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Shutting down my side project of two years
I started blaster.fm in late 2010 with only a vague idea of what I wanted to do with it. Over the next two years …
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Tech Industry & Business
The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
4532
Postmortem of Venture-Backed Startup, Sonar
Lessons Learned from the rise and fall of @Sonar
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Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt
While I've blogged before about Palantir Technologies (e.g., Beware the Spectacular B-Round Valuation), this will probably be my last post about them because, since leaving MarkLogic, I am no longer terribly involved in the Intelligence Community space nor engaged against them as an indirect competitor. I initially
4535
Sony makes bold claim about game ownership
Sony would like you to know that any reasonable gamer would know that purchasing a game is just licensing a game (Video Games Chronicle), not owning it. And there is truth mixed in with a bold-face…
4536
Bank failures come in waves
Interactive post about the frequency of bank failures over time
4537
Apple has a decade-long lead in wearables
Last week, Apple quietly unveiled one of the more remarkable pieces of technology that has been developed in the past few years. AssistiveTouch allows one to control an Apple Watch without actually touching the device. Instead, a series of hand and finger gestures can be used to control everything f
4538
I'm glad the Anthropic fight is happening now
“Preface to the highest stakes negotiations in history.”
4539
YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used
This article contains a list of the top 50 YC software startups (sourced from the October 2019 YC Top Companies page). It also contains aggregated statistics for valuations and back-end programming languages used. Values in this article are sourced, but I cannot guarantee their accuracy. Find me on Twitter…
4540
Most companies do not need Snowflake or Databricks
The cost for something that can be replicated free and open source is absurd. The Fortune 100 have a use case for these companies, the rest…
4541
An Example of a Sad Google Account Recovery Failure and Its Effects
UPDATE: 24 May 2023: A Proposal for “Enhanced Recovery Services” for Locked Out Google Accounts
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Why Companies Don't Fix Bugs
A few years ago, a lone programmer named t0st did something extraordinary: he fixed an 8-year-old bug in GTA Online that had been driving players crazy. The bug? Painfully long load times, sometimes u
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Mac Pros, Ara, and Modularity
Early yesterday Motorola announced their ambitious Ara project - a modular phone with interchangable parts and features. In theory it sounds great - battery running low? Swap in a new one. Need a bigger camera for that trip you're going on? Pop one in - no need for that big DSLR.
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Day in the Life of a Google Manager
Not long after joining Google back in 2010, I wrote this cheeky piece contrasting my daily schedule at Google with my previous career as a...
4547
Advertising without signal: The rise of the grifter equilibrium
Economists credit ads with two welfare‑enhancing roles: 1. Informative – trimming search costs (Stigler 1961 (pdf)). 2. Signaling – In classic models, high-quality sellers are more willing to incur large, sunk ad costs because they expect to recoup them through future sales, especially in experience-good markets where…
4548
Building a One-Person SaaS App Offers a Profound Sense of Personal Achievement
It's Raining Mobile Out of 20m global software developers, very few have built a profitable SaaS business. To give some context, consider
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How to save $13.27 on your SaaS bill
Vercel has a decent entry level analytics product which I cannot afford so I am going to build my own.
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Microsoft and Linux and Patents and Tweets
Fact-checking some tweets about Linux Foundation’s newest member and their harvesting of other members’ money. Microsoft recently joined the Linux Foundation while still asserting its p…
4552
How the New York Times keeps tragedies ad-free
I was looking at the HTML source of a recent New York Times story about a tragic plane accident—150 people feared dead—and noticed this meta tag in its head:
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Chinese Tech Terms Explained in English
Learn about five Chinese tech terms: Huidu, Lunzi, Chendian, Dapan, and Maidian, frequently used in companies like Tencent and ByteDance.
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The endless search for a crypto use case
Are we there yet?
4556
Why new hires often get paid more than existing employees
Last Updated: January 24, 2026One of the most enlightening moments in my career was when I discovered a…
4557
Apple Begins High Sierra Automatic Rollout
I have heard rumblings that Apple was considering making a bigger push for macOS users to upgrade to High Sierra. At the time, I was very unsure what that meant. Forcing updates for patch releases, such as 10.13.0 to 10.13.1 is one thing; moving users from Sierra to High Sierra with little input is another thing…
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Mapping the US healthcare system’s financial flows
Mapping Every Dollar of America's $5 Trillion Healthcare System
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Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India
[UPDATE: To all those who got here by clicking a link entitled “Why I Will Never Feel Threatened by Programmers in India”, that title has been retired as an unfortunate misfire on my pa…
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Ribbonfarm Is Retiring
After several years of keeping it going in semi-retired, keep-the-lights-on (KTLO) mode, I've decided to officially fully retire this blog. The ribbonfarm.com…