The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
I’ll get to the good and bad news of the week, but first I want to note the big story - Donald Trump’s conviction by a jury in New York - and a little story with big implications - the Federal Bureau of Investigation raiding a corporate landlord in cahoots with a nation-wide rent-fixing cartel that affects up to 16…
In the year 1900, automobile sales in the United States were divided almost evenly among three types of vehicles: automakers sold about 1,000 cars powered by internal combustion engines, but over 1…
Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I’ve sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.
Reflections on a Wall Street legend.
I once worked at a company that priced everything with a .95 ending. The bestselling software package was $999.95. Add-on products were $9.95, or $19.95, or $49.95. Everything ended with a .95. It had been this way for more than twenty years. One day, one of the VPs suggested we change all prices to end […]
Ever transferred assets between brokerages? Impressive, terrifying machinations happened in the background. No cats were harmed.
Gordon Moore’s famous prediction about computing power must count as one of the most astonishingly accurate forecasts in history. But it may also have been badly misunderstood — in a way that now l…
Southwest Airlines famously doesn’t show up when searching online travel agency websites. Historically if you’ve wanted to buy a ticket on Southwest, you’ve had to go directly to Southwest to make the purchase. But desperation and new government regulations appear to be changing all of that.
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ …
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I
Software doesn't scale through architecture and automation alone. New, more difficult problems appear that didn't exist before, causing new downstream consequences.
Even on little things, Sam is not consistently candid.
I’m putting the post about Lumina Probiotics back up, now edited to avoid any possible threats of libel.
Enjoy this post? Why not try the podcast version? Please download it, and also all the other episodes. Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now
Gumroad pays freelancers around the world $125-$200/hr. They choose how much of this they'd like to get in equity–between 0 and 80%. Equity entitles one to annual dividends.
Mortgages are popularly thought of as loans, but to understand the industry, it's better to model them as complex manufactured products.
A shift toward products and a research brain drain should ring your alarm bells
Remote work expert David Tate wrote that when fearful CEOs talk about workplace culture, they’re really talking about workplace control. Their insecurities demand that the way work is done by emplo…
Update 2024-05-21: Miles Ward has an update with more details in this X thread: UniSuper’s production Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) private cloud was automatically deleted one year after it’s creation due to a misconfiguration in how it was created. When it was created, there was a bug in the creation script which…
Or, how to ensure you learn absolutely nothing.
Apple’s iPad ad might not have been good for Apple, but it was a profound encapsulation of what has happened on the Internet; the question is what it leads to next.
This was several years back. Keep in mind that early in my career, my father had told me that doing a good job often meant doing what needed to be done in spite of your boss. And by that he meant that you can either make your boss successful and happy or you can run every decision by your boss. In which case no one is…
In this ever changing and evolving world of user generated versus AI generated content, the recent announcement of Stack Overflow partnering with OpenAI recently has been met with some backlash by …
On those who are unable or unwilling to buy a house in 2024 and what to do about it.
In my new role as VP of Engineering , there was one question I was dreading more than any other: “How are you measuring productivity?”
Pushing back on the cult of complexity.
