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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 16,898 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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A Behind the Scenes Take on Lithium-ion Battery Prices
Automakers and policy makers are increasingly voicing their belief that the passenger vehicle of the future will be powered (partially or fully) by electricity. There remains, however, a lack of consensus on the timing and speed of the transition, in large part due to differing opinions on current and future…
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1,000 True Fans
This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →
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Bitcoin's Energy Usage Isn't a Problem. Here's Why.
Updated for 2023, this report is a deep dive on Bitcoin's energy usage and long-term scaling approach, with data tables and case studies.
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USAID shutdown has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths
The Trump administration’s decision to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths from infectious diseases and malnutrition, according to Harvard Chan School’s Atul Gawande.
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JSMin isn't welcome on Google Code
Google’s Chris DiBona emailed me this morning to tell me that unless I removed a specific line from the license of my jsmin-php project (a PHP port of Douglas Crockford’s JSMin ), Google Code would no longer host the project.
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The 20 Most Expensive Keywords in Google Ads
While the minimum bid per keyword is 5 cents in Google Ads, the highest cost keywords are nowhere near that. Google can make up to $50 per click from the most expensive PPC keywords, and keyword advertising is a highly lucrative business. Learn all about the most expensive keywords for your industry.
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Rent Control
New York State legislators defend the War Emergency Tenant Protection Act—also known as rent control—as a way of protecting tenants from war-related housing shortages. The war referred to in the law is not the 2003 war in Iraq, however, or the Vietnam War; it is World War II. That is when rent control started in […]
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Camels and Rubber Duckies
You’ve just released your latest photo-organizing software. Through some mechanism which will be left as an exercise to the reader, you’ve managed to actually let people know about it. …
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Who Owns the Federal Reserve Banks?
Is the Fed public or private? It's both: the Board of Governors is an independent government agency, the Federal Reserve Banks are set up like private corporations.
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H-1B visas and prevailing wage levels: A majority of H-1B employers—including major U.S. tech firms—use the program to pay migrant workers well below market wages
H-1B is a temporary nonimmigrant work visa that allows U.S. employers to hire college-educated migrant workers as well as fashion models from abroad; nearly 500,000 migrant workers are employed in the United States in H-1B status. The H-1B is an important—but deeply flawed—vehicle for attracting skilled workers to the…
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Simplicity
Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated: “But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacke…
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Twitter by the Numbers (2023): Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts
Tap here to find interesting 2023 Twitter stats, demographics, financials, and Fun Facts that will blow you away.
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Facebook is not worth $33,000,000,000
Facebook is an amazing success as a social network. Anyone who can get 500 million people to connect, share photos, and click on little cows in Farmville deserves major kudos. But the bullshit monopoly-money valuation merry-go-round has to stop. It’s getting beyond ridiculous and when even…
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Introducing Substack Notes
Unlocking the power of the subscription network
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Wage suppression in 10 charts
Wages for typical workers lag far behind productivity growth. It hasn't always been this way and does not have to be this way. These 10 charts outline the historical context of workers’ wage trajectories, and what can be done to fix the gaping disparities.
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PRESS RELEASE: 37SIGNALS VALUATION TOPS $100 BILLION AFTER BOLD VC INVESTMENT
CHICAGO—September 24, 2009—37signals is now a $100 billion dollar company, according to a group of investors who have agreed to purchase 0.000000001% of the company in exchange for $1. Founder Jason Fried informed his employees about the new deal at a recent company-wide meeting. The…
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The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment
I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of…
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New Search Strategy for Firefox: Promoting Choice & Innovation
Ten years ago, we built Firefox to keep the Internet in each of our hands — to create choice and put people in control of their lives online. Our focus h
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Anthropic's "Profitability" Swindle
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Anthropic is “about to have its first profitable quarter,” specifically an operating profit, or EBITDA profitability: Anthropic’s revenue is set to more than double to $10.9 billion in the second quarter, an explosive rate of growth that will
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Against Intellectual Property
Would a libertarian society recognize patents as legitimate? What about copyright? In Against Intellectual Property, Stephan Kinsella, a patent attorney of many
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Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy+ (LCOE+)
Lazard’s Levelized Cost of Energy+ is a widely cited report that analyzes the cost competitiveness of renewables, energy storage, and system considerations.
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Back to Basics
We spend a lot of time on this site talking about exciting Big Picture Stuff like .NET versus Java, XML strategy, Lock-In, competitive strategy, software design, architecture, and so forth. All thi…
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How Microsoft Lost the API War
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir…
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Strategy Letter IV: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme…
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Selected Essays on Political Economy
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) was a French economist, statesman, and author. He led the free-trade movement in France from its inception in 1840 until his untimely death in 1850. The first 45 years of his life were spent in preparation for five tremendously productive years writing in favor of freedom. Bastiat was the…
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What’s behind the recent surge in the M1 money supply?
While the terms “money” and “wealth” often mean the same thing in everyday parlance, economists define money more narrowly as the component of wealth consisting of
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How bundling benefits sellers and buyers
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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The Productivity–Pay Gap
The huge gap between rising incomes at the top and stagnating pay for the rest of us shows that workers are no longer benefiting from their rising productivity. Before 1979, worker pay and productivity grew in tandem. But since 1979, productivity has grown eight times faster than typical worker pay (hourly…
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Money creation in the modern economy
Quarterly Bulletin 2014 Q1