Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 64 posts.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
A core component of making great decisions is understanding previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.
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October 2008 The economic situation is apparently so grim that some experts fear we may be in for a stretch as bad as the mid seventies. When Microsoft and Apple were founded. As those examples suggest, a recession may not be such a bad time to start a startup. I'm not claiming it's a particularly good time either…
The structural reasons why banks sometimes behave bizarrely in interactions with customers, like forgetting things which customers tell them.
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…
When you buy a USB charger, how do you know if you're getting a safe, high-quality charger for your money? You can't tell from the outside...
why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time
Wolfram plugin gives computationally accurate answers to ChatGPT queries using Wolfram's data knowledgebase and language. Custom visualizations are given as well. Stephen Wolfram explains how it works.
Yesterday, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were fired from the Board of Directors of OpenAI.
Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car's digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare – but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist…
In 2011, I left my job as the second employee at Pinterest — before I vested any of my stock — to work on what I thought would be my life's work...
Here we go again. I started another company. The money is in the bank.
This is a story consisting of several little building blocks and they occurred spread out in time and in different places. It is a story that shows with clarity how our current system with CVE Ids and lots of power given to NVD is a completely broken system. CVE-2020-19909 On August 25 2023, we got … Continue reading…
Accessing Wolfram|Alpha's computational knowledge with ChatGPT--an ideal combination of precise computation with human-like expression of ideas. Stephen Wolfram explains how.
This is a series of pages that guide you through the creation and operation of a successful consulting business. I’ve written this after running a fairly successful consultancy business in the mid-90’s and reviving this business in 2008. I’m primarily active in software, so some of the things in here will be skewed in…
A brief overview of what money laundering is, what financial institutions do about it, and why.
I joined Google in October 2005, and handed in my resignation 18 years later. Last week was my last week at Google.
The end of a dramatic weekend in tech is that OpenAI has split and Microsoft is partnered with one and has hired the other; this is the ultimate failure case of what should have been a for-profit c…
Since declaring our intention to leave the cloud in October, we've been busy at work making it so. After a brief detour down a blind alley with an enterprise Kubernetes provider, we found our stride building our own tools, and successfully moved the first small application out of the cloud a few weeks ago. Now our…
20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired . I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:
Credit card debt is the waste stream of consumer finance. The debt collection industry ends up being sordid, for complex structural and microeconomic reasons.
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Digg was having a rough year. Our CEO left the day before I joined. Senior engineers ghosted out the door, dampening productivity and pulling their remaining friends. We had only one remaining shot at revival, launching our two-years in the making rewrite: Digg v4. It did not go as planned.
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.
I saved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes. This is more money than I've made for my employers over the course of my entire career because this industry is a sham. I clicked about five buttons.
Here's a fun experiment to try. Take an open source project such as yt-dlp and try to find it from a very generic term like "youtube downloader". You won't be able to find it because of all of the content farms that try to rank at the top for that term. Even though yt-dlp is probably actually what you want for a tool…
