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Tech Industry & Business

The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 16,882 posts.

Any year
2223

Not an Amazon Problem

The NY Times profile quotes me saying “We don’t really have an Amazon problem. What we have is a deep, societal problem with an unacceptable imbalance of power and wealth.” But the URL contained the string “amazon-critic-tim-bray” and the HTML <title> says “Tim Bray Is Not Done With Amazon”. I feel like I’m being…

2224

How Not to Die (2007)

August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…

2233

The costs of microservices (2020)

An application typically starts its life as a monolith. Take a modern backend of a single-page Javascript application, for example - it starts out as a single stateless web service that exposes a RESTful HTTP API and uses a relational database as a backing store. The service is composed of a number of components, or…

2236

Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source

The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920. It's hard to overstate the importance of the work the Foundation does; they provide hardware which keeps the FreeBSD project running, they fund a myriad of independent projects, and they have…

2239

Platforms want to be utilities, self-govern like empires

Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the founding missions of…

2241

The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism

I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of

2243

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…

2244

What really happens inside a dating app

I have been working inside a dating app for a few months and there are a lot of interesting things. This article is going to be without any structure as there are many things to say. I will mostly ignore homosexual interactions. Not because they don't exist, just because it …