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Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 50 posts.
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The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero (2022)
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
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The Iron Law of Bureaucracy (2010)
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
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The man who killed Google Search?
Wanna listen to this story instead? Check out this week's Better Offline podcast, "The Man That Destroyed Google Search," available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. UPDATE: Prabhakar has now been deposed as head of search, read here for more details. If you liked
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The FAA's Hiring Scandal: A Quick Overview
An Air Traffic Control nightmare
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Will US companies hire fewer engineers due to Section 174?
It’s rare that a tax change causes panic across the tech industry, but it’s happening in the US. If Section 174 tax changes stay, the US will be one of the least desirable countries to launch startups
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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!
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Debanking (and Debunking?)
Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.
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Why conventional wisdom on health care is wrong (a primer) (2020)
Rich countries consume much higher quantities via higher intensity/tech. It's NOT high and rising: wages, profits, administration, encounters, etc. Income well explains American behavior here too.
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DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)
There is such a thing as a free lunch
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The Shameful Defenestration of Tim
On Tim Peters' recent suspension as a Python core developer
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People can read their manager's mind (2015)
People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Managers often say they'll reward something – perhaps they even believe it. But then they proceed to reward different things.
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Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms (2021)
In the past couple of months a couple of big social media sites have changed their terms or introduced suspicious paid plans and it has caught content creators off guard.
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Facing reality about the EU is a core requirement for good management
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Anatomy of a credit card rewards program
Credit card rewards are mostly funded out of interchange, a fee paid by businesses to accept cards.
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XZ Backdoor: Times, damned times, and scams
Some timezone observations on the recently discovered backdoor hidden in an xz tarball.
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How Does OpenAI Survive?
Throughout the last year I’ve written in detail about the rot in tech — the spuriousness of charlatans looking to accumulate money and power, the desperation of the most powerful executives to maintain control and rapacious growth, and the speciousness of the latest hype cycle — but at the end of
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The Subprime AI Crisis
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
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I sold TinyPilot, my first successful business
Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I’ve sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.
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Forbes Marketplace: The Parasite SEO Company Trying to Devour Its Host
Are you sick of Forbes appearing in search results? For topics that Forbes doesn’t have any expertise in? Here’s the organic rankings for “best pet insurance”: Forbes ranks #2. Not sure a business website knows how pet insurance actually works. But okay. They also have the #1 ranking for best cbd gummies: Because it’s…
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Reflections on Palantir
A retrospective of an eight-year stint.
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Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything…
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If WordPress is to survive, Matt Mullenweg must be removed
I believe Matt Mullenweg's abuses of his unilateral, unchecked powers prove that it is in the best interest of the entire WordPress community that he be removed from power immediately.
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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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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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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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Response to DHH
I’ve taken this post down. I’ve been attacked so much the past few days; the most vicious, personal, hateful words poisoned my brain, and the original version of this post was mean. I am so sorry. …
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OpenAI and Anthropic Revenue Breakdown
Breaking down revenue growth, the consumer subscription businesses and the importance of partnerships to the API business