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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.

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3692

Leaving Google

As of March 17th I’ll be an ex-employee. It’s an amicable separation in the face of irreconcilable differences: I wouldn’t move to California and Google wouldn’t open a Vancouver office. I haven’t decided what to do next.

3701

The appropriate amount of effort is zero

Most people put too much effort into everything they do. Here’s a good example from Kristijan around tension in his hands when touching and holding things: Something clicked about inhibition and non-doing (in Alexander Technique), and the strongest effect has been a relaxation of my hands. Like I was touching...

3708

Why Tarsnap doesn't use Glacier

On the surface, Tarsnap sounds like the perfect use case for Glacier. Out of every TB of data stored on Tarsnap, in any given month approximately 100 GB of data will be deleted, while only 33 GB of data will be downloaded; in other words, Tarsnap is very much a "write once, read maybe " storage system. Tarsnap's…

3709

The Value of In-House Expertise

An alternate title for this post might be, "Twitter has a kernel team!?". At this point, I've heard that surprised exclamation enough that I've lost count of the number times that's been said to me (I'd guess that it's more than ten but less than a hundred). If we look at trendy companies that are within a couple…

3712

When is short tenure a red flag?

A pattern of short tenure – multiple short jobs over a small period of time – can be a red flag, but necessarily. I’ll dig into short tenure in this article. What’s “short”? What’s a “pattern”? When you’re thinking of switching jobs, when and how should your tenure factor into the decision? For hiring managers, when…

3713

The end of smartphone innovation

Smartphones are still evolving, but we're on the upper slopes of the S-Curve. This means innovation is slowing, but also that iOS and Android are now unassailable. It's time to focus on what's next - voice, machine learning and, especially, augmented reality. 

3719

Elon Musk and the Hyperloop

For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on…

3720

OpenAI

I have some exciting news (for me, anyway). Starting next week, I’ll be going on leave from UT Austin for one year, to work at OpenAI. They’re the creators of the astonishing GPT-3 and …