1621
A letter from Sam & Jony
Building a family of AI products for everyone.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 16,887 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
1622
The Era of the Business Idiot
Fair warning: this is the longest thing I've written on this newsletter. I do apologize. Soundtrack: EL-P - $4 Vic Listen to my podcast Better Offline. We have merch. Last week, Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, revealing that he's either a liar or a specific kind of
1623
LLM inference prices have fallen rapidly but unequally across tasks
Epoch AI is a research institute investigating key trends and questions that will shape the trajectory and governance of Artificial Intelligence.
1624
The WinRAR approach
The WinRAR Approach: a small change in how I distribute content to keep the content free, sustainable, & ad-free.
1625
The value isn't in the code (2022)
It takes time and a lot of skill to write great code, so surely that code is valuable, right? Wrong. You might love it and nurture it, protecting it from harm, but I’m afraid that code of yours is potentially worthless. Why? Read on.
1626
The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology
Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the geniu...
1627
Why does the U.S. always run a trade deficit?
Persistent shortfalls in domestic savings, requiring funds from abroad to finance domestic investment spending, could be why the U.S. runs a trade deficit.
1628
Reports of Deno's Demise Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Addressing recent Deno criticisms and sharing our vision for the future
1629
Fabric Is Just Plain Unreliable, and Microsoft's Hiding It
Update 2025/07/21: Microsoft heard the complaints, and fixed the reliability added a better status page. Baby steps. Last week, Microsoft Fabric went down yet again for hours on multiple continents. Oh, you didn’t hear about it? Let’s talk about why. First, Fabric’s status page is fabricated bullshit. The link…
1630
A lost decade chasing distributed architectures for data analytics?
We benchmark DuckDB on a 2012 MacBook Pro to decide: did we lose a decade chasing distributed architectures for data analytics?
1631
What makes a good engineer also makes a good engineering organization (2024)
The people who create software generally refer to themselves as software engineers, and yet if they graduate from university, it is typically with a degree in computer science. That has always felt a little strange to me, because science and engineering are two pretty different disciplines – yet ...
1632
When a team is too big
What signs to look for and how to increase productivity with all-round skillset
1633
1634
BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)
Silent changes in payment methods on big creator funding platforms raise some unpleasant questions.
1635
Stack Overflow is almost dead
Today, Stack overflow has almost as few questions asked per month, as when it launched back in 2009. A recap of its slow, then rapid, downfall.
1636
How the economics of multitenancy work
CI is chaotic, bursty, spiky, and short-lived. That chaos is a nightmare unless you’re built for it. Blacksmith’s serverless CI cloud thrives on unpredictability: more customers = more noise = smoother utilization = lower costs for everyone. Multitenancy isn’t just efficient — it’s profitable. And yes, the margins are…
1637
E-COM: The $40M USPS project to send email on paper
E-COM was a $40 million US Postal Service project to deliver email on paper. Why it failed, and why spammers were its only real customers.
1638
Databricks acquires Neon
Databricks agrees to acquire Neon, a serverless Postgres database company, to bring speed and flexibility to production workloads.
1639
Wise refuses to let us access our $60k AUD
Wise has stolen more than $60,000 AUD from us, and refuses to let us access it. We’ve had a Wise account for around 5 years (since they were called TransferWise). It’s been a really useful …
1640
1641
Gig Companies Violate Workers Rights
Major digital labor platforms, also known as gig companies, operating in the United States misclassify gig workers as independent contractors, denying them labor rights.
1642
Intellect-2 Release: The First 32B Model Trained Through Globally Distributed RL
We're excited to release INTELLECT-2, the first 32B parameter model trained via globally distributed reinforcement learning. Unlike traditional centralized training efforts, INTELLECT-2 trains a reasoning language model using fully asynchronous RL across a dynamic, heterogeneous swarm of compute contributors.
1643
Why Bell Labs Worked
Or, how MBA culture killed Bell Labs
1644
Burrito Now, Pay Later
Liquid Lunches And The Serious Case for BNPL Securitization
1645
In 2025, venture capital can't pretend everything is fine any more
Venture capital is screwed. A bubble in AI is their last hope, and they’re betting everything on Sam Altman. It’s heartwarming. Today, we have the Pitchbook-NVCA Venture Monitor for Q1 2025. This i…
1646
Fandom sells gaming media brand Giant Bomb to long-term staff
World’s Largest Fan-Generated Entertainment & Gaming Platform | Fandom Fandom’s brands help fans get more out of the entertainment and games they love,…
1647
Intel: Winning and Losing
Idling at a Zenith
1648
Era of U.S. dollar may be winding down
Economist Kenneth Rogoff’s new book entwines currency’s ascension, his own experiences, and looks at what looms ahead.
1649
1650
How friction is being redistributed in today's economy
AI Chatbots, Newark, and the West Village Girls