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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 616 posts.

2010
2

What Happened to Yahoo

August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the…

3

My Thoughts on Oracle v Google

As you've probably heard by now, Oracle has decided to file suit against Google, claiming multiple counts of infringement against Java or JVM patents and copyrights they acquired when they assimilated Sun Microsystems this past year. Since I'm unlikely to keep my mouth shut about even trivial matters, something this…

6

Wikileaks To Leak 5000 Open Source Java Projects

Java's not even *fun* enough to laugh at. I expect after your sabbatical you would be trolling at Scala or Haskell or Go ! What's next ? Jokes about making GUIs in VB ? Pshh. Seriously though, I can get the attack on privateness and finality. From someone with a strong dynamic tropism, that makes sense. But that good…

7

How I Screwed Up My Google Acquisition

I began building a web-based version of PowerPoint called Preezo back in the Spring of 2005 after switching the direction of my angel-funded startup for the third time in less than a year. Prior to that I had been working on a web collaboration concept akin to JotSpot , but after awakening to the the potential of AJAX…

17

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…

19

What We Look for in Founders

(I wrote this for Forbes, who asked me to write something about the qualities we look for in founders. In print they had to cut the last item because they didn't have room.) 1. Determination This has turned out to be the most important quality in startup founders. We thought when we started Y Combinator that the most…

27

Why Free Plans Don’t Work

The following is a guest article by Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch . Not too long ago it seemed like every product I knew was offering some sort of free plan. The strategy was brilliant: get loads of people using your product and eventually turn them into paying customers. Everywhere I looked the

28

Startup Ideas Every Nerd Has (That Never Work)

Over the years I have spent a lot of time brainstorming startup ideas with people who are (asymptotically) as nerdy as me. For some reasons, every time I brainstorm with a new set of people, the following ideas come up. This suggests that either all nerds think alike, or alternatively, that they are unsolved problems…