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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
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Builder's Remedy goes into effect in many California cities tomorrow
Old law proposes to turn the Bay Area's zoning system into something like Japan's in just two days.
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I said no and Apple said yes
The one where Apple decides consent doesn’t matter anymore.
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Go is Google's language, not ours
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Domain expertise has always been the real moat
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll…
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Changes at Basecamp
At Basecamp, we treat our company as a product. It's not a rigid thing that exists, it's a flexible, malleable idea that evolves. We aren't stuck with what we have, we can create what we want. Just as we improve products through iteration, we iterate on our company too. Recently, we've made some internal company…
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How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions…
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The Mac Pro Lives
Apple is currently hard at work on a “completely rethought” Mac Pro, with a modular design that can accommodate high-end CPUs and big honking hot-running GPUs, and which should make it easier for Apple to update with new components on a regular basis. They’re also working on Apple-branded pro displays to go with them…
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It's not a crime if we do it with an app
Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You have TWO DAYS LEFT to pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter , which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.
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Six Months of Tiny Projects
In this post I'll give an update on how my Tiny Projects are performing six months on, and the pros and cons of launching micro-businesses.
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I fought the PayPal and I won
Payment processors hostile to freedom of expression hate me for this one weird trick!!
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After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
David Kopec's blog.
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Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought “Lol.” Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect. I got my email through Gmail, I wrote documents on Docs, I listened to Pandora, I viewed photos on TheFacebook.
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I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea
When good ideas make bad business
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Reasons not to become famous
I felt like I somehow needed fame. In retrospect, there was a lot of self-loathing from tough childhood experiences, and I desperately hoped that love from without (i.e., from masses of other people) would somehow make up for hate from within.
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Hyperspace
My interest in file systems started when I discovered how type and creator codes 1 and resource forks contributed to the fantastic user interface on my original Macintosh in 1984. In the late 1990s, when it looked like Apple might buy Be Inc. to solve its operating system problems, the Be File System was the part I…
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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?
There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". We've previously discussed Marc Andreessen's quote that tech hiring can't be inefficient here and here…
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Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
Early in my software engineering career, the UK-based startup I worked at, GenieDB, was taken over by a US Venture Capital fund, Frost VP, owned by Stuart Frost. I was functionally the only piece that came to the US. The code was rebuilt, the rest of the team eventually rotated out, even the core strategy was…
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Cutting your salary by 40%
Have you ever thought to yourself, “I need to get paid far far less than I’m worth?” Me neither. And yet some companies not only pay less, they’re proud of it. Allow me to explain—