1951
How to get your first ten customers (2013)
Preface: the assumption for this essay is that you’re building a B2B app, and you have something built but you’re having trouble getting people to pay for
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,397 posts.
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1952
1953
Why you should not pirate Google’s geo APIs
Picture by Scott Vandehey This morning I ran across a wonderful open source project called “Crime doesn’t climb”, analyzing how crime rates vary with altitude in San Francisco. Th…
1954
Retail, search and Amazon’s $40B ‘advertising’ business
Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google?
1955
1956
Are the costs of AI agents also rising exponentially? (2025)
There is an extremely important question about the near-future of AI that almost no-one is asking. We’ve all seen the graphs from METR showing that the length of tasks AI agents can perform has been growing exponentially over the last 7 years. While GPT-2 could only do software engineering tasks t
1957
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1960
Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record
I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as much as you'd expect…
1961
PostgreSQL community impact of 2nd Quadrant purchase
This blog is about my work on the Postgres open source database, and is published on Planet PostgreSQL. PgLife allows monitoring of all Postgres community activity.
1962
1963
Diaspora's Curse - Jason Fried
Diaspora, the “open Facebook alternative” (NYT story for background if you aren’t familiar), has raised Over $170,000 from over 4600 people in just a few weeks. All for an idea. That’s an impressive start if victory was measured in press coverage, cash, and cool. HereR…
1964
We Have to Start Over: From Atom to Zed
From the Zed Blog: Thorsten interviews co-founders Nathan, Max, Antonio about the vision and the technological choices behind Zed, how they went from Atom and Electron to Rust and GPUs with Zed.
1965
1966
Why Silicon Valley Works
I wrote this for the FT, but it's behind a paywall. Since I wrote it, I feel like it's probably ok for me to post it here. The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require...
1967
Spotify reducing employee base by about 6%
Earlier today, CEO Daniel Ek shared the following note about the company’s organizational changes with all Spotify employees. Team, As we say in our Band Manifesto, change is the only constant. For this reason, I continue to reiterate that speed is the most defensible strategy a business can have. But speed alone is…
1968
YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music
YouTube Identifies Birdsong As Copyrighted Music Posted by timothy on Sunday February 26, @04:43PM from the estate-of-john-cage-winces-with-envy dept. New submitter eeplox writes “I make natu…
1969
Oculus Joins Facebook
We started Oculus with a vision of delivering incredible, affordable, and ubiquitous consumer virtual reality to the world. We’ve come a long...
1970
Simple Analytics hits $4k MRR and shares its numbers
Simple Analytics open page shows an updated overview of key financial and customer-focused metrics.
1971
Quantifying the Impact of “Cloudbleed”
Last Thursday we released details on a bug in Cloudflare's parser impacting our customers. It was an extremely serious bug that caused data flowing through Cloudflare's network to be leaked onto the Internet.
1972
Eight Years at Roblox
I joined Roblox at the end of 2012 as a rendering engineer; I had just spent more than a year working on various titles from FIFA franchise after years of console game development and was becoming a bit tired of the “big game development”. My work on FIFA was as a contractor and I got an offer for a full-time…
1973
I quit – Peak indifference, big tobacco
Peak indifference, big tobacco, disinformation and death
1974
The fall of the theorem economy
How AI could destroy mathematics and barely touch it
1975
Trademark Actions Against the PostgreSQL Community
The PostgreSQL Core Team and the PostgreSQL Community Association of Canada (PGCAC) wish to provide clarification on the ownership and …
1976
1977
Bloomberg’s ‘The Big Hack’
One way or the other, there is more to come on this story, and either Bloomberg’s or Apple’s and Amazon’s credibility is going to take a significant hit.
1978
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1980
Apple curl security incident 12604
tldr: Apple thinks it is fine. I do not. On December 28 2023, bugreport 12604 was filed in the curl issue tracker. We get a lot issues filed most days so this fact alone was hardly anything out of the ordinary. We read the reports, investigate, ask follow-up questions to see what we can learn … Continue reading the…