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Tech Industry & Business

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

Any year
1861

Diseconomies of scale in fraud, spam, support, and moderation

If I ask myself a question like "I'd like to buy an SD card; who do I trust to sell me a real SD card and not some fake, Amazon or my local Best Buy?", of course the answer is that I trust my local Best Buy 1 more than Amazon, which is notorious for selling counterfeit SD cards. And if I ask who do I trust more, my…

1875

The Post-YC Slump

At the end of a YC batch, the general consensus among the partners is that about 25% of the companies are on a trajectory that could lead to a multi-billion dollar company. Of course, only a...

1876

You Are Not Paid to Write Code

“Taco Bell Programming” is the idea that we can solve many of the problems we face as software engineers with clever reconfigurations of the same basic Unix tools. The name comes from the fact that every item on the menu at Taco Bell, a company which generates almost $2 billion in revenue annually, is simply a…

1877

Planning and estimating large-scale software projects

This weekend I was talking with a friend about how I'd planned and estimated a huge software project in one of my previous jobs. By that I mean not something which can be done by a single team in a sprint or two, but something which requires several teams, across several quarters of effort, involving many other…

1880

T-Mobile: Breach Exposed SSN/DOB of 40M+ People

T-Mobile is warning that a data breach has exposed the names, date of birth, Social Security number and driver’s license/ID information of more than 40 million current, former or prospective customers who applied for credit with the company. The acknowledgment came less than 48 hours after millions of the stolen…

1883

Cisco to release BSD-licensed H.264 stack

As I noted last year , one of the biggest challenges to open source software has been the patent status of video codecs. The most popular codec, H.264 , is patent-encumbered and licensed by MPEG LA , under terms that prevent distributing it with open source products including Firefox. Cisco has announced today that…

1890

The US digital service

A lot of us complain about how the government is not very good at technology. The U.S. Digital Service is actually trying to do something about it, by applying the way startups build products to...