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The value of institutional memory
In 1978, a dredging gang working for British Waterways was struggling with a problem. They were trying to clear obstacles on the Chesterfield Canal so they could stabilise a concrete wall — not an …
Topics /
Tech Industry & Business
The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 532 posts.
302
Can “second life” EV batteries work as grid-scale energy storage?
Colin Campbell explains how Redwood drains every drop of capacity from used batteries before they are recycled.
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Analysis of Product Hunt products from 2014 to 2021
An analysis of Product Hunt, 2014 - 2021
304
The National Design Studio is a scam
Joe Gebbia has no business designing government services.
305
Attention is a luxury good
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to. Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability …
306
Salesforce regrets firing 4000 experienced staff and replacing them with AI
Salesforces has entered a phase of public reckoning after senior executives publicly admitted that the company overestimated AI’s readiness
307
Three Observations
Our mission is to ensure that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) benefits all of humanity. Systems that start to point to AGI* are coming into view, and so we think it’s important to...
308
An investigation into egg prices
'More hens, less income!' So said the United Egg Producers' economist Donald Bell in 1994. The industry has gotten more consolidated ever since. And avian flu is just the latest excuse to hike prices.
309
Development speed is not a bottleneck
Big part of discussion around vibe coding revolves around pace of development while it was never a key constraint in succeeding with a product.
310
Building AI products in the probabilistic era
AI turns products from deterministic functions into probabilistic systems. That requires expanding old playbooks (SLOs, funnels, siloed finance), and reasoning in terms of trajectories, Minimum Viable Intelligence thresholds, and data as company operating system.
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Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book
New research could have big implications for copyright lawsuits against generative AI.
313
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...
314
What would an efficient and trustworthy meeting culture look like?
I like bits, bits are mighty. With bits you can do impressive things!
315
Bye, Prime
Why? · As I wrote in Not an Amazon Problem (and please go read that if you haven’t) I don’t see myself as an enemy of Amazon, particularly. I think the pressures of 21st-century capitalism have put every large company into a place where they really can’t afford to be ethical or the financial sector will rip them to…
316
Solar-plus-storage technology is improving quickly
On how plummeting battery prices make 24/7 solar power a reality today.
317
It's five grand a day to miss our S3 exit
We're spending just shy of $1.5 million/year on AWS S3 at the moment to host files for Basecamp, HEY, and everything else. The only way we were able to get the pricing that low was by signing a four-year contract. That contract expires this summer, June 30, so that's our departure date for the final leg of our cloud…
318
Getting More Strategic
Strategy – how to be strategic, and how to be seen as strategic – is one of my ongoing obsessions. Years ago, I read Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, and it’s guided my thinking ever s…
319
Why does Britain feel so poor?
Plus chaos chasers, ghost motorways, the secret symbols hiding in your street, and a rationalist death cult.
320
The good times in tech are over
For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of…
321
The Future of MCPs
MCPs—Model Context Protocols—are set to transform AI from passive chatbots into powerful, action-taking agents. But the real story isn’t what MCPs enable—it’s who controls them.
322
The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great
When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked “your catalog.” I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that…
323
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 …
324
Software is eating the world, all right (2024)
I retired from my IT career a couple of months ago after 43 years of commercial software product development and transitioned to the real…
325
Is Sora the beginning of the end for OpenAI?
On my podcast this week, I took a closer look at OpenAI’s new video generation model, Sora 2, which can turn simple text descriptions into ... Read more
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Why Companies Don't Fix Bugs
A few years ago, a lone programmer named t0st did something extraordinary: he fixed an 8-year-old bug in GTA Online that had been driving players crazy. The bug? Painfully long load times, sometimes u
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Advertising without signal: The rise of the grifter equilibrium
Economists credit ads with two welfare‑enhancing roles: 1. Informative – trimming search costs (Stigler 1961 (pdf)). 2. Signaling – In classic models, high-quality sellers are more willing to incur large, sunk ad costs because they expect to recoup them through future sales, especially in experience-good markets where…
329
Mapping the US healthcare system’s financial flows
Mapping Every Dollar of America's $5 Trillion Healthcare System
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Claude is the drug, Cursor is the dealer
Coding Tools Are Just One Front in AI’s Supply Chain Wars