Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 50 posts.
A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are commoditized, in order to harvest most of the consumer surplus; discussion and examples.
Version 5.0 of Microsoft’s flagship spreadsheet program Excel came out in 1993. It was positively huge: it required a whole 15 megabytes of hard drive space. In those days we could still reme…
The smartest people in the world use mental models to make intelligent decisions, avoid stupidity, and increase productivity. Let's take a look at how ...
Lately I’ve been doing some career counseling for people off Twitter (long story).
Developer compensation has skyrocketed since the demise of the Google et al. wage-suppressing no-hire agreement , to the point where compensation rivals and maybe even exceeds compensation in traditionally remunerative fields like law, consulting, etc. In software, "senior" dev salary at a high-paying tech company is…
It was 7am when my phone rang. Instead of an alarm, it was my recruiter disturbing me from a pleasant dream. It was too early for a phone call or to be caught off guard, so I did not answer. I went to
Pretty much every day, I get a reminder from someone about how little people know about their exposure in data breaches. Often, it's after someone has searched Have I Been Pwned [https://haveibeenpwned.com/] (HIBP) and found themselves pwned somewhere or other. Frequently, it's some long-forgotten site
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and…
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares his unique template for how debt crises work.
Since 2014 this blog has extensively covered the wireless networks built by high-frequency trading (HFT) firms or network providers to reduce latencies between the different exchanges around the wo…
Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, E…
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
Understanding the differences between aggregators and platforms matters for companies interacting with them and also regulators considering antitrust.
How Colleges Make More Money Than God By Giving It Away
[I am not an economist or an expert on this topic. This is my attempt to figure out what economists and experts think so I can understand the issue, and I’m writing it down to speed your goin…
Some dumb lawyer figured it would be fun to give GDPR trolls a form letter to use to inflict maximum damage on unsuspecting companies. The reason why this is dumb is simple: the GDPR serves a legitimate need but by decreasing the signal:noise ratio handcrafted requests from users with a legitimate concern can get…
I get a lot of pitches for "Steam competitors." 99% of them are doomed to failure, but the vast majority are doomed before they even start.
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?
FINAL UPDATE (25-March-2022): Because of this article, we often keep getting asked if we still use GCP and if we would recommend it to…
The Windows division no longer exists at Microsoft, marking the end to a four-year process of changing Microsoft’s culture.
I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer: We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack Overflow. As of
Midlife is tough: the idealism of youth has faded, as has inevitably some of its fitness and vigor. At the same time, the responsibilities of adulthood have grown: the kids that were such a fresh adventure when they were infants and toddlers are now grappling with their own transition into adulthood – and you try to…
[Translations: Japanese] “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky I think this observation is brilliant. It reminds me of the clarity of the Peter Principle, which says that a person in … Continue reading →
The title of this review was carefully chosen, not glibly. I want what is best for VR and all other technologies on the Reality–Virtuality Continuum, Magic Leap included. Unfortunately, their cur…
Background This is a follow-up from an earlier post, “Stablecoins are doomed to fail,” from December 10th. I’ll keep this one short. Long have I been a critic of the “stable…
