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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
Subscriptions and the new In-App Purchase requirement
Apple’s new subscription-billing requirement has generated a lot of bad press and debate. The new rule, from the App Store Review Guidelines (developer account required):
Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi (Chancellor of UC Davis)
18 November 2011 Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi Linda P.B. Katehi, I am a junior faculty member at UC Davis. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, and I teach in th…
Why Startups Die
Startups die due to a variety of causes. Over the course of the last three years, I've watched many of my friends pour their hearts and souls into companies that, for one reason or another, just fizzled out of existence. In 2007, Paul Graham gave a variety of causes for…
Performance Culture
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
Command Line Accounting With Ledger and Reckon
I’ve been using ledger, combined with a custom Ruby gem called reckon, to balance my small business’s accounts for the last few years. The command line, Bayesian statistics, and Double Entry Accounting! What could be better? Here’s how I do it.
My app just won best iOS Japanese learning tool of 2025 award (blog)
Welcome to the award show everyone! Hosted by your favourite bee... Bee! 🥳 I wanted to summarise the best tools etc out there in 2025, and what better way then to put on a fake award show! And like all true award shows and Christmas themed events, let's get into
My Thoughts on the Datomic License
I have a greenfield project where the choice of database is open. I have been very interested in Datomic for a couple of years now and figured that I'd try Datomic out for the project. Then I tried to actually download and install it and decided against it... mostly because the value of Datomic does not clearly…
Six Lessons Learned from Domain Pigeon’s First Six Weeks
On January 29th I launched Domain Pigeon, a web site to help people find available domain names. The site lets visitors browse thousands of available .com domain names which they can register for t…
How Georgists Valued land in the 1900's
The lost art of the "Somers System" of land valuation
Do We Need Central Banks? (2017)
Paper presented at the 14 th Rhodes Forum: Dialogue of Civilisations Research Institute, Panel 2: Economic Alternatives when Conventional Models Fail, Rhodos, Greece, on 1 October 2016
The Buzzfeed Lesson
The lesson of BuzzFeed is that dominant Aggregators like Facebook have no incentive to act against their self interest and support suppliers.
How can you tell if the company youre interviewing with is rotten on the inside?
How can you tell the companies who are earnestly trying to improve apart from the ones who sound all polished and healthy from the outside, whilst rotting on the inside?
United Airlines Threatens to Engage Collections for Passengers Who Skip Segments
United reportedly has an effort to go after customers specifically that utilize Skiplagged to fly hidden city itineraries on the airline. In one case they're demanding payment of over $3000 and threatening to shut down the member's frequent flyer account and ban then from the airline. They are also threatening to send…
Let's get real about the one-person billion dollar company
The biggest hurdle is not AI capability, but founder pain tolerance.
The Asymmetry of Open Source
A comprehensive guide to funding open source software projects
I live in the country with the most expensive Apple products on the planet
I live in Brazil. Brazil is a developing country. It is definitely not a rich country, but it is definitely not among the poorest either. We are placed on 84th in human development index rankings. You will find Brazil similarly in the middle of other rankings like per-capita income, education or life expectancy. There…
The Military-Industrial Stock Buyback Complex
Why is the US military ceding ground to China? As a new DOD report shows, big defense contractors are middlemen whose main purpose is stock buybacks and dividends.
Automattic Purchases .blog TLD for $19M
It’s now public that Automattic is the company behind Knock Knock Whois There LLC, the registry for the new .blog TLD. (And a great pun.) We wanted to stay stealth while in the bidding process and …
Toronto Is in a Housing Bubble
With stocks hitting new all-time highs almost every day, global bond yields at or near zero, and Canadian home prices at nose-bleed levels, it seems like everything these days is in a bubble. This is particularly true for the Toronto housing market with average home prices up 22% Y/Y.
AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement
“We're nowhere near the ceiling.”
Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations
I think Apple Watch prices are going to be shockingly high — gasp-inducingly, get-me-to-the-fainting-couch high — from the perspective of the tech industry. But at the same time, there is room for them to be disruptively *low* from the perspective of the traditional watch and jewelry world.