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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
1502
Twitter's Fucked
The Twitter product is defective, broken beyond all hope of repair
1503
You don't need Scrum, you just need to do Kanban right (2022)
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
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The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ
Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that…
1506
The Amazon Premium
How the biggest cloud companies deliver the worst value
1507
Cooler screens
Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine of small, high velocity fans pervades the grocery side of this Walgreens. Were they always this loud? I'm not sure; some of the fans sound distinctly unhealthy. Still, it's a familiar kind of noise to anyone who regularly works around…
1508
Technological Unemployment: Much More Than You Wanted to Know
[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I’m writing it down to speed your goin…
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The Bitter Lesson Is Misunderstood
Together, the Bitter Lesson and Scaling Laws reveal that the god of Compute we worship is yoked to an even greater one — the god of Data.
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No, we won’t have a video call for that
Communications in distributed teams: a write-up of my talk from FrOSCon 2020, Cloud Edition.
1514
Hitting OKRs vs. Doing Your Job
In Engineering, quarterly OKRs (Objectives & Key Results) can feel like a duplication of product planning. Basically, they say “Ship the Roadmap.” What new information are they comm…
1515
Considerations on Cost Disease
I. Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. I’d previously heard the term used to refer only to a specific theory of why costs are increasing, involving labor becoming more efficient in some ar…
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My Google Workspace account suspension
As the title suggests, I have finally become the victim of Google’s account suspension.
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Textbook manifesto (2016)
Allen Downey's textbook manifesto: students should read and understand textbooks, so why are so many textbooks written as if nobody expects them to?
1520
What I Learned From Increasing My Prices
Last month Bidsketch had the biggest increase in revenue it’s ever had. Before that, the biggest increase in revenue came when FreshBooks emailed a million people and mentioned Bidsketch as a new integration for sales proposals. I got so many new sales notifications that day, I thought someone had hacked my server. It…
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Death by PowerPoint: the slide that killed seven people (2019)
We’ve all sat in those presentations. A speaker with a stream of slides full of text, monotonously reading them off as we read along. We’re so used to it we expect it. We accept it. We even consider it ‘learning’. As an educator I push against ‘death by PowerPoint’ and I'm fascinated with how we
1523
A new team at Reddit
Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...
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Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’
It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about *something*; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.
1526
Bored of eating your own dogfood? Try smelling your own farts
I called a large company the other day. Did I know the information I wanted could be found on their website? And was I aware that I could manage my account online? And would I like to receive a link to chat with their AI assistant via WhatsApp? Naturally, call volumes were higher than expected. I can only assume that…
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Replacing Middle Management with APIs
There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99designs Tasks in the visual design industry, Homejoy in the cleaning industry, and so on. These new software services…
1529
An apology...
Until Gizmodo publicly apologizes to Gray Powell, this is going to be in my /etc/hosts and in all of the DNS servers under my control: 127.0.0.1 gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 www.gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 m.gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 gawker.com 127.0.0.1 www.gawker.com 127.0.0.1 m.gawker.com The person at fault is the shithead who…
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Talent Acquisitions
Today, development stopped on Pulp, Wallet , and Sparrow as their companies were bought by Facebook and Google, respectively.