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Why Does Apple Offer Free Engraving?
This Black Friday, I had the occasion to ponder why it is that Apple offers free engraving on iPods and iPads (hereafter, iP*ds).
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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Proof of X
I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about different proof-of-work mechanisms. When I say proof-of-work, I’m not talking about consensus algorithms like the ones that some crypto currencies use. I’m talking about social networks.
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I Hired a Freelance Editor for My Blog (2017)
It’s surprisingly easy to hire a blog editor, and it provides tremendous value.
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Heroku: Core Impact
It’s been a rough month for Heroku. On April 15th, they opened a security notice that’s been active ever since – the status page, designed for incidents measured in hours rather than days or weeks, dutifully reads off a duration of “478 hours, 9 minutes” 1 .
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Machine intelligence, part 1
This is going to be a two-part post—one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what we should do about it. If you’re already afraid of machine intelligence,...
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My platonic ideal for how engineering hiring should work
I’ve become increasingly disgruntled at the state of hiring, and now I’m mad enough to write this blog post.
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What will be left for us to work on?
My keynote at ICML 2026
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Former officials say big tech monopoly power is vital to national security
When the U.S. security state announces that Big Tech's centralized censorship power must be preserved, we should ask what this reveals about whom this regime serves.
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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 Jobs Are Never Coming Back
I just watched former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm’s TED Talk. She provides some nice insight as to what it is really like as a politician trying to grapple with the new realities of t…
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How Alexa dropped the ball on being the top conversational system
I discuss why Alexa missed the opportunity to take the lead and become the dominant player in the conversational AI market.
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REvil Ransom Arrest, $6M Seizure, and $10M Reward
The U.S. Department of Justice today announced the arrest of Ukrainian man accused of deploying ransomware on behalf of the REvil ransomware gang, a Russian-speaking cybercriminal collective that has extorted hundreds of millions from victim organizations. The DOJ also said it had seized $6.1 million in cryptocurrency…
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Break Up Google
It’s easy to say “Break up Big Tech companies!” Depending how politics unfold, the thing might become possible, but figuring out the details will be hard. I spent the last sixteen years of my life working for Big Tech and have educated opinions on the subject. Today: Why and how we should break up Google.
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Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
The 2001 agile manifesto was an attempt to replace rigid, process and management heavy, development methodologies with a more human and soft...
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Memorizing session transcripts isn't useful
Keep track of artifacts, not scratch. Alt title: Claude, please stop trying to memorize random crap
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Why are toys such a bad business?
Inflections in finance and tech. Click to read The Diff, by Byrne Hobart, a Substack publication.
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B2B startups stop innovating the day you give power to product managers
The problem of product managers is not that they exist but rather that they have too much power. We have all seen these articles written by developers that explain that product managers are useless. They miss the point. I think it is pretty obvious that PMs (whether you call them …
4524
Daring Fireball: The iPhone 4S
This is the easiest product review I’ve ever written. The iPhone 4S is exactly what Apple says it is: just like the iPhone 4, but noticeably faster, with a significantly improved camera, and an impressive new voice-driven feature called Siri.
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The Relentless Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos is retiring, and will go down as one of the great CEO’s in tech history, in part because of how he transformed Amazon into a tech company in every respect.
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A Closer Look at the Lapsus$ Data Extortion Group
Microsoft and identity management platform Okta both this week disclosed breaches involving LAPSUS$ , a relatively new cybercrime group that specializes in stealing data from big companies and threatening to publish it unless a ransom demand is paid. Here’s a closer look at LAPSUS$, and some of the low-tech but…
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Too Young to Know It Can’t be Done
The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible – and achieve it, generation after generation. Pearl S. Buck Ask people what makes entrepreneurs successf…