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Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale
There’s an old startup mantra — probably from the early Airbnb or Y Combinator days — that goes: “Do things that don’t scale.”
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 8,981 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
782
Are OpenAI and Anthropic losing money on inference?
Deconstructing the real costs of running AI inference at scale. My napkin math suggests the economics might be far more profitable than commonly claimed.
783
Thank you, Y Combinator
Dear friends- I wanted to let you know I am stepping away from YC. I've been involved at YC since early 2011 and in that time it has been my privilege to work with over 600 startups and over a...
784
A/B testing gets misused to juice metrics in the short term
Every infuriating thing on the web was once a successful experiment. Some smart person saw Normal site: 1% sign up for our newsletterThrow a huge modal offering 10% off first order: +100% sign ups …
785
Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
I spent a couple of years managing a team, and I entered that role – like many – without knowing anything about how to do it. I tried to figure out how to be a good manager, and doing so I ended up reading a lot about servant leadership . It never quite sat right with me, though. Servant leadership seems to me a lot…
786
Helion
I’m delighted to be investing more in Helion. Helion is by far the most promising approach to fusion I’ve seen. David and Chris are two of the most impressive founders and builders (in the sense...
787
788
The Internet of Beefs
You’ve heard me talk about crash-only programming , right? It's a programming paradigm for critical infrastructure systems, where there is -- by design -- no…
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Is the world becoming uninsurable?
You are receiving this email because you are a subscriber to Charles Hugh Smith / Of Two Minds.
792
The Prime Video microservices to monolith story
The Prime Video team published this story: Scaling up the audio/video monitoring service and reducing costs by 90%, and the internet piled…
793
Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense
794
Symbian Won
I was working in the mobile phone industry just as smartphones were taking off. I saw the Palm Pilot rise and fall. I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. But the greatest tragedy of them all was Nokia and their Symbian Operating System. (Actually, Symbian's ownership…
795
How to get rid of old stuff, sell it for more, and use Amazon as cheap storage
Most people don't know that you can ship stuff to Amazon's warehouse and have them simultaneously store it and offer it for sale to their customers. — Sounds cool, right?
796
The insane amount of backward compatibility in Google Maps
I still keep a couple of my favorite old smartphones. Sometimes I use one of them as my primary device for fun. Phones are among the fastest evolving markets, even a year makes a whole lot of differences. One of the biggest challenges with using old phones is the software: they don't run modern software. And old…
797
In the belly of the MrBeast
what does MrBeast mean?
798
The case for banning non-competes
Making the labor market work
799
Amazon competitor got our belt listing taken down by saying it contains drugs
As an inventor, many of my readers know that I developed BeltBro, a no-buckle belt that uses two side belts loops to hold up your pants.
800
What Happens When A Twitter Client Hits The Token Limit
Remember when Twitter said that client-app developers would need to “work with us directly” and “need our permission” to exceed 100,000 user-login tokens?
801
Employee Equity
Startup employees often do not get treated very well when it comes to stock compensation. New ideas float around occasionally, but lawyers are usually averse to trying new things, and investors...
802
The end of Microsoft Research's AI Frontiers group
In 2023 after the ChatGPT release, it was clear to me that research needed to be more organized to succeed than was typical within Microsoft Research . The amount of support and focus which other research groups were applying was great enough that even with a clever idea pursued by one person it was likely to arrive…
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804
American Equity
I’d like feedback on the following idea. I think that every adult US citizen should get an annual share of the US GDP. I believe that owning something like a share in America would align all of...
805
How ChatGPT serves ads
OpenAI's ad platform has two halves. On the ChatGPT side, the backend injects structured single_advertiser_ad_unit objects into the conversation SSE stream while the model is responding. On the merchant side, a tracking SDK called OAIQ runs in the visitor's browser and reports product views back
806
The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing
The Stringer Bell rule is obsolete, as Trump and state attorneys general let the egg producers off the hook for a brazen conspiracy. Still, egg prices did drop as a result of the investigation.
807
Apple, Epic, and the App Store
The App Store is not one thing: it is installation, payments, and customer management; the further Apple gets from iOS, the worse its actions are for users and developers.
808
AI is stifling new tech adoption?
AI coding assistants are React evangelists.
809
The Time I Lied to the CTO and Saved the Day
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…
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