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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 776 posts.

2024
93

How America's universities became debt factories

This essay first appeared in my newsletter. Sign up here if interested in F'ing up the status quo and fixing education. Here's a puzzle: how do you create a trillion-dollar debt bubble that can't be popped? Answer: make student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy. Now, here's a trickier one: how do you fix this mess…

94

Embezzlers Are Nice People (2017)

We spend a lot of time suing embezzlers. All over the world. Week in and week out. Big embezzlers, small embezzlers, smart embezzlers and very smart embezzlers… That’s right, no dumb embezzlers because almost all the embezzlers we encounter are smart. Some are very smart. Some are brilliant. And, almost always, most…

98

Buy payphones and retire

Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though, and it…

100

Leaving LinkedIn

What if your dedication to doing things right clashed with your company's fast pace? Chris Krycho faced this very question at LinkedIn. His journey was marked by challenges: from the nuances of remote work to the struggle of influencing company culture, and a critical incident that put his principles to the test…

101

OpenVoice: Versatile instant voice cloning

Discover OpenVoice: Instant voice cloning technology that replicates voices from short audio clips. Supports multiple languages, emotion and accent control, and cross-lingual cloning. Efficient and cost-effective, outperforming commercial APIs. Explore the future of AI voice synthesis.

103

Move Fast and Abandon Things

Maybe it’s the change of weather. Fall often finds me looking backward, to the past — and anyway it is as good excuse as any as to why I have found myself peering into old hard drives trying to recover old bits and bytes from games that I wrote some thirty-five years ago or so.

104

The end of Airplane.dev

I worked at Airplane, an internal tooling startup, for nearly two years. Earlier this year, it was announced that the company was being acquired by Airtable and that the product would be shut down. In this blog post, I want to explain what happened from my perspective as a former employee.

114

Care Doesn't Scale

I met a social worker whose job was to look after four orphaned children. She’d alternate with her coworkers spending 24 hours at a time living with the kids, effectively acting as their parent. The children, unsurprisingly, had a lot of trauma and so her job was certainly not an easy one, but she found it deeply…

115

Why Gumroad Didn't Choose Htmx

In this essay, Sahil Lavingia, CEO of Gumroad, explains why the company decided against using htmx for its new project, Helper, in favor of React and Next.js. He shares the challenges faced with htmx, including issues with developer experience, user experience limitations, scalability, and AI tool support. While…

118

Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel

By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much…

119

Sourcegraph went dark

Towards the end of my mid-2019 job search, I was down to joining the Google Go team or Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph ultimately won due to cultural factors - the most important of which was the ability to build 100% in the open . All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were…