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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 622 posts.

2022
542

RIP Stack Overflow Jobs

Stack Overflow have announced they are going to kill off sunset their popular Jobs product. In this post, I talk about what Jobs was, why it was great, and why so many (myself included) will be sad…

543

The map is not the territory (2015)

The map is not the territory reminds us that our mental models of the world are not the same as the world itself. It cautions against confusing our abstractions and representations with the complex, ever-­shifting reality they aim to describe.

548

Norvig's Law (2002)

In July 1999, there was a news article stating that PC usage had doubled yet again, reaching penetration of 50% of homes. People were hailing this as yet another sign of the inevitable climb of technology, but I saw it as a warning sign that the glass was half empty, and coined the following:

550

Lock-In and Multi-Cloud

Alone in a room with the customer’s CTO, I said “So, I spent this morning talking to your people, and it looks like you’re using low-level generic tech for everything and managing it yourself. You could save a shit-ton of money by using high-level managed services and get load-scaling for free.” “Yeah,” he said, “but…

557

Email Is Async

Email is often used as a synchronous (real-time) comms channel when it shouldn't be. Learn why email is async and how to keep it that way.

558

The Death of Quanta Magazine

Yesterday Quanta Magazine published an article written by Natalie Wolchover, Physicists Create a Wormhole Using a Quantum Computer . I’m shocked and disappointed. I thought Quanta Magazine was the most respectable source of science news, they have published several quality, in-depth articles in difficult topics. But…

561

AWS is not a dumb pipe

In 1997, David Isenberg wrote an article called the Rise of the Stupid Network. Isenberg worked at Bell Labs, the R&D lab of AT&T, and was responsible for some significant breakthroughs during the PC and the early int...

562

Energy vs. Sovereign Bond Markets

October 9, 2022 Latest Articles: A Look at the Lightning Network Energy: The Area Under the Curve This newsletter issue focuses on recent problems with developed country sovereign bond markets and how energy supply constraints pose an ongoing problem for them. The Sovereign Bond Bubble During much of 2019 and 2020…

565

Twitter, when the wall came down

I, like many people, have a complicated relationship with Twitter. As Adam and I regaled in a recent Twitter Space , it started when debugging the Twitter fail whale in the offices of Obvious in 2007, where I became thoroughly unimpressed with their self-important skipper, Jack Dorsey. In part because I thought he was…