Topics /

Tech Industry & Business

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

Any year
1082

Boring is what we wanted

We are coming up on five years since the first M1 Macs shipped. It was an incredible time to be a Mac user. Those first Apple silicon Macs looked like the Intel machines they replaced, but they were better in every single way. In December 2020, John Gruber wrote: We knew this to be true: Computers could run fast and…

1083

O’Reilly Media Has Lost Its Soul

Several years ago I was courted by O’Reilly Media. After the success of my first book, Show Me the Numbers , the folks at O’Reilly were interested in publishing my second. I responded cautiously at first, because my prior self-publishing experience was extremely positive. Analytics Press, the publisher of Show Me the…

1086

The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary

I've been very surprised and delighted over a number of years now by Microsoft's strong efforts in open source. I understand the skeptics, I was on Slashdot when they tried to sue Linux out of existence and I think only time will tell. I figure MS contributing is better than them hunting Linux distributions for sport…

1092

How I advertise malicious software on Google Ads

A caller phones Radio Erywan. “Is it true that in Moscow, on Red Square, they give out cars?” “True. Not in Moscow, however, but in St. Petersburg. Not on Red Square, but on Revolution Square. Not cars, but bikes. And they don’t give them out, but steal them”. Edit: Through the apparent magic of Hacker News, my Google…

1098

You might not need machine learning

Machine learning is a trendy topic, so naturally it’s often used for inappropriate purposes where a simpler, more efficient, and more reliable solution suffices. The other day I saw an illustrative and fun example of this: Neural Network Cars and Genetic Algorithms . The video demonstrates 2D cars driven by a neural…

1101

Stop Asking Me to “Sign Up” (2014)

The fate of many startups depends almost entirely on one conversion point: When a visitor becomes a user. All too often, this pivotal role falls on the shoulders of a pitifully generic “sign up” button that’s lucky to get even a minute of consideration during development. If you take

1104

Habits of High-Functioning Teams

I often struggle to explain what it means to be part of a high-functioning software team. Sure, there are mountains of literature, and an entire genre of LinkedIn thought leadership that professes all kinds of guidelines and heuristics about what makes teams work, but in my experience, it’s hard to internalize these…