Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 69 posts.
October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed — if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed — and that's too big a…
Mozilla is in an absolute state: high overheads, falling usage of Firefox, questionable sources of revenue and now making big cuts to engineering as their income falls.
[ Updated (06/16/08): Here’s a real-world project review memo , written several years ago, that described (among many other things) the Dead Sea effect. ]
Published December 2, 2020 Since autumn of 2019, I’ve been bearish on the dollar, meaning I have a longish-term outlook towards a weaker dollar. This view began forming when the Federal Reserve cut interest rates in summer 2019, and then the view solidified with a catalyst after an overnight repo rate spike in…
James C. Scott's fascinating and seminal book, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Imp rove the Human Condition Have Failed , examines how, across…
An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept
[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…
The story of how Microsoft embraced and then killed AppGet.
The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.
I felt like I somehow needed fame. In retrospect, there was a lot of self-loathing from tough childhood experiences, and I desperately hoped that love from without (i.e., from masses of other people) would somehow make up for hate from within.
May 2020 Gwern.net newsletter: GPT-3 scaling, implications, deep theory; anime GAN updates, and 1 book review.
There is such a thing as a free lunch
Twitter was thrown into chaos on Wednesday after accounts for some of the world’s most recognizable public figures, executives and celebrities starting tweeting out links to bitcoin scams. Twitter says the attack happened because someone tricked or coerced an employee into providing access to internal Twitter…
A wealth tax will usually have a threshold at which it starts. How much difference would a high threshold make? To model that, we need to make some assumptions about the initial value of your stock and the growth rate. Suppose your stock is initially worth $2 million, and the company's trajectory is as follows: the…
You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming , right? It's a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is -- by design -- no…
Published February 2020 There is currently a short squeeze affecting most of the global economy, slowing its growth. This has been the case well before the impacts from the trade war and the coronavirus. A short squeeze occurs when something that is heavily shorted goes on to rise sharply in price for one reason or […]
April 2008 Umair Haque wrote recently that the reason there aren't more Googles is that most startups get bought before they can change the world.
Donald Norman concludes that simplicity is overrated: “But when it came time for the journalists to review the simple products they had gathered together, they complained that they lacke…
In February, KrebsOnSecurity told the story of a private citizen auctioning off the dangerous domain corp.com for the starting price of $1.7 million . Domain experts called corp.com dangerous because years of testing showed whoever wields it would have access to an unending stream of passwords, email and other…
How TikTok exposed Facebook’s blindspot, thanks to its Chinese roots, and why those Chinese roots make TikTok a genuine concern.
The single best term I’ve learned this year. I want to give you the non-technical definition, and as is my wont, broaden it a bit. Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occur…
Published November 2020 Lately, it has become fashionable to debate what is, or is not, “money-printing” by central banks. This debate is natural, due to the extreme policy nature of 2020, with massive fiscal expenditures, huge increases in central bank balance sheets, and changes in central bank inflation targets…
Google, the Stupidity Amplifier by Greg Egan
This is part 1 of a series where I’ll look at the future costs of clean energy and mobility technologies.
The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
In American innovation through the ages , Jamie Powell wrote: who hasn’t finished a non-fiction book and thought “Gee, that could have bee...
As an early domain name investor, Mike O’Connor had by 1994 snatched up several choice online destinations, including bar.com, cafes.com, grill.com, place.com, pub.com and television.com. Some he sold over the years, but for the past 26 years O’Connor refused to auction perhaps the most sensitive domain in his stable…
