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

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4771

The piracy paradox at Udemy (2015)

My Pluralsight courses get pirated all the time. I used to have Google alerts for them but frankly, the flood of emails I’d get each day just didn’t justify the “return” I’d get by forwarding them on to the Pluralsight piracy folks. I ended up rationalising it

4773

Avoid Apress

Nearly three years ago, I got involved with Apress to contribute to two books. The experience went disastrously wrong. It was a profoundly unpleasant experience and I want to warn any other prospective authors to avoid this publisher, and encourage readers to buy from other publishers. Warning: this post is…

4786

Last gasps of the rent seeking class?

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on…

4788

Amazon Has an Honesty Issue

We recently ordered a high-value item from Amazon (for Prime delivery), but it was stolen from within their delivery chain. Amazon initially accepted that there was an issue but have staunchly tried t

4792

Nobody’s going to steal your idea

When I was working on my dissertation, I thought someone might scoop my research and I'd have to start over. Looking back, that was ridiculous. For one thing, my research was too arcane for many others to care about. And even if someone had proven one of my theorems, there would still be something original

4797

Three AM 911 call, 9 AM salesman

A few days ago, the smoke alarms in my house went off at 3am, so we got up and took it seriously when we smelled smoke everywhere. But after 20 minutes of searching high and low, we couldn't find a source, so as a precaution, we called 911 to

4800

The 37signals Effect

Super-fantastic-caveat : Despite the title, this post isn’t really about 37signals, in particular. I’ve used them as an example, only. I probably could have called it the “Joel on Software” effect, too. This post is about all of us who aren’t 37signals, or Joel, and the dangers we face when trying to incorporate…