Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,396 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, with Spending Hitting $34B
Soundtrack: In Flames - Colony To further support my independent journalism, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $7 a month or $70 a year. If you’re subscribed to the free newsletter and logged in, you should see at the bottom right hand corner of your screen a little
DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage (2020)
There is such a thing as a free lunch
Status as a Service
Editor's Note 1 : I have no editor. Editor’s Note 2 : I would like to assure new subscribers to this blog that most my posts are not as long as this one. Or as long as my previous one . My long break from posting here means that this piece is a collection of what would’ve normally been a series
Machine intelligence, part 1
This is going to be a two-part post—one on why machine intelligence is something we should be afraid of, and one on what we should do about it. If you’re already afraid of machine intelligence,...
Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
An emoji flipbook presentation by Alex Komoroske about how dysfunctional organizational dyanmics arise even when individuals are well-behaved
Inequality and Skin in the Game
(Chapter from Skin in the Game)
React, Facebook, and the Revocable Patent License. Why It’s a Paper 🐯.
Update(9/25/17): My article about the licensing change.
Ashley's Apple Story
Ashley's Apple Saga
Worldwide, Median Household Income About $10,000
New Gallup global income data estimate the median household income across 131 countries at $9,733, and median per-capita income at $2,920. Incomes in the 10 wealthiest countries are more than 50 times those in the 10 poorest.
The facts about a recent counterfeiting case brought by the U.S. government
In the last few days there have been several stories about the sentencing of Eric Lundgren in a case that began in 2012, and we have received a number of questions about this case and our role in it. Although the case was not one that we brought, the questions raised recently have caused us...
New Search Strategy for Firefox: Promoting Choice & Innovation
Ten years ago, we built Firefox to keep the Internet in each of our hands — to create choice and put people in control of their lives online. Our focus h
How To Legally Own Another Person
Even the church had its hippies –Coase does not need math –Avoid lawyers during Oktoberfest –The expat life ends one day –People who have…
Undergraduation
March 2005 (Parts of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions.) Recently I've had several emails from computer science undergrads asking what to do in college. I might not be the best source of advice, because I was a philosophy major in college. But I took so many CS classes that most CS…
US Rail Construction Costs
Update 2017/7/1: this is the most linked-to post of mine about construction costs, even though the dataset here is relatively small. You can see links to more posts, with more datapoints, on my sta…
Community and Diversity
[I hope that it’s obvious from what follows that this is a statement of personal opinion, not an official Mozilla document.]
Idea to Paying Customers in 7 Weeks: How We Did It
Learn how paying customers in 7 days became an idea. This post is an overview the idea to paying customers in 7 weeks and how we did it.
It’s Time to Build
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one…
Teen on Musk's DOGE team graduated from 'The Com'
Wired reported this week that a 19-year-old working for Elon Musk ‘s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was given access to sensitive US government systems even though his past association with cybercrime communities should have precluded him from gaining the necessary security clearances to do so…
Reasons not to become famous
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.
ChatGPT can now call Wolfram Alpha
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.
Too Clever by Half
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…