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Seeing like a bank
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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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DHH: Let It All Out
Casey's reporting for The Verge brought some of the dirty laundry that helped motivate our change of direction regarding societal politics at Basecamp onto the public record. It erased part of that fine line we try to toe between sharing as much of the inner workings at the company as possible while respecting the…
154
In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome (2001)
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
155
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate
I watched 15 hours of COVID origins arguments so you don't have to - but you should!
156
The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing
The current version of this article is The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing, Version 3.0.
157
I Am Deleting the Blog
[EDIT 2/13/21: This post is originally from June 2020, but there’s been renewed interest in it because the NYT article involved just came out. This post says the NYT was going to write a posi…
158
An Open Letter to Intel
Thanks for putting a version of MINIX inside the ME-11 management engine chip used on almost all recent desktop and laptop computers in the world. I guess that makes MINIX the most widely used computer operating system in the world, even more than Windows, Linux, or MacOS. And I didn't even know until I read a press…
159
The FAA’s Hiring Scandal
Inside a decade of struggle to bring a scandal to light
160
The Ultimate Guide to Inflation
Originally Published: May 2021 Inflation is a controversial and complex topic. This article looks at 150 years of data across multiple countries to provide a general idea of what inflation is, what to look for, and how to invest with inflationary and deflationary risks in mind. Read from the beginning, or jump to the…
161
Selling to the Fortune 500, Government, and Other Lovecraftian Horrors
You really can sell SaaS/software to large enterprises, despite your perceived inability to do so. Read on for how.
162
Debanking (and Debunking?)
Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.
163
The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millenial
A few months ago, while dining at Veggie Grill (one of the new breed of Chipotle-class fast-casual restaurants), a phrase popped unbidden into my head: premium…
164
In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome (2001)
Time for a pop quiz. 1. Code Reuse is: a) Goodb) Bad 2. Reinventing the Wheel is: a) Goodb) Bad 3. The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome is: a) Goodb) Bad Of course, everybody knows that you should always…
165
Architecture astronauts take over
It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work t…
166
Against Tulip Subsidies
I. Imagine a little kingdom with a quaint custom: when a man likes a woman, he offers her a tulip; if she accepts, they are married shortly thereafter. A couple who marries sans tulip is considered…
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Aggregation Theory
The disruption caused by the Internet in industry after industry has a common theoretical basis described by Aggregation Theory.
169
Popularity – Brendan Eich
It seems (according to one guru , but coming from this source, it’s a left-handed compliment) that JavaScript is finally popular .
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Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project
I received an official response from Replit and my open-source project will be back up soon; please see the bottom of the blog post for an update. The rest of the content here will remain as a historical artifact.
172
The Day AppGet Died
The story of how Microsoft embraced and then killed AppGet.
173
Why is it hard to buy things that work well?
There's a cocktail party version of the efficient markets hypothesis I frequently hear that's basically, "markets enforce efficiency, so it's not possible that a company can have some major inefficiency and survive". We've previously discussed Marc Andreessen's quote that tech hiring can't be inefficient here and here…
174
How AirBnB Became a Billion Dollar Company
Detailed breakdown explaining questionable marketing techniques used by AirBnB. By David Gooden, marketing expert & MN luxury realtor.
175
37signals Leaves the Cloud
Basecamp has had one foot in the cloud for well over a decade, and HEY has been running there exclusively since it was launched two years ago. We've run extensively in both Amazon's cloud and Google's cloud. We've run on bare virtual machines, we've run on Kubernetes. We've seen all the cloud has to offer, and tried…
176
The True Cost of Commuting
It was a beautiful evening in my neighborhood, and I was enjoying one of my giant homebrews on a deck chair I had placed in the middle of the street, as part of a nearby block’s Annual Stree…
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DHH Is Worse Than I Thought
DHH's politics are not normal. Maybe they used to be, I don't know, but as of right now the dude is way outside of what most people would consider moral or acceptable.
179
The Engineer/Manager Pendulum
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story).
180
Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!
When you’re trying to get people to switch from a competitor to your product, you need to understand barriers to entry, and you need to understand them a lot better than you think, or people …