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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 480 posts.

2018
212

Hacker News Highlights: April and May 2018

Here are some of our favorite Hacker News comments from April and May. If you see something cool like this, email us at hn@ycombinator.com [mailto:hn@ycombinator.com] so we can add it to the next list. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- HN users across countries discuss…

213

Hallmark of an Economic Ponzi Scheme

The hallmark of an economic Ponzi scheme is that the operation of the economy relies on the constant creation of low-grade debt in order to finance consumption and income shortfalls among some members of the economy, using the massive surpluses earned by other members of the economy. The factors most responsible for…

214

Debt Collection Companies Have Hijacked the Justice System

Lauren Smith (pseudonym) a mother of three in Indiana, had to file for bankruptcy because she couldn’t afford to repay her bills for treatment for thyroid cancer. And because she was unable to work, she had to stay with her parents in Florida while she recovered. She didn’t know that during that time, at the request…

218

The True Cost of Rewrites

Your code is complex and working with it is difficult. Years of development and bug fixes have you ready to declare bankruptcy on your technical debt and start again from scratch. It feels so freeing to leave all your past mistakes behind and start over in a new technology and do everything right this time. Before…

226

New Standard Deal

We are changing the standard deal at YC and increasing our investment from $120K to $150K. The $150K investment for 7% will be made on a post-money cap safe. We believe the post-money safe is simpler, making ownership and dilution easier to understand. This new deal will start with our Winter 2019 batch, and replaces…

230

Zen Magnets: 6 Years of Battle End in Victory

“We will not settle for any sort of stop-sale of magnets that are perfectly safe when not misused… We vow to continue this [legal] battle until our very last drop of cash-flow blood”, promised in August 2014 , forecasting 95% chance of a glorious honorable death of insolvency on the legal battlefield.

232

When the business model is the privacy violation

Sometimes, when we worry about data privacy, we’re worried that data might fall into the wrong hands or be misused for unintended purposes. If I’m considering participating in a medical study, I’d want to know if insurance companies will obtain the data and use it against me. In these scenarios, we should look for…

236

Don’t Shoot Messenger

Update (September 28, 2018): Reuters reports that the court has denied the government's request to force Facebook to assist with the wiretap.Late last week, Reuters reported that Facebook is being asked to “break the encryption” in its Messenger application to assist the Justice Department in...

238

What Thunderbird Learned at FOSDEM

Hello everyone! I’m writing this following a visit to Brussels this past weekend to the Free and Open Source Software conference called FOSDEM. As far as I know it is one of the largest, if not the largest FOSS conference in Europe. It proved to be a great opportunity to discuss Thunderbird with a wide […]

240

The Decentralized Future

A good method for discovering startup ideas is to look into technological breakthroughs and think about what they unlock that wasn't possible before. In this introductory post, we are going to use this framework to examine Bitcoin.