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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 569 posts.

2020
303

Banks, QE, and Money-Printing

Published November 2020 Lately, it has become fashionable to debate what is, or is not, “money-printing” by central banks. This debate is natural, due to the extreme policy nature of 2020, with massive fiscal expenditures, huge increases in central bank balance sheets, and changes in central bank inflation targets…

307

Apple Watch momentum is building

In a few months, the number of people wearing an Apple Watch will surpass 100 million. While the tech press spent years infatuated with stationary smart speakers and the idea of voice-only interfaces, it was the Apple Watch and utility on the wrist that ushered in a new paradigm shift in computing.

308

Things to know before starting a Patreon page

For the three years starting in April of 2017, I ran much of The Prepared’s (and ultimately my family’s) income through Patreon. I started doing so as an experiment - one that by any measure has been a success. But while Patreon was instrumental in that process, I recommend that creators not str

313

Five Buck Fatigue

This is about a reaction I noticed with myself in response to membership programs, patreons and individual sponsorship as I've run into significantly more of these following Corona. The advertising-supported model has confirmed many of the concerns about its sustainability and creators are looking for more reliable…

319

The End of the Beginning

The beginning of technology was about the shift from batched computing in one place to continuous computing everywhere. That era of paradigm changes may be over, which means the real changes are on…

320

Signaling as a Service

01 Intro One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. The book makes two main arguments: a) Most of our everyday actions can be traced back to some form of signaling or status seeking b) Our brains deliberately hi

322

Sendgrid under siege from hacked accounts

Email service provider Sendgrid is grappling with an unusually large number of customer accounts whose passwords have been cracked, sold to spammers, and abused for sending phishing and email malware attacks. Sendgrid’s parent company Twilio says it is working on a plan to require multi-factor authentication for all…

329

Save the USPS

There are three types of infrastructure. One is visible: roads, dams and bridges. The second is invisible: broadband internet provisions and the entirety of our cellular infrastructure. Both are st…

330

Mistakes That Kill Startups (2006)

October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…