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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 16,888 posts.

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7841

Other People’s Problems

It’s surprisingly easy to be generous and find solutions to our friend’s problems. Much easier than it is to do it for ourselves. Why? There are two useful reasons, I think. FIRST, beca…

7843

Alaska Airlines to Buy Virgin America for $2.6B

My first airline was started out of frustration. As a young record executive, I travelled the world flying by other airlines, but found the experience dreadful. So in 1984 I chartered one second-hand Boeing 747 and offered flights between London and New York. People thought we were mad and bound to fail quickly…

7846

We created a fake delivery company to get a job

/imagine one day randomly finding yourself in a foreign country thousands of kilometres away from home. Your own country is suddenly at war, and all you have is a backpack hanging off your back. That’s a weird situation to be in. But you have to figure something out. So starting a fake delivery company sounds like the…

7848

YC Updates and Additions

Y Combinator now has 5 major groups—YC Fellowship, YC Core, YC Continuity, YC Research, and Hacker News—and we’re putting one person in charge of each group. Paul Buchheit is taking over for me as managing partner of the core YC program. We’re going to continue doing YC Fellowship (!), and Kevin Hale is going to be…

7850

Selling Bitcoins in Cana­da

In 2013, I bought a few Bitcoins from a dude in a coffee shop, paying with hundred-dollar bills. Later that year I sold enough to get my money back . Then I forgot about them, Bitcoin’s price gyrations occasionally registering in a corner of my mind. But earlier this month I decided to find out if the remainder could…

7852

LibreOffice 7.3

In addition to the majority of code commits being focused on interoperability with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats, there is a wealth of new features targeted at users migrating from Office, to simplify the transition Berlin, February 2, 2022 – LibreOffice 7.3 Community, the new major release of the…

7857

Better than Free (2008)

[I’ve revised and condensed this short essay into an updated version, which you can read on my Substack here: https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/better-than-free] The internet is a copy machine. At its most foundational level, it copies every action, every character, every thought we … Continue reading →

7859

Tacocopter Basics

The Tacocopters are coming. Sure, the original pitch was a clever troll aimed at credulous and impatient fast-food junkies. But the numbers don’t lie – a typical taco weighs less than a pound, and aircraft that can autonomously fly a few dozen ounces of payload to your doorstep are already available for around a…