2221
Everything I know about good API design
Most of what modern software engineers do involves APIs: public interfaces for communicating with a program, like this one from Twilio. I’ve spent a lot of time…
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 16,888 posts.
Tech Industry & Business
Any year
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Apple Will Not Reinstate Epic’s Fortnite Developer Account
Accounts that have never been disabled include the accounts for Rocket League (a game whose Mac support [Epic discontinued in January 2020][rl]), and separately, Unreal Engine. My understanding is that none of those accounts are affected by Apple’s decision not to reinstate the Fortnite developer account.
2225
The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers
I’ve been dipping into the r/ChatGPT subreddit recently to see how people are reacting to the GPT-5 launch, and so far the vibes there are not good. This AMA thread …
2226
Not an Amazon Problem
The NY Times profile quotes me saying “We don’t really have an Amazon problem. What we have is a deep, societal problem with an unacceptable imbalance of power and wealth.” But the URL contained the string “amazon-critic-tim-bray” and the HTML <title> says “Tim Bray Is Not Done With Amazon”. I feel like I’m being…
2227
How Not to Die (2007)
August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk…
2228
I almost sold Baremetrics for $5M
tl;dr In the past 6 months I turned down multiple $3-5m offers and failed to close a $5m sale. In the past six years of Baremetrics' existence, I've
2229
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Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”
My translation of DIE ZEIT’s interview with Thomas Piketty is now hosted by TheWire.in. Read it here.
2231
I'm skeptical of low-code
Low-code can be a great tool but it often fails to live up to its marketing
2232
Your idea is brilliant, your idea is worthless (2016)
While I was at a family wedding a few weeks ago, one of my aunts asked me, “So, what’s the hardest part about designing a game? It must be coming up with the ideas, right?” I laug…
2233
The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production
I've built 12+ AI agent systems across development, DevOps, and data operations. Here's why the current hype around autonomous agents is mathematically impossible and what actually works in production.
2234
An update to the Timescale license
Learn how we are building an open-source business in the cloud and why we added the Timescale License. Read the full article on the Tiger Data blog.
2235
Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers?
In Search of Silence Joel Spolsky is a well-respected figure in Silicon Valley. He created the popular Trello project manager software and is currently the ... Read more
2236
The costs of microservices (2020)
An application typically starts its life as a monolith. Take a modern backend of a single-page Javascript application, for example - it starts out as a single stateless web service that exposes a RESTful HTTP API and uses a relational database as a backing store. The service is composed of a number of components, or…
2237
GitHub stars won't pay your rent (2020)
Going from OSS to SaaS. Mistakes made and lessons learned from launching Sizzy - The Browser For Developers.
2238
What happened to TheNumbers.com
If you work in or around the film industry, there is a decent chance you have used the work of The Numbers this month, whether you realise it or not.
2239
Tarsnap has given 2^18 dollars to open source
The largest recipient of this funding every year has been the FreeBSD Foundation, and to date they have received $173,920. It's hard to overstate the importance of the work the Foundation does; they provide hardware which keeps the FreeBSD project running, they fund a myriad of independent projects, and they have…
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GitHub stars won’t pay your rent
Lessons learned and mistakes made while turning an open-source project into a profitable SaaS product.
2242
Platforms want to be utilities, self-govern like empires
Whether it’s “bringing the world closer together” (Facebook), “organizing the world’s information” (Google), to be a market “where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Amazon) or “to make personal computing accessible to each and every individual” (Apple), the founding missions of…
2243
Some mistakes I made as a new manager
the trough of zero dopamine • managing the wrong amount • procrastinating on hard questions • indefinitely deferring maintenance • angsting instead of asking
2244
The hypocrisy of cyberlibertarianism
I like the Internet. I am old enough to remember the pre-Internet era and despite the younger generations pining for those simpler days, I was there. Paper maps were absolutely horrible, just you and a compass in your car on the side of the road in the middle of
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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…
2247
What really happens inside a dating app
I have been working inside a dating app for a few months and there are a lot of interesting things. This article is going to be without any structure as there are many things to say. I will mostly ignore homosexual interactions. Not because they don't exist, just because it …
2248
What’s in a PR statement: LastPass breach explained
The LastPass statement on their latest breach is full of omissions, half-truths and outright lies. I’m providing the necessary context for some of their claims.
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