Best of 2009

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2009. 1,923 posts.

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1630

Virtual Mafia in Online Worlds

If you allow players in an online world to penalize each other, you open the door to extortion: One of the features that supported user socialization in the game was the ability to declare that another user was a trusted friend. The feature involved a graphical display that showed the faces of users who had declared…

1642

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition

In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number…