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So You Want to Compete with Steam
I get a lot of pitches for "Steam competitors." 99% of them are doomed to failure, but the vast majority are doomed before they even start.
Topics /
Tech Industry & Business
The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 337 posts.
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XPS 13 developer edition 7th generation available
-> Updated June 22, 2018 – Three 16GB/FHD configs added to the line up in the US -> Updated Jan 26, 2018 – Added list of countries that offer the XPS 13 developer edition offline.…
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An employee whose job was to be sacked (2010)
Customer service has improved little in the last fourty years. This story demonstrates the high standards that once existed in one of our leading Department Stores.
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Demand for Ruby on Rails is Still Huge
TL;DR Looking at job postings, Rails is more popular than Django, Laravel or Express. By a lot. If you specifically measure startup cities…
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Shortwave Trading: The West Chicago Tower Mystery
Since 2014 this blog has extensively covered the wireless networks built by high-frequency trading (HFT) firms or network providers to reduce latencies between the different exchanges around the wo…
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Tech’s Two Philosophies
Google and Facebook represent one philosophy, and Microsoft and Apple represent another; tech needs both, but ultimately platforms are more important than aggregators.
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Qualcomm, National Security, and Patents
The Trump administration blocked Broadcom’s acquisition of Qualcomm, and I think it was the right move. Understanding why means understanding Qualcomm and Broadcom’s plan for the compan…
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Using GnuCash as a Freelancer to Track Finances and Prepare Taxes
GnuCash makes it easy to keep track of your money and it creates reports that will make your accountant happy.
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Nikon versus Canon: A Story of Technology Change
Nikon losing the leadership position to Canon in the market for professional photography 30 year technology transition story.
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What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow. As of
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Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel was disrupted
Disruption is simple to say but there many factors at play. Disruption is never one feature, but a full set of assumptions that go into a…
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Lessons from Spotify
Spotify has a marginal cost problem, but while the cause is unique to Spotify, the challenges are more applicable than it seems.
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It can all go to zero
Perspective can be a useful thing. Cryptocurrencies have had a bad 24 hours. Last night Amy and I watched The Big Short for the second time. If you’ve never seen
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Apple’s Social Network
Apple’s decision to stop reporting unit sales is defensible; the company, though, should provide more data to support its new growth story.
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MacOS Marzipan
I haven’t been running Mojave on my machine in the beta period. I always wait for public releases before updating the software on my (only) Mac. I knew what to expect of course. I don’t have my head in the sand. I watched the WWDC keynote, I saw all my friends’ complaints on Twitter, I was braced for it. But, man…
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The Stack Overflow Age
I want to catch you all up on some stuff but mostly I want to tell the story of Stack Overflow in a not-completely-disorganized way.
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Country Time Lemonade Will Pay Legal Fees for Unlicensed Lemonade Stands
Are you thinking of helping your kid setting up a lemonade stand this summer? Apparently, some young entrepreneurs are getting shut down due to a lack of small business permits. In a very savvy PR move, Country Time Lemonade has offered to reimburse any permit fees or fines (up to $300) that are incurred while…
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The most expensive four words in the English language: “This time is different”
There are currently a number of attempts to deploy a cryptocurrency-based decentralized storage network, including MaidSafe, FileCoin, Sia a...
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Let’s have no managers, instead of managers with no engineering experience
Over the course of my career as a developer I’ve been involved in a bad management situation more than once.
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Pushback against Saudi funding endangers Silicon Valley valuations
Shifting common knowledge on Saudi Arabia has infected the narrative around SoftBank's Vision Fund, which in turn places unicorn valuations at risk.
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How Sketch Took on Adobe
When Pieter Omvlee was tasked with designing a simple drawing application as part of his computer science class at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, he set about creating a lightweight app that would fulfill his homework assignment. In the late 2000s, the vector drawing app market was a lot smaller than it…
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How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine
Atlassian didn't jump through the standard hoops. Instead, they chose an unconventional path that would ultimately help them build a $10 billion business.
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