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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 622 posts.
Let’s play a game. I have a coin that lands heads 60% of the time and tails 40% of the time. You have $25 and can bet on either side of the coin — every time you’re right you double your bet, and every time you are wrong you lose it.
Norton 360 , one of the most popular antivirus products on the market today, has installed a cryptocurrency mining program on its customers’ computers. Norton’s parent firm says the cloud-based service that activates the program and allows customers to profit from the scheme — in which the company keeps 15 percent of…
The Kroger-Albertsons supermarket deal is uglier than you might expect. The "special cash division" of $4 billion may be intended to get around antitrust enforcers.
Some folks claim that Apple's mandated inadequacy for browsers and their engines is somehow beneficial to the cause of ensuring a diverse pool of web engines. Nothing could be farther from the truth, but to understand why, we need to understand how browsers are funded. With that understanding, we can see that not only…
New data on the Sideways effect
An anecdotal account of my experience writing and selling "India World" to Tor.com
Michael Thaddeus Professor of Mathematics mt324@columbia.edu thaddeus@michaelthaddeus.org February 2022, revised March 2022
Life is to short to work on things you hate
Clever Hans and how corporate AI plays the media, in 2022
Agricultural economists manipulated data to block Congress from acting on high beef prices and the destruction of independent cattle ranching. Why? Because they think monopolies are good.
Financial theory demonstrates that the concept is fundamentally flawed
There’s no more denying it: if you look at W3Techs CMS market share numbers, WordPress’ market share is shrinking, losing 0.4% market share since February. I do
July 31 st 2022 has come and gone. Hacker Lab has closed but the community in Sacramento and the need for these kinds of inspiring and supportive makerspaces is still very much alive.
When I decided to write and sell my first ebook, The Tech Resume Inside Out [https://thetechresume.com/], I expected to learn about the writing process. How to create a high-quality publication. How to work with editors. Designing a cover and illustrations for the book. And I have, indeed,
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
Shorter title: SBF, FTX, WTF?
In 1995 Netscape partnered with Sun Microsystems to create interactive websites . Famously Brendan Eich spent only 10 days to create the first version of JavaScript - a dynamic programming language with a roughly syntactic lineage from Sun’s Java language. As a result of this partnership Sun held the trademark…
This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →
Why brainstorming doesn't work - and why to do nothing instead
Effective next Thursday,...
The sex industry has pioneered every new communications tool since the printing press: in my own lifetime, I've watched it take the lead in VCRs, desktop publishing, BBSes, digital text, digital images, digital videos, live streaming services, cryptocurrency, and VR. It would be easy to conclude that being interested…
And other observations from our Joe Rogan Experience experience
The hedge fund's finances appear to rest on the same scheme that destroyed Celsius Network. Will it work out any differently for Sam Bankman-Fried?
The Wolfram Institute will pursue opportunities in scientific research based on a new multicomputational paradigm found during a project to develop a fundamental theory of physics.
How would we think about retention if we could visualise the full impact of someone leaving our team?
Which companies pay for oncall, and how much? Philosophies across the industry for paying for standby duty and numbers from 80 companies.
Saying yes is easy—at first. It makes you feel better. And it makes you feel like you can do anything! And the person you're saying yes to also gets a happy feeling because you're going to do something for them. Saying no is hard. It's an admission you can't do something. And worse still, you're disappointing someone…
The pitfalls of analysis paralysis
Nuclear power plants produce around 20% of US electricity and the majority in France. Yet the industry is stagnant. Let's look at why.
When U.S. consumers have their online bank accounts hijacked and plundered by hackers, U.S. financial institutions are legally obligated to reverse any unauthorized transactions as long as the victim reports the fraud in a timely manner. But new data released this week suggests that for some of the nation’s largest…
