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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 768 posts.
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Google News to shut down in Spain
After 9/11, one of our engineers, Krishna Bharat, realized that results for the query “World Trade Center” returned nothing about the terror...
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Travis CI: From Open to Minimum Vacation Policy
When Travis CI turned into a business with employees, one of our ideas was to not constrain people in how much time they take off for vacations. We didn’t track the days people were taking off, and as the people running the company, we didn’t actively encourage people to take times off. In short, we had an open…
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Troll-Proofed Defensive Patent License Launches with 23 Patents
In the movement toward patent reform, the Patent Office, Congress, and the courts aren't the only targets for change. Individual and corporate patent owners have steps they can take to reduce the harmful effects of software patents and disempower patent trolls, largely through alternative licensing...
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MIT indefinitely removes online physics lectures and courses by Walter Lewin
MIT is indefinitely removing retired physics faculty member Walter Lewin’s online lectures from MIT OpenCourseWare and online MITx courses from edX, the online learning platform co-founded by MIT, following a determination that Dr. Lewin engaged in online sexual harassment in violation of MIT policies.
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The failed economics of our software commons and what to do about it
Progress in the software industry has been crushed under the weight of technical debt accumulated over the last 40 years. The tools, languages, libraries, and platforms we all rely on suffer from massive incidental complexities responsible for billions of dollars in wasted productivity. Anyone who spends any amount of…
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At Apple’s request, we removed the ability to “Send” files to other services
UPDATE 12/11/14: After a considerate conversation with Apple, Transmit iOS 1.1.2 has been released with restored “Send To” functionality.
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Transcriptic for YC biotech startups
Reducing cost and cycle time as much as possible is one of the highest-leverage things anyone can do to help startups. A few years ago, we rolled out deals with Amazon, Heroku, Microsoft, and Rackspace to make web hosting available for free to the startups we fund. As we expand into new areas, we’ll put similar…
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A cautionary tale about subscription services and how not to shut down a startup
As you think about holiday gifts this season, I’d like to warn you about the subscription service Whimseybox. This is also a cautionary…
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Why my book can be downloaded for free
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Resumes suck for hiring engineers
In this experiment, I wanted to see how good engineers and recruiters were at resume-based candidate filtering. Going into it, I was pretty sure that engineers would do a much better job than recruiters. However, that’s not what happened at all. As it turned out, people were pretty bad at filtering resumes across the…
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Microsoft acquires Acompli
I’m pleased to announce that Microsoft has acquired Acompli, provider of innovative mobile email apps for iOS and Android. This acquisition is part of our company-wide effort to help people accomplish more with their mobile devices. This year we brought Office to the iPad and the iPhone, and we recently announced that…
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Hard-won lessons about money and investing
Any time you talk about money, you risk sounding like a jerk. I’m going to take that risk in this post. I’ll start out by talking about a couple ways I shot myself in the foot financial…
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Is My Startup Burn Rate Normal?
Self-examination for Seed and Series A startups
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How we built Flow
A journey in inception, design and technology
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What We Learned From 40 Female YC Founders
We’re excited to launch Female Founder Stories [http://www.femalefounderstories.com/], a collection of interviews with 40 of Y Combinator’s female alumnae. We asked them about things like how they got started, their experience at Y Combinator, their experience as female founders, and what they wish they’d known when…
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