1051
Apple squandered the Holy Grail
Why Apple Intelligence failed even though everything it's built upon is nearly perfect
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
1052
I'm quitting the Washington Post
Democracy can't function without a free press
1053
I am rich and have no idea what to do
Life has been a haze this last year. After selling my company, I find myself in the totally un-relatable position of never having to work again. Everything feels like a side quest, but not in an inspiring way. I don’t have the same base desires driving me to make money or gain status. I have infinite freedom, yet I…
1054
Databases in 2024: A Year in Review
Andy rises from the ashes of his dead startup and discusses what happened in 2024 in the database game.
1055
Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work
Some engineering patterns that sound good but almost never work as intended
1056
Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC
Book review of the autobiography of Morris Chang.
1057
Most people don't care about quality
My friend, the photographer Paul Clarke has an uncanny eye for detail. Every single shot he publishes is beautiful - they capture life in a way that I don't have the language to describe. I'm quite content to point my phone at someone, use the default settings, and grab a snap. My photos lack composition, clarity…
1058
OpenAI’s board, paraphrased: ‘All we need is unimaginable sums of money’
OpenAI is to this decade’s generative-AI revolution what Netscape was to the 1990s’ internet revolution.
1059
Stripe V2
Stripe’s API got a new major version, and no one noticed.
1060
Notes on China
Deeply researched interviews
1061
Intel's $475M error: the silicon behind the Pentium division bug
In 1993, Intel released the high-performance Pentium processor, the start of the long-running Pentium line. The Pentium had many improvement...
1062
Google's Results Are Infested, Open AI Is Using Their Playbook from the 2000s
Google search results are becoming annoying to use and Open AI is about to eat Google's lunch.
1063
The Nvidia Way
Tae Kim's terrific new book on the story of Nvidia and Jensen Huang
1064
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
a perfectly miserable son of a gun builds Silicon Valley
1065
Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
How Machine-Readable Clinical Guidelines Can Help Standardize Cancer Care
1066
Long Term Software Development
Recently the Dutch Electoral Board (where I am also a very part time advisor) invited me to do a talk reflecting on their open source Abacus vote tabulation software. Much software is now provided as a service, and is typically deployed continuously (CD, continuous deployment), surrounded by enough automated testing…
1067
1068
The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed
A year-long investigation by an indie journalist is a call to action
1069
Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?
I recently built a website that breaks down the cost of a UK electricity bill. It's interactive, and I'd recommend visiting it before reading this post. Check it out here: electricitybills.uk Here are three interesting things about the data. #1: The wholesale power cost is only one third of
1070
Nurses whose shitty boss is a shitty app
Operating a business is risky: you can't ever be sure how many customers you'll have, or what they'll show up looking for. If you guess wrong, you'll either have too few workers to serve the crowd, or you'll pay workers to stand around and wait for customers. This is true even when your "business" is a "hospital."
1071
After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code
And by "all," I mean everything: core product, failed pivots, miscellaneous
1072
Quick takes on the recent OpenAI public incident write-up
OpenAI recently published a public writeup for an incident they had on December 11, and there are lots of good details in here! Here are some of my off-the-cuff observations: Saturation With thousa…
1073
Konwinski Prize
Why I launched the K Prize, aka, why want to give $1M to the first open source AI that gets 90% on contamination-free SWE-bench.
1074
Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government reform
Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand the nature of government reform
1075
The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)
Vulcan & dBASE
1076
Parkinson's Law: It’s real, so use it
Yes, just set that deadline.
1077
The Google Willow Thing
Yesterday I arrived in Santa Clara for the Q2B (Quantum 2 Business) conference, which starts this morning, and where I’ll be speaking Thursday on “Quantum Algorithms in 2024: How Should…
1078
The slow death of the hands-on engineering manager
And how to combat it. The story of an EM who created a ChatGPT for the internal docs in a few hours
1079
Debanking (and Debunking?)
Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.
1080
Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel
By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager. In January 2021, when Gelsinger was abruptly named the CEO of Intel, this is more or less all I knew of him — and I found myself urgently needing to learn much…