Topics /

Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 705 posts.

2015
302

EFF Outlines Plan to Fix the Broken Patent System

San Francisco - The U.S. patent system is in crisis, but there are clear steps Congress and the White House can take to mitigate the impact of vague patents, patent trolls, and a weak legal process to protect competition and creativity, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) explains in a new...

314

Thunderbird Usage Continues to Grow

We’re happy to report that Thunderbird usage continues to expand. Mozilla measures program usage by Active Daily Installations (ADI), which is the number of pings that Mozilla servers receive as installations do their daily plugin block-list update. This is not the same as the number of active users, since some users…

315

A Decade at Google

One of the key challenges you face in an industrial research lab is how to choose your projects. You want your projects to be interesting research but also contribute to your company. As a junior researcher, you’re typically in the situation of choosing a project to join, while later in your career you are expected to…

316

The Electric Car

The electric car is going to take over the world. Soon. Let me explain. 75% of US consumers and over 85% of US millennials own smartphones. Perhaps more amazing is that 1/4 of people in the...

317

Joining a Different YC

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining Y Combinator full-time. My job is to help our companies make hardware people want faster and better than ever before. Fortunately, our alumni are the best resource in the world for this: they’ve built some of the most innovative startups of the last decade. Coupled with our…

318

YC Open Office Hours

Earlier this fall, we announced our first Open Office Hours [https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/yc-open-office-hours-for-black-and-hispanic-founders] where founders got to meet one-on-one with YC partners. We piloted the program with Black and Latino founders, over 650 founders applied in under a week, and we were able…

325

Why Red Hat Acquired Ansible

Today, we announced a definitive agreement to acquire Ansible, a popular IT automation tool launched in early 2013. Like in any acquisition, customers and partners will likely have a number of questions, so let me get straight to the point and cover the top three questions I anticipate: Why an IT automation solution?…

326

How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang (2013)

Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. Drawing on data from the US, Germany and the UK, Alexandre Afonso looks at how…