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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 334 posts.
Turn Out the Lights, the Party’s Over
What party, you ask? The one with the mosh pit at LaSalle and Jackson in Chicago. The one held in the building that’s in the background image of this page.
Why do we care about Xiaomi?
Is Xiaomi just another handset maker, or something more? We may start seeing a lot less uniformity in how Android comes to market, and what it looks like. That matters to Google.
Lessons from Airbnb's Rejections
I am so happy Brian Chesky shared these rejection emails from Airbnb's early days. I am constantly reminded how most every successful startup began small and faced various types of rejection early...
Standard Treasury Acquired by Silicon Valley Bank
We're proud to say that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) has acquired the assets and team of Standard Treasury. More information can be found in the press release. Dan and I started Standard Treasury...
Another Theory to Explain 10X Programmers
a blog post by @azwinkau
The strange economics of open-source software
I always use the names of economists for my machines' hostnames. keynes, friedman, marx, fisher, ricardo. So every so often the strange economics of open-source software hits me. Today it is almost taken for granted that the source code for most software is freely available. This is a profound and remarkable change…
Data is at the heart of search, but who has access to it?
In my February 23 blog post, I gave a brief overview of how search engines have evolved over the years and how today’s search engines learn from past searches to anticipate which results will be mo…
AI-Powered Meeting Scheduler X.ai Raises $9.2M Series A
I invest in early-stage AI, ML, and data startups at FirstMark Capital, and I write about the space here
Shutting Down a Service with 500M Requests per Month
This week I finished shutting down my app-detection service, iHasApp . I disabled the signup forms, grandfathered the current users on their plans, sent out emails, and updated the landing page with a message to any new visitors. After all of this, I thought it might be interesting to chronicle what it was, how it…
Airbnb and San Francisco
Airbnb has recently been attacked by San Francisco politicians for driving up the price of housing in the city. San Francisco has tried, and will continue to try, to ban Airbnb in various ways....
What Did Billion Dollar Companies Look Like at the Series A?
Five key traits of unicorns at the Series A. Some may surprise you.
Quantifying the Clickbait and Linkbait in BuzzFeed Article Titles
You probably do not know that the 3 most interesting things I found will blow your mind.
Software has its own Gresham's Law
I recently found myself reading a few of Gregor Hohpe's blog posts and came across Design Patterns: More Than Meets The Eye . In it, Hohpe repeats a message that needs to be repeated every so often even now, twenty years after the publication of the GoF book: software patterns are fundamentally about human…
Machine intelligence, part 2
This is part two of a a two-part post—the first part is here. THE NEED FOR REGULATION Although there has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of machine intelligence recently, there...
Against Tulip Subsidies
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
Quantity Always Trumps Quality
Nathan Bowers pointed me to this five year old Cool Tools entry on the book Art & Fear. Although I am not at all ready to call software development “art” – perhaps “craft” would be more appropriate, or “engineering” if you’re feeling generous – the parallels between some of the advice offered
Book Review: Red Plenty
I. I decided to read Red Plenty because my biggest gripe after reading Singer’s book on Marx was that Marx refused to plan how communism would actually work, instead preferring to leave the e…