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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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Quantifying GitHub Copilot’s impact on developer productivity and happiness
When the GitHub Copilot Technical Preview launched just over one year ago, we wanted to know one thing: Is this tool helping developers? The GitHub Next team conducted research using a combination of surveys and experiments, which led us to expected and unexpected answers.
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Why didn't we patent the spreadsheet? Were we stupid? (1999)
We didn't patent VisiCalc at Software Arts because you really couldn't patent software prior to 1981, and VisiCalc was shown to the public in 1979.
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Qt and Open Source
There have been discussions on various internet forums about the future of Qt open source in the last two days. The contents do not reflect the views or plans of The Qt Company. The Qt Company is proud to be committed to its customers, open source, and the Qt governance model
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The 'intellectual property' oxymoron
“ If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the…
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The Impact of Index Investing: A Follow-Up
The prior piece received a much stronger reaction than I expected. The topic is complicated, with ideas that are difficult to adequately convey in words, so I’m going to use this piece as a follow-up. I’m going to look at the specific example of the Tech Bubble, which is a clear case in which the broad adoption of a…
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All His Life Has He Looked Away, to the Future...
It’s one thing to look at today’s Windows 8 on a tablet and say that it has a lot of potential. It’s another thing altogether to look at it and declare victory.
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The iPhones 8
These are solid year-over-year updates — at least as impressive as the iPhone 7 was over the iPhone 6S. If they hadn’t debuted alongside the iPhone X we’d be arguing about whether these are the most impressive new iPhone models since the iPhone 6.
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The downfall of National Geographic
When the pages stop turning
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Leading with Wikipedia: A brand proposal for 2030
A few months ago, people across the world were asked “What is Wikimedia?” Almost no one answered correctly. But while “Wikimedia” may not be widely recognized outside our movement, there is a clear way to use our existing brands to better bring in the billions of people who have yet to join us in our….
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CoinTent: A Sustainable Ad-Free Web
Introducing CoinTent
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Lily Drone Files for Bankruptcy
Lily, whom despite raising millions in dollars to build their highly anticipated consumer drone, have just filed for bankrupcy. Throughout 2015 and 2016, Lily raised over $35 million in pre-sales and even secured $15 million in investment via equity organisations. Their downfall, predicted by DroningON three days…
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Another Way of Looking at Lee Sedol vs. AlphaGo
Imagine a contest in which we are going to pit man against machine. But instead of measuring who is best in playing the game of ‘Go’ we are going to measure who is fastest. In the one corner: Human, all of 175 pounds of extremely well trained runner. And in the other corner, a Formula 1 racecar with a remote control…
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Tesla Gave Me Control of Their Site Forums
Update, 3/6/21: 2.5 years after they gave me a wild ride with admin access to their forums, Tesla announced that they will be killing off the Tesla
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Milton Friedman’s Interest Rate Fallacy
Milton Friedman’s interest rate fallacy is one of the most mystifying and counterintuitive facts in modern finance.
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What Is Going to Happen in 2019
Hi Everyone. Happy 2019. Today, as is my custom on the first day of the new year, I am going to take a stab at what the year ahead will bring. I find it useful to think about what we are in for. It helps me invest and advise the companies we are invested in. […]
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UK'S shadow Internet minister says she is "particularly stupid"
I remarked earlier about Helen Goodman MP and her total lack of technical knowledge. An MP being a bit behind the times isn't the greatest shock - but she's Labour's Shadow Minister for Culture, Media, and Sport - that's a big deal! This year, Claire Perry MP produced an "independent" report into online child…
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Yes it's a bubble, so what?
Syzygy Asset Management
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Telling people to leave finance
I used to work in finance, and now I don’t. I haven’t regretted leaving for a moment, even when I’ve been unemployed and confused about what to do next. Lots of my friends that I …
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Glut of Fake LinkedIn Profiles Pits HR Against the Bots
A recent proliferation of phony executive profiles on LinkedIn is creating something of an identity crisis for the business networking site, and for companies that rely on it to hire and screen prospective employees. The fabricated LinkedIn identities — which pair AI-generated profile photos with text lifted from…
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Bitcoin: A flawed currency with a useful application for the Eurozone (2014)
The responses of many to my post on Bitcoin reveal a powerful tendency to underestimate the ill-effects of deflation on a social economy. This tendency to underestimate deflation’s deleterious impact matters beyond debates on Bitcoin per se. For example, in Europe the incapacity of the European Central Bank (ECB) to…
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Basecoin, aka the Basis Protocol
See also Bitshares: Don’t walk away – run, Stablecoins are doomed to fail, Stablecoins are doomed to fail, part II, and Stablecoins are doomed to fail, part III. UPDATE, 4/18/18 –…
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Why are maps so hard to make?
Announcing Felt's public launch and $15M Series A. Maps are fun now! Margins is back!
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Apple can own I/O to own the universe
Inflections in finance and tech. Click to read The Diff, by Byrne Hobart, a Substack publication.
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Google is testing its new ad targeting tech in millions of browsers
Update, April 9, 2021 : We've launched Am I FLoCed, a new site that will tell you whether your Chrome browser has been turned into a guinea pig for Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, Google’s latest targeted advertising experiment. Today, Google launched an “origin trial” of Federated Learning...