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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
Is High Quality Software Worth the Cost?
We usually perceive that it costs more to get higher quality, but software internal quality actually reduces costs.
Gift card gang extracts cash from 100k inboxes daily
Some of the most successful and lucrative online scams employ a “low-and-slow” approach — avoiding detection or interference from researchers and law enforcement agencies by stealing small bits of cash from many people over an extended period. Here’s the story of a cybercrime group that compromises up to 100,000 email…
Farewell, Building in Public
The end of an era of radical transparency.
One AI Tutor Per Child: Personalized learning is finally here
Update (July 17, 2026): It’s three years since I wrote this article. It went viral and has been reshared and discussed. And curiously, AI…
Stripe is friendly to “friendly fraud”
Update: this post generated some interesting discussion on Hacker News. Friendly fraud is the laundered name for something that the payment system is not really able to prevent. Even though I’m pretty sure they can do way better. Particularly big and sophisticated payment providers like Stripe, with a mountain of…
Google is now telling users its apps are out of date. No updates are available
[ Update: Users can’t reproduce this any longer, as they have pushed a server-side fix for this issue. It still counts as an embarrassing failure by Google. If you would like to see what the bug looked like, there’s a video at the bottom of the article.]
You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss (2008)
March 2008, rev. June 2008 Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for…
YC is wrong about LLMs for chip design
LLMs don’t make chips better. Good engineers do.
LinkedIn Larpmaxxing
rant and building of the slop YOLO project to detect other slop YOLO projects
The Marketing Behind MongoDB
Countless NoSQL databases competed to be the database of choice. MongoDB's marketing strategy helped it become the winner.
The Intel Split
It appears that Intel’s partnership with TSMC is much larger than it first seemed; the implications for Intel as whole are massive.
Startups in 13 Sentences
February 2009 One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what…
How I took my SaaS from idea to sold in 14 months
I built an MVP in one month and grew the product for a year. But now it’s time to pass the torch. It’s official, I sold Mugshot Bot! Here’s how it all went down.
Firing People
Firing People: a talk about firing people, by Zach Holman.
What happens when you're #1 on Hacker News for a day
Last Sunday, my post “What I learnt from bootstrapping my startup in Thailand for 6 months” hit #1 on Hacker News and then stayed there for most of the day. He…
Minimum Viable Personality
Today we have a special guest post. There have been a few guest posts here at AVC. Maybe a half dozen in total. One of my favorites was this one by JLM during the financial crisis of 2008/2009. But this one today may top that gem. It's from our favorite Giant Robot Dinosaur and it's […]
Falling Out of Love with Apple, Part 3: Content and Censorship
In this final post of a three-part series, we discuss how Apple's approach to content is an anticompetitive slippery slope.
These are called opportunities
Yesterday Apple updated three of their machines. During the announcement, it was revealed that the MacBook Air, the MacBook Pro 13", and the Mac Mini would now be running on M1 SoCs. These "One more thing..." events usually comes with raving numbers and this one did not diverge from the tradition.