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Systems ideas that sound good but almost never work
Some engineering patterns that sound good but almost never work as intended
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 439 posts.
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Morris Chang and the Origins of TSMC
Book review of the autobiography of Morris Chang.
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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…
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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.
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Stripe V2
Stripe’s API got a new major version, and no one noticed.
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Notes on China
Deeply researched interviews
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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...
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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.
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The Nvidia Way
Tae Kim's terrific new book on the story of Nvidia and Jensen Huang
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Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
a perfectly miserable son of a gun builds Silicon Valley
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Why are cancer guidelines stuck in PDFs?
How Machine-Readable Clinical Guidelines Can Help Standardize Cancer Care
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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…
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The Ugly Truth About Spotify Is Finally Revealed
A year-long investigation by an indie journalist is a call to action
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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
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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."
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After 3 Years, I Failed. Here's All My Startup's Code
And by "all," I mean everything: core product, failed pivots, miscellaneous
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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…
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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.
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Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand government reform
Wishing for a more orderly disruption may misunderstand the nature of government reform
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The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)
Vulcan & dBASE
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Parkinson's Law: It’s real, so use it
Yes, just set that deadline.
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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…
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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
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Debanking (and Debunking?)
Crypto advocates kicked off a recent, somewhat politicized, discussion of debanking. Strap in for scintillating banking compliance trivia.
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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…
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Mistakes as a new manager
Transitioning from an individual contributor to a manager is tough but rewarding. The key is to delegate, find new sources of fulfillment, focus on quality over quantity, maintain proper engagement…
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Intel’s board, and an example of when boards and short-termism fail
Pat lost his seat because of an incompetent board. Let's meet them.
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I algorithmically donated $5000 to Open Source
Notable case of algorithmic approach to open source and non-profit giving
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Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley
A demonstration of power by Silicon Valley’s top startup accelerator.