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"AI, no ads please": 4 words to wipe out $1T
Introducing a series on AI vs. ads
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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Leadership is a hell of a drug
Last week, I received the following invitation to a compulsory on-site meeting, following management's repeated engagements with some sort of Agile shaman.
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Signs you're about to be acquired (2020)
Over the course of my tech career thus far, I’ve been through two acquisitions. In each case, I was just a normal employee without any special inside knowledge, and found out only a few days before the deals were publicly announced. In retrospect, however, there were some clear signs in the weeks leading up to the…
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The end of Airplane.dev
I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.
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Leaving LinkedIn
What if your dedication to doing things right clashed with your company's fast pace? Chris Krycho faced this very question at LinkedIn. His journey was marked by challenges: from the nuances of remote work to the struggle of influencing company culture, and a critical incident that put his principles to the test…
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BlackCat ransomware group implodes after apparent payment by Change Healthcare
There are indications that U.S. healthcare giant Change Healthcare has made a $22 million extortion payment to the infamous BlackCat ransomware group (a.k.a. “ ALPHV “) as the company struggles to bring services back online amid a cyberattack that has disrupted prescription drug services nationwide for weeks. However…
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Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Why do east Asian firms value drinking?
East Asian businesses often go out drinking.
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Byte Interviews the Apple Lisa Dev Team (1983)
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of Apple's Lisa.
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Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
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Financial systems take a holiday
Ever wondered about what happens when banks are closed or why some apps have operating hours? It's fascinating.
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Money bubble
I think I’m probably going to lose quite a lot of money in the next year or two. It’s partly AI’s fault, but not mostly. Nonetheless I’m mostly going to write about AI, because it intersects the technosphere, where I’ve lived for decades.
1393
Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban UBI Experiments
The Foundation for Government Accountability - a Florida-based lobbying group backed by the richest 1% - is working to get basic income experiments banned by state legislators across the U.S. (This article is also available as a YouTube video and as a podcast episode) As a well-known quote often
1394
The Tech Industry Doesn't Understand Consent – Opt-Out Is Not Consent
Thanks to Samantha Cole at 404 Media, we are now aware that Automattic plans to sell user data from Tumblr and WordPress.com (which is the host for my blog) for “AI” products. In respon…
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Gemini and Google's Culture
The Google Gemini fiasco shows that the biggest challenge for Google in AI is not business model but rather company culture; change is needed from the top down.
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The Disappointing Tea.xyz
I got a pull request from "tea.xyz" related individual and unraveled a mess of a disappointing project.
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Pains of building your own billing system
Trying to cobble together your own billing system is like wrestling an octopus that's armed with tax codes and invoices instead of tentacles. It's a beast of complexity that can tangle up everything from customer support to compliance. I have 14 points on why it's hard.
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Home Screen Advantage
Cupertino's attempt to scuttle Progressive Web Apps under cover of chaos is exactly what it appears to be: a shocking attempt to keep the web from ever emerging as a true threat to the App Store and blame regulators for Apple's own malicious choices. By hook or by crook, Apple's going to maintain its home screen…
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Microsoft is driving users away
What will be the end of Windows? Microsoft.
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Ship faster by building design systems slower (2023)
Successful design systems can and should move more slowly than the products they support—but a deliberate pace doesn’t have to create bottlenecks. Josh Clark shows how to reconcile the needs and speeds of product versus design system.
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Frugly vs. Freemium
uglify the UI for non-paying consumers
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Institutions try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution
The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”.
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Notes from an Interviewer
These days I find myself interviewing quite a few candidates. Some are good, some aren’t. So it goes. However, there is another group who I feel could be good but just aren’t showing it…
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Quality is a hard sell in big tech
What the **** does that mean?
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The Fed is behind the Capital One/Discover merger
In 2010, Congress capped fees for debit card networks so merchants don't get gouged by Visa and Mastercard. But the Fed stuck in a loophole for Discover. And that is leading Capital One to buy it.
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Google Reneged on the Monopolistic Bargain
A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.
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Data will not tell you what to do
How disappointing it is to learn that the best ideas rarely come from data after 15 years of working in the field.
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Why is no one making a new version of old Facebook?
12 Challenges readers Thandeka Xaba and Toby Mather raised some great points in the comments for yesterday’s Typology piece (thanks so much!).
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UI is a function of your organization
The Domino’s “Pizza Tracker” is an intriguing piece of UI. As an end user, it provides the precision of detail you want in tracking your order: Your order has…