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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 8,982 posts.
Strategy Letter I: Ben and Jerry’s vs. Amazon
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’…
Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty
Finalist #3 of the book review contest
How To Legally Own Another Person
Even the church had its hippies –Coase does not need math –Avoid lawyers during Oktoberfest –The expat life ends one day –People who have…
A Plan for Spam
August 2002 (This article describes the spam-filtering techniques used in the spamproof web-based mail reader we built to exercise Arc . An improved algorithm is described in Better Bayesian Filtering .) I think it's possible to stop spam, and that content-based filters are the way to do it. The Achilles heel of the…
Chat log exhibits from Twitter v. Musk case
This is a scan/OCR of Exhibits H and J from the Twitter v. Musk case, with some of the conversations de-interleaved and of course converted from a fuzzy scan to text to make for easier reading.
The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ
Here is a small sample of stuff that pops up with some regularity, if you want me to add entries please mail me jacques@mattheij.com, if you ask a question that is hard to answer it may take a while before I can post it . Please note that I’m not affiliated with HN in any way other than being a user, the majority of…
Bionic Office
Well. That took rather longer than expected. We have, finally, moved, into the new Fog Creek office at 535 8th Avenue, officially ten months after I started pounding the pavement looking for a repl…
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
I watched 15 hours of COVID origins arguments so you don't have to - but you should!
Reading List: Fog Creek Software Management Training Program
The management training program we’re starting up here at Fog Creek will take about three years and will be relatively intensive. Among other things, there will be a required reading list con…
How Microsoft Lost the API War
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir…
Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy
[Conflict of interest notice: I’ve volunteered for both private and public charities, but more often private. I received a small amount of money for work done for a private charity ten years …
Aggregation Theory
The disruption caused by the Internet in industry after industry has a common theoretical basis described by Aggregation Theory.
Futarchy: Vote Values, But Bet Beliefs
These policies are not just dumb in retrospect; typically there were people who understood a lot about such policies and who had good reasons to disapprove of them beforehand. It seems hard to imagine such policies being adopted nearly as often if everyone knew what such "experts" knew about their consequences. Thus…
Font smoothing, anti-aliasing, and sub-pixel rendering
Apple and Microsoft have always disagreed in how to display fonts on computer displays. Today, both companies are using sub-pixel rendering to coax sharper-looking fonts out of typical low res…
Painless Functional Specifications
When The Joel Test first appeared, one of the biggest sore points readers reported had to do with writing specs. It seems that specs are like flossing: everybody knows they should be writing them, …
Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems
The idea of advertising is to lie without getting caught. Most companies, when they run an advertising campaign, simply take the most unfortunate truth about their company, turn it upside down (…
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing
The current version of this article is The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, Version 3.0.
Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists
Did you invest in 10 years of medical school and training? What if you'd bought bitcoin and sat on the beach instead?
Steve Blank If I Told You I’d Have to Kill You: The Story Behind “The Secret History of Silicon Valley”
About a month ago I had one of the strangest phones call of my life. “Steve my name is Donald xx, and I’m the head of external affairs of the CIA’s venture capital firm and we’d like you to keynote…
Benedict’s Newsletter
What mattered in tech this week? A weekly email newsletter.
Hitting the High Notes
In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company: The common belief is that when you’re …
Popularity – Brendan Eich
It seems (according to one guru , but coming from this source, it’s a left-handed compliment) that JavaScript is finally popular .