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

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1505

The Appalling Stupidity of Spotify's AI DJ

Am I naïve in expecting Artificial Intelligence to be smart? Is my interpretation of the word “intelligence” too literal? And when an AI behaves stupidly, who’s to blame? The programmers or the AI entity itself? Is it even proper to make a distinction between the two? Or does the AI work in so mysterious a way that…

1507

Cooler screens

Audible even over the squeal of an HVAC blower with a suffering belt, the whine of small, high velocity fans pervades the grocery side of this Walgreens. Were they always this loud? I'm not sure; some of the fans sound distinctly unhealthy. Still, it's a familiar kind of noise to anyone who regularly works around…

1520

What I Learned From Increasing My Prices

Last month Bidsketch had the biggest increase in revenue it’s ever had. Before that, the biggest increase in revenue came when FreshBooks emailed a million people and mentioned Bidsketch as a new integration for sales proposals. I got so many new sales notifications that day, I thought someone had hacked my server. It…

1523

A new team at Reddit

Last week, Yishan Wong resigned from reddit. The reason was a disagreement with the board about a new office (location and amount of money to spend on a lease). To be clear, though, we didn’t...

1525

Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’

It’s not just that Isaacson was wrong about *something*; it’s that he was wrong about the most important thing in Jobs’s career. There’s a decades-long story arc about the software system started at NeXT that Isaacson completely misses.

1528

Replacing Middle Management with APIs

There’s a trend in Silicon Valley startups to create a software layer in industries that were traditionally pure human services. Uber and Lyft have created software layers in the taxi industry, 99designs Tasks in the visual design industry, Homejoy in the cleaning industry, and so on. These new software services…

1529

An apology...

Until Gizmodo publicly apologizes to Gray Powell, this is going to be in my /etc/hosts and in all of the DNS servers under my control: 127.0.0.1 gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 www.gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 m.gizmodo.com 127.0.0.1 gawker.com 127.0.0.1 www.gawker.com 127.0.0.1 m.gawker.com The person at fault is the shithead who…