Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,981 posts.
I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean , so the…
Originally Published: May 2021 Inflation is a controversial and complex topic. This article looks at 150 years of data across multiple countries to provide a general idea of what inflation is, what to look for, and how to invest with inflationary and deflationary risks in mind. Read from the beginning, or jump to the…
a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things
“One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.” ~ Carl Sagan
Conversations, my federated instant messaging client for Android, started out as many traditional open-source projects do: as an attempt to scratch my own itch. Development started in January 2014 in my student dormitory, and within weeks I started dogfooding and using the client as the primary means of communicating…
Looking at Mozilla’s finances, it’s reasonable to conclude that Google is keeping them on life support to keep the anti-trust hounds at bay. Mozilla’s deal with Google will account for at least 70% of their revenues going forward. That’s over $400 million to be the default search provider in 4% of browsers. For 1…
UPDATE : Revolut has refunded me, I will update the post with more details soon.
The inevitable result of financial innovation gone awry, which it ALWAYS does, is that it ALWAYS ends up empowering the State. When too clever by half people misplay the meta-game, that’s all the excuse the State needs to come swooping in and crush them, just as they are with Bitcoin today they did with Bear and…
September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best…
I've had a busy week, so I didn't have time until today to read this news about Red Hat locking down RHEL sources behind a Red Hat subscription. I repeat the title: Red Hat, are you dumb? When Red Hat decided to turn the community CentOS distribution into a leading-edge distro instead of basically "Red Hat Enterprise…
When I was 17 and a high school drop-out I went to work for a bank. My mom was ecstatic, I had a job, in spite of my failure to ‘get an education’. Never mind that the job that I got was mailroom gofer. Now, don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with being a mail runner for a bank. And run I did. So fast that…
Anyone who built software for a while knows that estimating how long something is going to take is hard. It's hard to come up with an unbiased estimate of how long something will take, when fundamentally the work in itself is about solving something.
Hey everyone, new vlog for this morning. I was in Seattle last week and it made me nostalgic. When I lived there, I made a career decision that cost me a lot, so I wanted to share it with you with...
I bought a Toshiba laptop about 9 months ago, it is still under warranty. It does not turn on at all. Warranty card states that laptop is covered in the United States, US territories, Latin America and the Caribbean. This is the only reason I used to buy Toshiba. Sent the laptop to Toshiba in Guatemala and they refuse…
Back in 2013, I was beginning to get the sense that data breaches were becoming a big thing. The prevalence of them seemed to be really ramping up as was the impact they were having on those of us that found ourselves in them, myself included. Increasingly, I was writing
https://gofund.me/8950f458
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 […]
I’ve been trying to run search ads on Google for over a month. Due to two unrelated snags, I’ve only had ~12 hours of uptime with those ads in that time. Based on conversations with other startups that run Google Ads, my experience is neither unique nor surprising. Apropos of Google’s earnings day, I wanted to vent a…
Andreessen-Horowitz has always been the most levelheaded of the major current year VC firms. While other firms were levering up on “cleantech” and nonsensical biotech startups that viol…
GLM 5.2 is the first open weights model I'd call a genuine competitor to Opus and GPT for agentic work - at ~15-20% of the price. Part one of why AI inference margins are about to collapse.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta alleged Amazon led a price-fixing conspiracy of online retailers to inflate prices across the entire economy. And he's demanding an immediate halt.
A detailed explanation of why I keep saying that advertising is a cancer on modern society.
xAI is renting huge amounts of GPU capacity to Anthropic and Google. Financial engineering ahead of the SpaceX IPO, a real compute shortage, or a genuine datacentre advantage? Probably all three.
