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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...
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
4802
Of Psion and Symbian
Mobile before iOS and Android
4803
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…
4804
How important are 'economies of scale'?
How important are 'economies of scale' in production and innovation?
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America could have $4 lunch bowls like Japan but for zoning laws
Zoning and food safety laws add up to outlaw tiny restaurants operated by one or two staff.
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Early Retirement (2006)
The joys, challenges, and some practical aspects of retiring young.
4809
I joined landlord groups to persuade them to be better people to their tenants
1 sites already link to thisisalot.com, after 2 years online. Listed at $195 — keep the equity.
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Repealing Section 230 won’t do what anyone wants
Abolishing platform immunity won’t do what anyone wants
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People spend more when prices end in .99 (2018)
I once worked at a company that priced everything with a .95 ending. The bestselling software package was $999.95. Add-on products were $9.95, or $19.95, or $49.95. Everything ended with a .95. It had been this way for more than twenty years. One day, one of the VPs suggested we change all prices to end […]
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SaaS Needs a Single Point of Purchase
The unassailable advantage that big cloud providers like AWS and Azure have over the rest of the SaaS industry isn’t their quality or pace of innovation; it’s that they’re a single point of purchase for a variety of services. If there was a single vendor that large corporations could contract with and pay for SaaS…
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Answering Legal Questions with LLMs
Blog post: Answering Legal Questions with LLMs
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The Kawaiization of Product Design
Over the last year or two, I’ve noticed a certain style emerge in brand and product design. Look at the graphic below and you'll see it. The colors are soft and muted, the shapes rounded and the typography unobtrusive. It’s what you could describe as clean. It’s approachable. It’s inoffensive. It’s almost… cute. Zoom…
4818
OpenAI probably can't make ends meet. That's where you come in
If you thought the 2008 bank bailout was bad, wait til you see the 2026 AI bailout
4819
Unshackle the Middle Class
Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to
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Uber's Failure in Japan
Uber’s disastrous failure in Japan was not caused by local competition, but by a uniquely American strategy that simply could not work in Japan. You see, Uber represents a new kind of startup. The very thing that makes them so successful in America dooms them to failure in Japan.
4821
The Rise of the Bullshittery
A few thoughts on how the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do.
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The Truth About Starting a Startup
(I wrote this for YC’s Future Founders Conference for Women. I’ll add the recording when it becomes available. The actual talk I gave on November 18th should include bonus streams of unconscious...
4823
Behind the scenes of the Pirate Bay trial
Process of law failed on so many accounts in the trial against the two operators of The Pirate Bay, its media spokesperson, and a...
4824
I'm making drugs for cats
For all the new readers who’ve joined since my post about effective altruism and elections, welcome!
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Work at the Mill: The story of Digital Equipment Corporation
Or, the Story of Digital Equipment Corporation
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Mystery Blips
A young operations engineer learns a lesson about creative debugging
4828
An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
Having worked for a decade as an engineer at various companies, I noticed how most teams in software often have "the" manager and "the" tech lead or "the" senior engineer. These are the decision-makers and ones that lead all projects. Many engineers go to these people asking, "What do
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Building a business, not just an app
This past week has not been the first outbreak of independent developer angst over the app store, but it feels like it has been one of the more intense. The pump was primed by the news that Kim Kar…