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Why Do Famous People Get Paid $250k to Give a Speech?
The organizations willing to spend $20,000-$200,000 to hear a luminary speak include Wall Street banks, summer camp executives, and national associations of bakers.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 16,895 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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Los Angeles is gearing up to ban wood-frame construction
Over the summer, the Los Angeles City Council Public Safety Committee approved a proposal to expand Fire District 1, an anachronistic planning overlay that would effectively ban wood-frame construction in much of the city. Superficially premised as a measure to improve fire safety, the motion has been heavily promoted…
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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble
Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea – known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water – changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such…
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The secret sauce of TikTok’s recommendations
Dive into the inner workings of TikTok’s awesome real-time recommendation system and learn what makes it one of the best in the field!
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Most tech revolutions made work worse for employees
Every productivity wave since the PC made work faster and piled on more of it, so companies gained more than workers did. AI does the work itself, which is why this one could land differently.
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Meta.ai Oh My
“Meet Your New Assistant” says the announcement , going on with “Built With Llama 3”. And oh my goodness has it ever got a lot of coverage. So I thought I might as well try it.
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How the US built 5k ships in WWII
Among the most impressive manufacturing achievements of the US during WWII was the number of ships it produced.
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The European Commission versus Android
Examining the history of Android explains why the European Commission may be right to fine Google for its actions around Android, even as the reasoning feels off.
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Amazon doubling down on return to office
The tech giant is not blinking: after the unprecedented pushback on its 3-day return to office policy last month, Amazon just made it clear that the policy is going ahead.
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What makes 5% of AI agents work in production?
Beyond the Prompt: Notes from the Context Frontier
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Theology majors marry each other a lot, but business majors don’t
The American Community Survey collects data on the college majors of people who’ve graduated college. This excellent data has lots of untapped potential for family research, because it tells …
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How banks are getting around open banking and PSD2
Banks are scared. They’ve seen the rise of the new world of open APIs, apps and analytics and know that their organisations are not yet ready or fit to change to that world. What to do? Well, the easiest thing to do is to block access to the bank’s data. If third party FinTech firms...
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Dear MongoDB users, we welcome you in Azure DocumentDB
Azure helps you build, run, and manage your applications. Get the latest news, updates, and announcements here from experts at the Microsoft Azure Blog.
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Intelligence is a commodity. Context is the real AI Moat
My thesis on the AI-first society and the future of software
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How to stop losing 17,500 kidneys
"Someone left a human liver at the wrong hospital’s cargo bay in 90 degree heat, and no one noticed for an hour and a half."
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Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
A beloved hometown impersonator had no idea what he was signing up for with this photoshoot.
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Capitalism is a paperclip maximizer
There is a classic thought experiment in the field of artificial intelligence which is often used to explain how an AI might inadvertently cause the destruction of humanity as a by-product of tryin…
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The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken
Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between...
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$300k for Cracking Telegram Encryption
$300,000 for cracking #Telegram encryption
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Privacy Fundamentalism
The current privacy debate is making things worse by not considering trade-offs, the inherent nature of digital, or the far bigger problems that come with digitizing the offline world.
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Telltale Autopsy
So Telltale Games is out of business. Like most of the rest of the industry – including the employees of Telltale – I had no idea this was coming. I looked at the popularity of their breakout hit The Walking Dead and the overall quality of some of their earlier adventure game offerings and just assumed this was a…
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Nobody got fired for Uber's $8M ledger mistake?
LedgerStore became a case study for DynamoDB, and system design publications keep praising it to this day. But the design was abandoned 3 years after it went live.