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8,458 articles · Business

Technology

A 65-year-old programming language called COBOL still quietly runs over $3 trillion in banking transactions every single day — and because the original engineers are retiring fast, banks are scrambling to pay younger coders fortunes just to keep the ancient code from collapsing

COBOL remains embedded in banking and government systems because replacing old code means replacing decades of business logic, not just a programming language.

Business

Stripe's payment infrastructure was built in a Palo Alto apartment by two Irish brothers from Limerick who, before they turned 25, had convinced Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to back them, and the company's annual payment volume now exceeds the entire GDP of Ireland by more than three times

Stripe processed $1.4 trillion in payment volume in 2024 — roughly 2.6 times Ireland's GDP — and the founders built the first version in a Palo Alto apartment before either turned 25.

Business

Booking.com runs well over a thousand simultaneous A/B tests at any moment from its Amsterdam headquarters, on an experimentation platform engineers built in the mid-2000s and have patched continuously without ever fully replacing, and a single button colour test passed into company folklore as the change that reportedly earned more than its first three years of trading combined

Inside Booking.com's Amsterdam engineering floors, a homemade experimentation framework from 2007 quietly runs tens of thousands of parallel A/B tests, turning fractions of a percent into billions in bookings.

Business

Adyen processes payments for Uber, Spotify, eBay, and Microsoft from an Amsterdam canal house where the engineering team still eats lunch at a single long table, and the company went public worth €7 billion with fewer staff than a midsize hotel

Adyen processes payments for Uber, Spotify, eBay and Microsoft from a 17th-century Amsterdam canal house where engineers still share one long lunch table — and went public at €7 billion with fewer staff than a midsize hotel.

Business

Norway's sovereign wealth fund owns roughly 1.5% of every listed company on Earth, and the team that decides how it votes on 9,000 annual shareholder resolutions is smaller than the staff of a single Oslo restaurant

Norges Bank Investment Management runs the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, holds roughly 1.5% of every listed company on Earth, and processes 9,000 shareholder meetings a year with a corporate governance team you could fit around three dinner tables.

Business

The UK's Online Safety Act gives Ofcom the power to fine platforms 10% of their global revenue, which for Meta alone would be over $16 billion, and the enforcement unit responsible for issuing those fines has fewer than 50 staff

The UK's Online Safety Act gives Ofcom theoretical penalty powers larger than the GDP of small countries. The team that actually issues those fines has fewer than 50 staff — and Meta is now in the High Court trying to shrink the formula.