see this important message from Qualcomm: ”At Qualcomm, we are dedicated to pioneering leading technology and delivering premium experiences to our valued customers. The launch of…
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Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)
Rich countries consume much higher quantities via higher intensity/tech. It's NOT high and rising: wages, profits, administration, encounters, etc. Income well explains American behavior here too.
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Understanding how bureaucracy develops
understanding how actions taken with the best of intentions can put your organization in a straightjacket
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Reflections on Palantir
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
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Response to DHH
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. …
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Scale Ruins Everything
Your Startup Could Destroy Society