361
Business advice plagued by survivor bias (2009)
Advice from "successful entrepreneurs" might be unreliable due to Survivor Bias. What's real, and what's random?
Topics /
Tech Industry & Business
The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 439 posts.
362
Airline Takes Revenge After Bad Review, Posts Passenger's Passport Online
YouTuber Josh Cahill, who has nearly 700,000 subscribers, reviews flights and courts drama, it seems. Just a couple of months ago he was banned by Qatar Airways over a negative review. Now he’s taken on East Timor’s Aero Dili.
363
Lumina's legal threats and my about-face
I’m putting the post about Lumina Probiotics back up, now edited to avoid any possible threats of libel.
364
365
Stop Doing Cloud
An example of how you can save money, simplify your architecture and speed up the development by going back to the basics and ditching the cloud, kubernetes and whatnot.
366
Stop Designing Your Web Application for Millions of Users When You Dont Have 100
It’s easy to get carried away when you’re building a new web app. You’ve got big ideas, you picture millions of users flocking to your platform, and you start imagining the kind of infrastructure needed to handle all that traffic. So, you build for scale from day one—optimising databases, setting up powerful servers…
367
368
Reverse engineers bust sleazy gig work platform
Supposedly, these lines were included in a 1979 internal presentation at IBM; screenshots of them routinely go viral:
369
Pop culture has become an oligopoly (2022)
A cartel of superstars has conquered culture. How did it happen, and what should we do about it?
370
Sam Altman Goes Full Emperor
His boundless ambition is putting AI, and the world, on a dangerous path.
371
How We Handle Cap Table Information
On Friday we had an internal policy violation that affected three companies. I’ve been in touch with the founders and I’m appalled we made…
372
On being brought up by libertarian economists
The central fact about child rearing by my parents was the equal intellectual status of everyone in the family.
373
E-Bikes Overtake Buggies for Some Amish (2021)
In some Amish communities these days, e-bikes are beginning to outnumber buggies on the roads. Horse-drawn buggies, long a symbol of the Amish lifestyle, are finding less use as more people in Amish communities adopt electric-powered bicycles. In small Amish towns across America such as Sugarcreek, Ohio, Napponee…
374
What went wrong with UniSuper and Google Cloud?
Update 2024-05-21: Miles Ward has an update with more details in this X thread: UniSuper’s production Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) private cloud was automatically deleted one year after it’s creation due to a misconfiguration in how it was created. When it was created, there was a bug in the creation script which…
375
Why Bad CEOs Fear Remote Work (2021)
Remote work expert David Tate wrote that when fearful CEOs talk about workplace culture, they’re really talking about workplace control. Their insecurities demand that the way work is done by emplo…
376
Algorithmic fitting of Japanese candy
Introduction to bin packing through a simple example of fitting boxes of candy inside a parcel.
377
They want your ethics for $105
If you have a blog, you've probably gotten those emails that want to "collaborate" on a guest post—which often means "let us post sketchy links for SEO purposes." Recently, I got one which was a little different flavor than the usual spam, so I bit and replies. The end result was at the same time fascinating…
378
When Kodak and Polaroid went to war
This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ …
379
Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban UBI Experiments
The Foundation for Government Accountability - a Florida-based lobbying group backed by the richest 1% - is working to get basic income experiments banned by state legislators across the U.S. (This article is also available as a YouTube video and as a podcast episode) As a well-known quote often
380
Corporations are not to be loved
I started using Apple computers — and writing code for them, starting with BASIC — 43 years ago, before the Macintosh, even, and I’ve made this my career. I’ve had all these decades to really, thoroughly delight in these incredible machines and software, and to give a little back with my own apps.
381
VMware outsourcing their support
By Ruben Schade in Eora/Sydney, Australia.
382
Now is a good time to start a service business
Now is a good time to start a service business. Maybe you should try it! A service business is one where your company sells its work output directly instead of selling a product. Dentists, plumbers, design agencies, pool cleaner, consultants: these are all service businesses. The opposite of a service business is a…
383
More info about synonyms at Google (2010)
Steve Baker, an engineer in the search quality group at Google, just did a nice post about synonyms on the Google blog. A lot of people seem to think that Google only does simple-minded matching of…
384
Apple vs. the "Free Market"
Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple, the most valuable company on the planet. Apple contributes nothing to their work, but it will get to steal a third of their wages:
385
Outsourcing Cost Boeing Billions (2019)
On October 29, 2018 Lion Air Flight 610, a 737 MAX 8 flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia, crashed into the sea 13…
386
387
The Death of the Magazine
Or what happens when journalism forgets about quality writing
388
389
What makes housing so expensive?
Buying a home is by far the largest purchase most of us will make, and paying the rent or mortgage will be our largest monthly expense.
390
Creative workers deserve better than a choice as to who rips them off
Spotify's relationship to artists can be kind of confusing. On the one hand, they pay a laughably low per-stream rate, as in homeopathic residues of a penny. On the other hand, the Big Three labels get a fortune from Spotify. And on the other other hand, it makes sense that the rate for a stream heard by one person…