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Human attention has become a commodity
Fake news. Misinformation. Mental health crises. Election meddling. Extremism. Partisanship. Eating Disorders. Body Dysmorphia. Vulnerability porn.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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What good cash-strapped hiring looks like
Bootstrapped operators who take their hiring seriously all eventually end up designing a system with the same fundamental approach. Here's how you can do it too.
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Kinda a Big Announcement
The other day I was talking to a young developer working on a code base with tons of COM code, and I told him that even before he was born, everyone knew that COM was already so deeply obsolete tha…
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Microsoft Silently Dropping Emails – a Sad but True Story (2020)
From time to time Microsoft decides to block or even silently drop emails that are sent by my selfhosted email server. It’s always a pain and takes a lot of effort to deal with it. This time I decided to…Read more ›
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My Brush With a Patent Troll
Back when the web was only a limited affair and the most exciting thing on it in the realm of imagery was the ‘coffee pot webcam’ I came up with a way to make a real live video stream that worked in a browser. A few months earlier I’d made a very basic version of this using ftp upload of images to a server and then a…
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Making Yourself a CEO
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps
This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups . RFC doesn’t mean “ Request for Comments ” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts will be deep-dives on products and problems I find interesting or that I’m…
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Problems the AI industry is not addressing adequately
As a supporter, I would love not to feel this way
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Web3: A VC-funded gig economy of securities fraud
If you look at a “Web3” offering and just think of it as a pump-and-dump onto retail investors, everything will make much more sense.
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The chip shortage could lead to an era of hardware innovation
It’s bad out there for customers of electronic parts and components. The semiconductor shortage is so severe it’s being covered by mainstream media; meanwhile, various politicians have tasked their aides with looking at the global supply chain. Indeed, in the short term, the dearth of chips is already leading to…
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Mondrian Entered the Public Domain. The Estate Disagrees
The Mondrian Trust claims a 1930 painting is still protected—citing "dual copyrights," Spanish law, and a misreading of the Copyright Act.
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Unslacking Tideways Company
We have moved away from Slack at Tideways over the last three months, because I found Slack is already annoying, even with just a four person team (plus the occasional freelancer). For me, it disrupts deep work phases and knowledge lost in the depth of chat history.
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After 20 years I turned off Google Adsense for my websites (2025)
Soon after I launched this blog in February 2005, I signed up for Google AdSense. My goal was to make a little money and learn about the industry from the inside. In particular, if I was going to cover the...
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A Sick Giant
Available today
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iBookstore rejects Holly Lisle's writing course because she mentions Amazon
Lesson 6 includes my “Amazon River” technique, in which I show students how I use a couple of useful bits of Amazon’s website software and the Amazon database to figure out how to find alternative genres for their books if they aren’t having any luck selling it in the genre they wrote it for. I’ve successfully used…
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Solve the Problems Your Parents Have
WTF is getting old, our generation wonders. I think ageism runs deep, especially among the tech set who assume older people must be Luddites and by extension lower life forms. I’m not joking, I know people who feel this way – and when was the last time you had a conversation with tech with someone over 50?
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No I won't sign your NDA, here's why.
The other day I got to chatting with a lovely woman who reached out after reading my blog. She was interested in talking about an idea she had, how she might get it off the ground, and if I might …
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Feedback doesn't scale
Listening is always hard, and it only gets harder at scale.
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Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later
Kelly predicted AI heavyweights while advocating for a future of open weights
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Help me distribute $100,000 to new entrepreneurs in Africa
I love the idea of microlending, small loans of a few hundred dollars made to entrepreneurs in impoverished areas so that they can start or...
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Sergey Brin, Please Pick up your Paychecks
The state of California is currently holding over $6 billion in unclaimed property belonging to millions of people. What type of property a...
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The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough
Burnout is on the rise again, with an ironic twist.
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An AWS Region is coming to South Africa
In the first half of 2020 we plan to launch an AWS Region in South Africa