5911
In 1985 Maxell built a bunch of life-size robots for its bad floppy ad
A rough start to what would later become one of my favorite tech ads from the 80s.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,982 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
5912
Book Review: Hoover
You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Bu…
5913
Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More
Charlie Munger offers timeless and pithy wisdom on getting rich, focus, fake knowledge, understanding our circle of competence, and so much more.
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HFT in my backyard – III
INTRO Last Friday evening, I received a tip via telephone, “You should go to the Houtem tower tomorrow morning. Jump may work on the network.” Unfortunately I couldn’t make it back to Houtem. But i…
5916
Design for Hackers (the book) is here
It was less than 10 months ago that I told you that I would be writing Design for Hackers. Less than 10 months, and the book is already available. In fact, I just signed a bunch of books for some of the amazing 138 backers of the Kickstarter campaign, and I’m also packing my bags
5917
We don't do that here (2017)
If no one has told you yet, as your career in tech progresses you will eventually become a custodian of culture. If you run a meetup or a team, if you lead an open source project, or if you organize an event people will be looking to you to know what is and isn’t okay in that space. You get this responsibility whether…
5918
Pandemic Villains: Robinhood
Have a pair of gangly Stanford grads built the perfect mousetrap?
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Samsung and other manufacturers disable phones bought on gray markets
In a shocking turn of events, several smartphone manufacturers, including industry giant Samsung, have taken a drastic step that has left customers outraged. These companies have remotely disabled phones purchased through gray markets, effectively holding the users’ data hostage until they buy new phones from official…
5921
Qualcomm cancels Snapdragon Dev Kit, refunds all orders
This afternoon I received the following email from Arrow, regarding the Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows: Dear Valued Customer, Please see this important message from Qualcomm: ”At Qualcomm, we are dedicated to pioneering leading technology and delivering premium experiences to our valued customers. The launch of…
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5923
Why Is Peter Thiel Pessimistic About Technological Innovation?
Collection of Peter Thiel's evidence that we're economically stagnating and no longer living in a technologically-accelerating civilization.
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5925
A bubble that knows it's a bubble
Railway Mania, dot-com, AI. Technology bubbles follow a pattern older than any of them. What's different this time is that everyone knows the script.
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Hopefully fair performance reviews for software developers
Note: if you're just looking for performance review templates and examples, head to the templates page [https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/templates-as-inspiration-for-software-engineers/] to download them. I've had about a dozen performance reviews during my decade-long software engineering career. Some of them were…
5928
Elon Musk’s Ideas About Transportation are Boring
Four years ago, I broke my comment section by declaring that Elon Musk’s Hyperloop proposal had no merit, combining technical criticism with expressions like “barf ride” and ̶…
5929
5930
Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality
A contemplation of how feature management tools might evolve to better support how feature flags are used in practice
5931
Google terminating YouTube channels and videos (2016)
YouTube partners are struggling to get their videos reinstated after false copyright claims. Where's the Fair Use?
5932
Post-mortem of a Dead-on-Arrival SaaS Product
My side-business Marginalia has not done well so I decided to put it out to pasture.
5933
Measuring an engineering organization
For the past several years, I’ve run a learning circle with engineering executives. The most frequent topic that comes up is career management–what should I do next? The second most frequent topic is measuring engineering teams and organizations–my CEO has asked me to report monthly engineering metrics, what should I…
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Getting sweet patron money on the modern internet (2020)
Once, to survive in the arts, you needed someone like this : The profoundly rich product of centuries of inbreeding. This is a blog pos...
5937
Treason in the Futures Markets
People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets
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Primer on FedEx's Distribution Network (2024)
With a map!
5940
Designing Engineering Organizations
How should you structure a larger engineering organization, one with dozens (or hundreds) of engineers? There are many tradeoffs to consider, and no single right answer. But, there are some structures that work better than others.