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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
About a year after the catastrophic Digg V4 launch, our last-ditch experiment to salvage the site showed a spark of hope. We’d cajoled our way into a Facebook beta that allowed us to publish each Digg users’s read articles into their Facebook newsfeed, sending every clicking friend directly to Digg’s permalink page…
[As always, I preface any discussion of Amazon and Apple by noting that I own some stock in both companies, and that I worked at Amazon from 1997 to 2004] A lot of folks, especially Apple supporters, like to characterize Amazon as irrational, even crazy, for its willingness to live with low margins
I’d be quite content if I never again heard the Intel “bong” at the end of every PC ad.
I've always wondered if anyone actually used the social sharing buttons embedded on news sites and (some) WordPress blogs.
Get those numbers up! Those are rookie numbers! I've been reading a lot about Anthem. It's that gigantic, mega-budget looter-shooter fr...
Money. The villagers are tired of bartering. The dairy farmer wants to buy corn, even when he does not have milk to trade, and the corn farmer wants to buy meat, even when the butcher does not want corn. So they decide that special gray stones that they can collect from a nearby riverbed will represent an abstract…
Benjamin Tseng — startup operator, deeptech investor, and applied technologist. Writings and projects across deeptech + AI, biotech, operational models, and software systems.
For most queries, Google search is pretty underwhelming these days. Google is great at answering questions with an objective answer, like “# of billionaires in the world” or “What is the population of Iceland”. It’s pretty bad at answering questions that require judgment and context like “What do NFT collectors think…
Lesson from the success of Dropbox. Should entrepreneurs abandon current ideas to shoot for something bigger?
How cold calling succeeded where AdWords failed, producing a 100% conversion rate and all the information needed to create a scalable business.
Some of the smartest people I know continuously struggle to get ahead because they forget to address a few simple truths that collectively govern our potential to make progress. So here’s a …
Strategy – how to be strategic, and how to be seen as strategic – is one of my ongoing obsessions. Years ago, I read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, and it’s guided my thinking ever s…
Plus chaos chasers, ghost motorways, the secret symbols hiding in your street, and a rationalist death cult.
The business of software is a bit of a miracle. Properly designed, software isn’t more expensive to create when more people use it. In fact, when network effects are involved, it’s actu…
With most competing browsers and the content industry embracing the W3C EME specification, Mozilla has little choice but to implement EME as well so our users can continue to access all content the…
The US Treasury is currently borrowing money at a Negative Real Yield . In any normal environment, if you can borrow money at a negative rate you should borrow as much as you can. The premise is that any idiot should be able to earn a return of greater than zero with the money. That’s a premise that should make the…
Hot takes and cold truths on software, startups, and the lies we tell ourselves.
Microsoft’s recent licensing change for Windows Server is a great modern-day example of why so many businesses hated Microsoft two decades ago. Is this an aberration, or are they back to their old tricks?
Maybe Libra was just very stupid. Because it was a blockchain project started by bitcoiners. Maybe it was always just dumb as hell.
In the how to sell your company article I wrote at length on the process of how to go about selling your company once you’re ready for that. Which makes it seem as if there is no choice, either you sell your company, or you don’t. Simple as that.
Person 1: Did you know that 60% of restaurants close within three years of opening ?
It starts with someone posting an AWS press release in the company chat. “AWS Announces FooBar,” the headline reads. The announcement skirts around technical details, as usual, but contains a worrying amount of buzzwords that overlap with the company’s product. Somebody responds with a grimace emoji 😬. Others reply…
