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A skeptical response to Musk's hyperloop
There is a belief within American media that a successful person can succeed at anything. He (and it’s invariably he) is omnicompetent, and people who question him and laugh at his outlandish…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,308 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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Steve Yegge and Grok
Bryan Summersett's home page.
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Index Investing Makes Markets and Economies More Efficient (2016)
U.S. equity index funds have grown dramatically in recent decades, from a negligible $500MM in assets in the early 1980s to a staggering $4T today. The consensus view in the investment community is that this growth is unsustainable. Indexing, after all, is a form of free-riding, and a market can only support so many…
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“CEO said a thing” journalism
"CEO said a thing!" journalism involves parroting the claims of a business leader or executive with absolutely no context, correction, or challenge whatsoever, no matter how elaborate the delusion.
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Four Magic Words
Long ago, in a parallel universe three doors down and one to the left of our own, OpenAI headquarters found itself in chaos. A klaxon blared overhead as red lights began flashing. A message played over a loud-speaker: “Warning! Warning! This is not a drill! Artificial General Intelligence window
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Raising money for StackOverflow
A few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into our laps, or spend time doing the Sand Hill Road rounds, meet…
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Goodhart’s law isn’t as useful as you might think (2023)
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
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Human Intervention as a Competitive Advantage
Derek Sivers official site. Thoughts on philosophy, culture, self-improvement. Author of Useful Not True, How to Live, Hell Yeah or No, Anything You Want.
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Field experimental evidence of AI on knowledge worker productivity and quality
I think we have an answer on whether AIs will reshape work....
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The Tyranny of ‘The Plan' (2013)
A long, close reading of Poppendieck's talk on how plans quietly become the thing we manage instead of the outcome, from the Empire State Building up.
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Cars and second order consequences
Electric and autonomy are rolling through the car industry, changing everything about it. But though they transform gasoline and car accidents, they could change a lot more besides - everything from cigarettes to parking. It's the second-order consequences that are hardest to see, but most interesti
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On the Road to Recap
Why the Unicorn Financing Market Just Became Dangerous…For All Involved In February of last year, Fortune magazine writers Erin Griffith and Dan Primack declared 2015 “ The Age of the Unicorns ” noting — “Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists.” By…
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Business Requirements are Bullshit
How do you go about gathering business requirements, so you know what to deliver to the customer?
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Finality does not exist in payments
Many people believe some transactions are final. The reality is a bit more complicated, and involves technical, social, and legal factors.
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The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)
Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
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The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development
In the first two parts of this series, we talked about the archetypes that inhabit organizations (Sociopaths, Losers, Clueless), what they do (the Gervais…
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The Bowling Pin strategy
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups
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My Biggest Surprise: How Law Shapes the Business Landscape, and a Patent Puzzle
If there’s one thing I’ve been surprised by while trying to start startups, it’s the extent to which the business landscape is shaped by law. Skin Cancer One of my first serious s…
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Bye, Amazon
May 1 st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19.
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I regret my website redesign
Mistakes I made working with my first design agency.
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“A calculator app? Anyone could make that”
calculator-app - Chad Nauseam Home
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Two new PebbleOS watches
Including my dream smartwatch…
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Amazon's customer service backdoor
As a security conscious user who follows the best practices like: using unique passwords, 2FA, only using a secure computer and being able…