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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 601 posts.
Why I Left Google
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What Business is Wall Street In?
The only people who know what business Wall Street is in are the high frequency and automated traders. They know what business Wall Street is in better than everyone else. To traders, whether day traders or high frequency or somewhere in between, Wall Street has nothing to do with creating capital for businesses, its…
My Brush With a Patent Troll
Back when the web was only a limited affair and the most exciting thing on it in the realm of imagery was the ‘coffee pot webcam’ I came up with a way to make a real live video stream that worked in a browser. A few months earlier I’d made a very basic version of this using ftp upload of images to a server and then a…
Making Yourself a CEO
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
iBookstore rejects Holly Lisle's writing course because she mentions Amazon
Lesson 6 includes my “Amazon River” technique, in which I show students how I use a couple of useful bits of Amazon’s website software and the Amazon database to figure out how to find alternative genres for their books if they aren’t having any luck selling it in the genre they wrote it for. I’ve successfully used…
No I won't sign your NDA, here's why.
The other day I got to chatting with a lovely woman who reached out after reading my blog. She was interested in talking about an idea she had, how she might get it off the ground, and if I might …
Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name
A story about Facebook went around twitter last night that provoked quite a reaction in privacy advocates like me: Facebook, it seems, is experimenting with getting people to ‘snitch’ o…
Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting
I don't remember seeing this before at the bottom of the Craigslist posting form. I'm guessing this is the result of the Padmapper debacle?...
The App Store Nightmare
Edit: The specific error message I was getting is a bug in the App Store relating to disabling SpotLight on your Mac. Once this was fixed, apps from my Swedish region again started updating on the …
A $5000 Chair
This the story of a black faux-leather chair, the kind you can buy at Walmart for $99, that ended up costing me five grand. Very early in the days of Distil, my partner Steve and I hooked up with t…
The Pirate Bay Is The World’s Most Efficient Public Library
The way media piracy works is that one person or group purchases a work, and then shares it with millions of other people. This...
Agile: 5 years later and you're still doing it wrong
Which values of the Agile Manifesto do you find foolish? If you're going to tar and feather it(Agile), maybe you should start at the source.
The Google Nexus Q Is Baffling
David Pogue tests the Google Nexus Q home entertainment device and finds himself bewildered.
Why Facebook is killing Silicon Valley
We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energi…
Fred Wilson's response to "Paul Graham's Letter to YC Companies"
I don't disagree with PG when he says that Facebook's IPO performance (or lack thereof) has the potential to impact valuations in startup land. I think it will be particularly impactful on the late stage and secondary markets where most of the IPO valuation speculation is happening. But let's put Facebook's current…
Don't write on the whiteboard
Quill Grid: The Starlink for AI becomes a network. An optional, opt-in distributed AI grid where idle Quill One devices share spare capacity, earn credits, and donate AI hours.
Amazon Prime members buy twice as much, don't compare on price
Removing friction is critical to increasing e-commerce conversion and shipping costs play a big part. That's why Amazon's Prime program generates big results by...
Why Tarsnap doesn't use Glacier
On the surface, Tarsnap sounds like the perfect use case for Glacier. Out of every TB of data stored on Tarsnap, in any given month approximately 100 GB of data will be deleted, while only 33 GB of data will be downloaded; in other words, Tarsnap is very much a "write once, read maybe " storage system. Tarsnap's…
Elon Musk and the Hyperloop
For a while now there have been tantalizing hints that Elon Musk is at it again. His usual way of approaching a problem is to look at an industry, find some fatal flaw in it, fix that flaw and then leave everybody else in the dust, wondering why they didn’t do what he did. He’s one of the most interesting people on…
One hiring filter that works
In a fairly popular blog post, Raganwald advocates against using various heuristics while filtering out resumes. For the most part, I agree with him. Since it's hard to find good programmers, false negatives are very costly compared to the cost of a false positive (a wasted interview). But I have …