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Hard Startups
The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one. A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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A False Economy Powered by Ads and Lies
Tech companies like Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet continue to post record profits despite a slew of controversies and bad press.
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Things I Learned from Five Years in Climate Tech
Articles about systems, programming, and software engineering management written by Evan Meagher
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Andreessen-Horowitz craps on “AI” startups from a great height
Andreessen-Horowitz has always been the most levelheaded of the major current year VC firms. While other firms were levering up on “cleantech” and nonsensical biotech startups that viol…
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RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps
This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups . RFC doesn’t mean “ Request for Comments ” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts will be deep-dives on products and problems I find interesting or that I’m…
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An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
Having worked for a decade as an engineer at various companies, I noticed how most teams in software often have "the" manager and "the" tech lead or "the" senior engineer. These are the decision-makers and ones that lead all projects. Many engineers go to these people asking, "What do
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Systems Thinking and Quality
Wise words from Russell Ackoff regarding systems thinking and quality improvement – and what we can learn from them
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How important are 'economies of scale'?
How important are 'economies of scale' in production and innovation?
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Why Germans won’t heat their homes even with free electricity?
This is a translation/guest post by Riku Merikoski. The original can be found here (in Finnish). All mistakes due to translation are my fault. On Monday 10th February 2020 something historical hap…
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The Law of Conservation of Complexity
"Every application has an inherent amount of irreducible complexity. The only question is: Who will have to deal with it—the user, the application developer, or the platform developer?" Larry Tesler's original law regarding complexity in software applications, and links to articles and pap
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The Next Leap in Self-Driving: Prediction
Why prediction has overtaken perception as the biggest challenge in the field.
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Hackers Were Inside Citrix for Five Months
Networking software giant Citrix Systems says malicious hackers were inside its networks for five months between 2018 and 2019, making off with personal and financial data on company employees, contractors, interns, job candidates and their dependents. The disclosure comes almost a year after Citrix acknowledged that…
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Pay up or we’ll make Google ban your ads
A new email-based extortion scheme apparently is making the rounds, targeting Web site owners serving banner ads through Google’s AdSense program. In this scam, the fraudsters demand bitcoin in exchange for a promise not to flood the publisher’s ads with so much bot and junk traffic that Google’s automated anti-fraud…
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Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)
(Note: This was written in 2016. I recently — in late 2019 — wrote a post about some things I’ve learned since then .)
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Rules to run a software startup with minimum hassle
Over the last 5 years of bootstrapping, I’ve tried a lot of things, and discovered there are many ways to create hassle for yourself that wastes time and energy and distracts you from building value in your business. This is my second post on lessons learned from bootstrapping; you can subscribe to updates to this…
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Why do incompetent managers get promoted?
Two books — 45 years apart — explain it. If you want to get ahead, it’s time to face the facts.
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The Business Case for Formal Methods
This is an “intro packet” you can use to argue for the benefits of formal methods (FM) to your boss. It’s a short explanation, a list of benefits and case studies, and a demo. Everything’s in TLA+, but the arguments apply equally well to Alloy, B, statecharts, etc. Adapt the material to your specific needs. Quick…
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First, Do No Harm
As regulators look closer at acquisitions they should be extremely wary of unintended consequences. The current system works well for everyone, most of the time.
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The coming IP war over facts derived from books
Facts are friends not food
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Costco Capitalism
Can consumers at Costco really have their free sample and eat it too?
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Why Google Did Android
What happened was, in the late stages of my career at Sun Microsystems, as we were sliding into Oracle’s loathsome embrace, I had discovered Android. The programming language was Java, and not a dorky “ME” subset. My employer was saying nice things about it , and I’d long craved something I could both carry in my…
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Will Spotify Ruin Podcasting?
Hi, Welcome to BIG, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly.
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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.
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Dangerous domain corp.com goes up for sale
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…