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

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4291

Free Kindle This November

[Translations: Japanese] In October 2009 John Walkenbach noticed that the price of the Kindle was falling at a consistent rate, lowering almost on a schedule. By June 2010, the rate was so unwavering that he could easily forecast the date … Continue reading →

4293

Why Microsoft bought Skype

There is so much to write about but I’ll begin with Microsoft buying Skype for $8.5 billion. The pundits are debating whether this move by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer makes good business sense, but that’s the wrong way to look at it. The better approach is to wonder what would have happened had Microsoft not

4294

Negative incentives in academic research

In the first half of the XXth century, there were relatively few scientists, and these scientists were generally not lavishly funded. Yet it has been convincingly argued that these scientists were massively more productive. We face a major replication crisis where important results in fields such as psychology and…

4303

Mainstream Failure

The media’s telling of the Japan story has been inexcusably bad. I can’t count the number of pieces about confinement breaches and radiation surges; where they are not information-free they are wrong, and where they are not wrong, they bypass what matters. Here are a few specifics.

4307

We Looked for Work as a Software Development Team

Part of this story is a common one. Established company in an industry undergoing major disruption hires developers to innovate back to viability. Management lacks clear vision of what that means and so chops and changes ( not pivots, that’s something else) technology strategy several times. After two years of hard…

4310

The Apple Vision Pro

The Apple Vision Pro is a disappointment for productivity, in part because of choices made to deliver a remarkable entertainment experience. Plus, the future of AR/VR for Apple and Meta.

4314

It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit

We're spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else. The only way we were able to get the pricing that low was by signing a four-year contract. That contract expires this summer, June 30, so that's our departure date for the final leg of our cloud…