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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 383 posts.
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Brittleness comes from “One Thing”
Brittleness is when the company fails because just one component breaks. Learn some strategies for fixing Brittle Points.
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Economics of Minecraft
anecdotes from working over a minecraft economy
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The Digital Advertising Duopoly
This chart from eMarketer really brings it home. We have a digital advertising duopoly. The difference between second and third place is massive. I don’t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this market failure. I want to see the technology industry adopt new approaches to monetization, ideally not…
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Hard and Soft Skills in Tech
It’s both more serious and less serious than we’ve admitted
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Candy Japan 2017 Year in Review
This was another tough year for Candy Japan, with many factors combining to a sharp decline in subscriber numbers. Contains revenue numbers, site statistics and learnings from 2017.
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Bitcoin is Eating Itself
Fees keep going up. And every time they go up, more of the money stored on the blockchain becomes worthless.
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Clever ideas that failed (2010)
The cleverness of an idea is proportionate to its odds of failure. Brian Kernighan once said that “debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” I have built many things that I wasn’t…
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Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
(Sequel here: Blockchain is not only crappy technology but a bad vision for the future.)
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Four DB2 Code Bases?
Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a single code base…
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Making Millions by Distributing Pirated Movies
Introduction Did you know that piracy is about making money? Most people don’t seem to be aware of that. Piracy is about money. It’s serious business. It doesn’t have to be though…
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Chrome is Not the Standard
No single browser vendor represents ”the future of the web.” Each ships in line with its own business priorities. And that's a good thing.
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Selling Bitcoins in Canada
In 2013, I bought a few Bitcoins from a dude in a coffee shop, paying with hundred-dollar bills. Later that year I sold enough to get my money back . Then I forgot about them, Bitcoin’s price gyrations occasionally registering in a corner of my mind. But earlier this month I decided to find out if the remainder could…
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Google Maps' Moat
Over the past year, we’ve been comparing Google Maps and Apple Maps in New York, San Francisco, and London—but some of the biggest differences are outside of large cities.
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Why you can’t cash out part 1: Bitcoin’s “price” is largely fictional
Public discussion and media coverage of Bitcoin assumes certain things about Bitcoin: • Bitcoin has a price, that you could expect to buy or sell it around. • Bitcoin is like buying a share in a co…
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What People Think You Can’t Say in Silicon Valley
Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Tim Ferriss, and most recently Sam Altman (but see his clarification) think there are too many opinions…
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Amazon's Fake Review Problem
Update – the fake reviews featured below were removed shortly after this post blew up on Hacker News.
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Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring
Four years ago, I broke my comment section by declaring that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposal had no merit, combining technical criticism with expressions like “barf ride” and ̶…
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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...