1621
An analysis of the Google antitrust trial
We did an analysis of the Google antitrust trial. Last week, over half of the trial was held behind closed doors because the judge, Amit Mehta, is deferring to Google on the need for secrecy.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
1622
The age of the grift shift
For a book proposal I am currently working on (German, no proposal isn’t done yet because I keep reworking stuff, my agent hates me) I am thinking a lot about late stage capitalism and technologies, about how the kinda terminal economic system shapes the technologies it brings forward etc. And there are of course a […]
1623
Ship of Fools
I recently had a 3 week holiday in Florida with my family. My 17 year old son is interested in rocketry and my wife is interested in wildlife. We got to see plenty of both and had a great time. The…
1624
1625
How to evaluate a product roadmap, for engineers
Aka, how do I know if a product leader knows what they're doing? There are thousands of articles, courses, and guides on how to build a roadmap for product managers. Even with all these resources, roadmaps often become a point of contention between product managers and their stakeholders. There
1626
How unions won a 30% raise for every fast food worker in California
Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. 40 years of declining worker power shattered the American Dream (TM), producing multiple generations whose children fared worse than their parents, cratering faith in institutions and hope for a better future.
1627
iPhone 15 Pro facts and estimates
A couple of things I learned and one reasonable guess.
1628
Why Is Booz Allen Renting Us Back Our Own National Parks?
In 2017, consulting giant Booz Allen cut a deal with the government to extract junk fees from Americans who want to use Federal lands and waters for hunting or fishing. Will Congress or Biden act?
1629
Unity's Trap
Hello! I'm Tom. I'm a game designer, writer, and programmer on Gunpoint , Heat Signature , and Tactical Breach Wizards . Here's some more info on all the games I've worked on, here are the videos I make on YouTube, and here are two short stories I wrote for the Machine of Death collections.
1630
GPT-4 is not getting worse
GPT-4 may have declined in some areas, but it hasn’t systematically done so. My tests were shit, and never proved much of anything.
1631
How Instagram scaled to 14 million users with only 3 engineers
Instagram's guiding principles and tech stack explained simply
1632
I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it
Or "that time I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it like a week after launch"
1633
Marginalia Search Receives FUTO Grant
I’m happy to announce that the generous people at FUTO have granted the project $15,000 with no strings attached to help the search engine out with some more server power. FUTO is a young Austin, TX-based organization “dedicated to developing, both through in-house engineering and investment, technologies that…
1634
Willingham sends Fables into the public domain
Here, below, is the press release I sent out today to explain what I did and why.
1635
The end of tweeted articles
Elon Musk, X and the end of tweeted articles
1636
The Tyranny of the Marginal User
why consumer software gets worse, not better, over time
1637
Solar
I spent some time (in Fall 2023) reading about solar deployment. Some facts that struck me:
1638
Why agencies get stuck at $50k MRR
Can we just keep adding more clients until at 150 clients we hit $300k MRR?
1639
There are now two types of PayPal dollars, and one is better than the other
PayPal now offers its customers two types of U.S. dollars. In addition to having the option of opening a traditional PayPal account to maint...
1640
How long it took different companies to find product-market fit
Part five of my seven-part series on kickstarting and scaling a B2B business
1641
Credit card debt collection
Credit card debt is the waste stream of consumer finance. The debt collection industry ends up being sordid, for complex structural and microeconomic reasons.
1642
Nvidia’s AI supremacy is only temporary
Nvidia is an amazing company that has executed a contrarian vision for decades, and has rightly become one of the most valuable corporations on the planet thanks to its central role in the AI revol…
1643
Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users
Microsoft announces vague changes to the default web browser setting for Windows Insider. Nothing but wishful thinking. Still force-opens web links in Edge.
1644
1645
Mistakes You Should Never Make (2014)
I was walking to a team meeting where I was going to announce that we would likely have to lay off nearly all of our employees because we unexpectedly had almost no money left, and that it was all my fault.
1646
The end of the subscription era is coming
You’re overpaying for your porn (and journalism)
1647
The U.S. housing market vs. the Canadian housing market
The housing market is even worse in Canada than it is here.
1648
Aardvark'd: The Fog Creek documentary, 18 years later
Not many people remember this 2005 documentary featured early interviews with Paul Graham, Aaron Swartz, Alexis Ohanian, and Steve Huffman.
1649
Every software project is a startup that will probably fail
It dawned on me today. Maybe most software fails. Not in the sense that “it eventually dies after a long and respectable life.” In the sense that it never actually achieves flight, never catches on, never produces more value that it cost to develop.
1650
HashiCorp did it backwards
Hashicorp recently announced they’re changing the license of Terraform to a source-available license, BSL1.1.