Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,981 posts.
Back in October 2010 I was very glad to receive a mail from the people behind the Samsung Dolfin browser, who turned out to work from Bangalore, India, asking for my cooperation in making it better and even offering to pay me for it. Unfortunately, by now it turns out that they’re a bunch of fucking assholes who don’t…
It is becoming increasingly difficult to trust the privacy properties of software and services we rely on to use the Internet. Governments, companies, groups and individuals may be surveilling us without our knowledge. This is particularly troubling when such surveillance is done by governments under statutes that…
When OSS advocacy goes too far & corporate greed takes over, free software is used as a tool to destroy competition and hurt the developer community.
Follow these steps to start an LLC in California
We don’t really talk about layoffs. When you hear someone say they got laid off, it’s likely the next thing you hear from them is about the new job they’re starting. But we don’t talk about what it’s like in between those two events - which means we’re not acknowledging how traumatic it is to be laid off.
Back in 2014, Elon Musk referred to AI as summoning the demon. And it wasn’t hard to see that view. Soon, Go agents would beat top humans learning from self play. By the end of 2017, the same algorithm mastered Chess and Shogi. By 2020, it didn’t even need tons of calls to the simulator, and could play Atari too.
How early-stage clinical trials became unnecessarily expensive and inefficient—and how we can fix them, inspired by a recent story about a dog treated for cancer.
Apple’s announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function -- killing Microsoft. Here is the money line…
Too often we see job requirements for development positions with a long series of bullet points: General Tech X everyone has heard about, 5 years Specific Tech Y that came out last year, 3 years Sp…
U.S. equity index funds have grown dramatically in recent decades, from a negligible $500MM in assets in the early 1980s to a staggering $4T today. The consensus view in the investment community is that this growth is unsustainable. Indexing, after all, is a form of free-riding, and a market can only support so many…
In September 2021, online coding school Treehouse laid off close to 90% of its staff without severance pay.
Addressing causal problems on major eBay and Facebook
I might be well behind others on this subject, but I’m trying to catch up. I just finished a book entitled Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: how microfinance lost its way and betrayed th…
I continue to notice an unsettling trend: the rise of the GitHub monoculture. More and more, people seem to believe that GitHub is the center of the programming universe.
How you price a product can have a radical impact on the revenue you make from it. My search for the perfect pricing model resulted in an additional $50,000 (a 170% increase) in revenue. Here's how.
Every year I take a step back and ask if there are common themes in technology.
Back in June I wrote about the China branded OEMs as the last big ‘swing vote bloc’ in the handset market. These vendors which contribute so much to global handset volumes have not fully voted on w…
Over the course of my tech career thus far, I’ve been through two acquisitions. In each case, I was just a normal employee without any special inside knowledge, and found out only a few days before the deals were publicly announced. In retrospect, however, there were some clear signs in the weeks leading up to the…
