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Predicting the Future of Distributed Systems
There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
1202
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":
1203
Lidl's Cloud Gambit: Europe's Shift to Sovereign Computing
Lidl is launching sovereign cloud computing in Europe. GDPR and data compliance is driving the EU to look for local alternatives.
1204
Cautionary tale on using Chase bank for indie business
A cautionary tale of a business owner's nightmare with Chase Bank, revealing crucial banking lessons for entrepreneurs.
1205
Outsourcing Cost Boeing Billions (2019)
On October 29, 2018 Lion Air Flight 610, a 737 MAX 8 flight from Jakarta, Indonesia to Pangkal Pinang, Indonesia, crashed into the sea 13…
1206
We need to liberate the Postcode Address File
This is the Pentagon Papers for the UK address database
1207
Random Thoughts about Unity
From the outside, Unity lately seems to have a problem or two. By “lately”, I mean during the last decade, and by “a problem or two”, I mean probably over nine thousand problems. Fun! But what are they, how serious they are, and what can be done about it?
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Sourcegraph went dark
Towards the end of my mid-2019 job search, I was down to joining the Google Go team or Sourcegraph. Sourcegraph ultimately won due to cultural factors - the most important of which was the ability to build 100% in the open . All documents were public by default. Technical and product RFCs (and later PR/FAQs) were…
1210
AI companies are pivoting from creating gods to building products
Turning models into products runs into five challenges
1211
Roblox is the biggest game in the world, but is unprofitable
With 380MM MAUs, Roblox probably counts more players than the entire AAA gaming ecosystem, is more played than Disney+ is watched, and is starting to rival smaller social networks in scale. But Roblox has yet to profit. How can it become a business comparable to its operating scale?
1212
Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google
I started writing this retrospective during my last week at Google, I have already wrapped up everything, had my goodbyes. In the spirit of SRE (as an ex-SRE), I thought it would be fun to write a little retrospective in the form of a postmortem. Introduction I joined Google young and relatively inexperienced and had…
1213
Banks Are Now Accused of Cheating Customers Billions
Massive banks are now accused of cheating customers billions of dollars in interest payments according to financial reports.
1214
Ask for Advice, Not Permission (2015)
The world is full of gatekeepers who think they have veto rights. Don’t believe them. Pitbull got it right when he said "Ask for money, get advice. Ask for advice, get money twice."
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When Nothing Ever Goes Out of Print: Maintaining Backlist Ebooks (2016)
A talk given at the ebookcraft conference, March 30, 2016
1217
It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
Henry George was right about land values. And today we have a homebuilder cartel rooted in control of land and financing.
1218
Apple vs. the "Free Market"
Every artist, performer and creator on Patreon is about to get screwed out of 30% of their gross revenue, which will be diverted to Apple, the most valuable company on the planet. Apple contributes nothing to their work, but it will get to steal a third of their wages:
1219
The Myth of the Product-Market Fit (2013)
The ideas behind Product Market Fit (PMF) were first articulated by Marc Andreessen in a detailed blog post around 2007 [https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_startups_part4.html].
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The Shameful Defenestration of Tim
On Tim Peters' recent suspension as a Python core developer
1222
Intel's Immiseration
The long, seemingly inevitable decline of an icon
1223
How Uber tests payments in production
Well-run payment systems are developed by engineers who understand what is the best use of their time: to catch unknown unknowns, and to do it fast.
1224
VisiCalc – The Early Days (2003)
Peter Jennings early history of VisiCalc
1225
Airlines are running out of 4-digit flight numbers
Airlines use up to four digits for flight numbers. That means they can have up to 9,999 flights (since there’s no flight zero), and no one comes close. American Airlines operates around 6,700 daily flights including its American Eagle regional services. So they should have plenty of room to grow! Except they don’t…
1226
How to build quickly
Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. This is a ~10x speed up over the ‘loading-bar’ style (more on that below) Don’t just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so you can […]
1227
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
1228
Why the CrowdStrike bug hit banks hard
Regulation-induced monocultures meet unfortunate but explicable engineering decisions.
1229
Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper
Recently, GDM released a great paper titled, Scaling Exponents Across Parameterizations and Optimizers, in which they conduct over 10,000 LLM training runs to obtain optimal hyperparameters under different regimes. After reading it (it was great), I wanted to test my understanding of the paper by tallying up all…
1230
After 10 years, Yelp gave my app 4 days
David Kopec's blog.