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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 334 posts.

2015
315

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…

319

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…

321

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....

325

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…

327

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…

329

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

330

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…