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You don't need live chat on your website
Why you (probably) don't need live chat on your website.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,158 posts.
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A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term
Every infuriating thing on the web was once a successful experiment. Some smart person saw Normal site: 1% sign up for our newsletterThrow a huge modal offering 10% off first order: +100% sign ups …
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Nearly 20% of active Twitter accounts likely to be fake or spam
TL;DR - From May 13-15, 2022, SparkToro and Followerwonk conducted a rigorous, joint analysis of five datasets including a variety of active (i.e.
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Driverless robotaxi fleet paralyzed for hours in San Francisco
Apparently, the first system breakdown of a driverless robot taxi fleet occurred. In San Francisco, at least a dozen autonomous Chevrolet Bolts from GM Cruise Automation were spotted blocking the i…
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Shaving is an example of how consumer products extract more money
Shaving is too expensive and is a demonstrative example of how most consumer products are designed to extract more money from you rather than to improve your life, or the world, or to be in any way remotely good.
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Court finds calling stuff open source when it's not is false advertising
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently affirmed a lower court decision concluding what we’ve always known: that it’s false advertising to claim that software is “open source” when i…
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Time Till Open Source Alternative
Open Source Freelancer
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Stripe is PayPal circa 2010
After integrating both Stripe and Paypal I've come to the realization that they are nearly the same, including all the evil.
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$7M lost on Amazon inventory, then bankrupt
Our Amazon journey started in January 2018 when HyperVolt released the first massage gun on the market. We were so careful with this…
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Patreon Lays off 17% of Staff
A note from Jack about the recent layoff and what went into the decision.
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Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear
Six companies control 90% of what you read, watch, and hear. Here's why that's dangerous.
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Second-Order Thinking
Second-order thinking is a mental model that smart people like Warren Buffett & Howard Marks use to avoid problems. Read this article to learn how it works.
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I Listened to 1000 B2B SaaS Sales Calls
For a project I was working on, some of the research involved listening to thousands of sales calls from well known high-growth B2B SaaS companies.
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Problems at Roblox
Problems at Roblox (RBLX)
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What is money, anyway?
Editor’s Note: This topic is now comprehensively covered in my book, Broken Money. Money is a surprisingly complex subject. People spend their lives seeking money, and in some ways it seems so straightforward, and yet what humanity has defined as money has changed significantly over the centuries. How could something…
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How This Ends
Back in February of last year, I wrote a blog post with the same title and said this about the asset price bubble we were living in and investing in over the last few years: The big question is how does this end? I believe it ends when the Covid 19 pandemic is over and […]
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Building for the 99% Developers
Software development is not all clean code and automated processes -- and it never will be. Buyers and vendors both need to realize this.
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Mullvad is now available on Amazon
For the first time in our history you can buy Mullvad VPN physical activation codes on Amazon!
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Using a framework will harm the maintenance of your software
In this article I'm putting together my quotes, thoughts and notes on the idea that Frameworks harm the maintainability of the software you build in that framework. I'm proposing that Frameworks:
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What Happened at Alameda Research
Milky Eggs
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Rust – A hard decision pays off
Edo Liberty, Pinecone CEO, provides a glimpse into the journey behind building a database company, including some insights into the latest innovations around the product and vector search.
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Crypto is an unproductive bubble
This post sparked a great conversation on Hacker News! See the comments here.Another update: Scott Alexander just (12/8/22) wrote the best counterpoint to this that I’ve read – see it here “The four most expensive words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different.’” John Templeton I’m writing this essay not so much to…
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AI Homework
The first obvious casualty of large language models is homework: the real training for everyone, though, and the best way to leverage AI, will be in verifying and editing information.
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Is Google Search Deteriorating? Measuring Google's Search Quality in 2022
Has Google's Search Quality deteriorated in recent years? This post measures Google Search using human evaluation.
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What are you doing, WordPress.com?
Be sure to check out the update at the bottom. I recently wrote that I've stuck with WordPress.com for so long, for all its purported limitations, because its features fully suffice the committed blogger whose content is textual for the most part and because the company behind WordPress.com is running a good business…
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Facebook says Apple is too powerful – they're right
In December, 2020, Apple did something insanely great. They changed how iOS, their mobile operating system, handled users’ privacy preferences, so that owners of iPhones and other iOS devices could indicate that they don’t want to be tracked by any of the apps on their devices. If they did, Apple...