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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
On April 2nd, 2025, our president announced major new taxes on imports from foreign countries (“tariffs”), ranging from 10% to 49%. The stated goal is to bring manufacturing back to the United States and to “make America wealthy again”. These tariffs will not work. In fact, they may even do the opp
Let engineers learn cloud without jeopardizing their personal well-being.
Wolfram plugin gives computationally accurate answers to ChatGPT queries using Wolfram's data knowledgebase and language. Custom visualizations are given as well. Stephen Wolfram explains how it works.
I’ve started nine firms and I’m, generously, 3-4-2 (win-lose-tie). In retrospect, and I think about this a lot, the only reliable forward-looking indicator of our firm’s success or failure was … timing. Specifically, the part of the economic cycle at founding. The firms we started in recessions had an easier time…
How Delve managed to falsely convince hundreds of customers they were compliant and then lied about it when exposed and called out
A few years ago I was in a meeting with developers and someone asked a simple question: “What’s the right framework for a new Windows desktop app?” Dead silence. One person sugges…
Building in consumer hardware as a software engineer
A new email-based extortion scheme apparently is making the rounds, targeting Web site owners serving banner ads through Google’s AdSense program. In this scam, the fraudsters demand bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher’s ads with so much bot and junk traffic that Google’s automated anti-fraud…
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I’ve been on Nexuses and Pixels since Nexus one. Stock-or-nothing was me. However, the mobile phone market has become a bit stale and…
Why senior developers talk in terms of complexity while the rest of the business is worried about uncertainty. And what to do about it now that AI is in the picture.
For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.
A security architect with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) alleges that employees from Elon Musk ‘s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) transferred gigabytes of sensitive data from agency case files in early March, using short-lived accounts configured to leave few traces of network activity. The NLRB…
Update (9 Apr 2026): Another one. A helpful person sent in Microsoft 365 Copilot for US Government. That's 81. Chart updated.
The company’s motto used to be “Don’t be evil.” Things have changed.
How big is YouTube? It's not easy to find out, but we did two years of research and figured out how...
Writing advice: some nonfiction fails because it opens with background instead of a hook—readers leave before reaching the good material. Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic interesting, lead with that, and let the background follow once you’ve earned attention.
My family is pledging another $400,000 1 to the Zig Software Foundation (ZSF). This brings our total pledged support for ZSF to $700,000, after our initial donation in 2024 .
On April 9, 2025, someone risked $2.5 million on SPY call options—and walked away with $70+ million in under an hour. The trade was placed at 1:01 pm. At 1:30 pm, Trump announced tariff pauses. The market exploded upward. These options that cost 85 cents were suddenly worth more than $25.
No single browser vendor represents ”the future of the web.” Each ships in line with its own business priorities. And that's a good thing.
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
I've worked at various tech companies: from "traditional" shops and consultancies, through an investment bank, to high-growth tech firms. I've also talked with software engineers working at startups, banking, automotive, big tech, and more "traditional" companies. This mix had a healthy sample of Silicon-Valley…
Years ago, I used Google Talk with almost everyone I talked to. Nowadays, I talk with almost no one on Hangouts. Google Talk has changed from
For the past few weeks, I've been playing with gpt-5.6-luna . It is shockingly capable, fast, and smart. I regularly see it do ~100 tps, and rip around my codebase, email, and knowledge base.
