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We should be more ambitious with the software we build
Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust ) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying
Topics /
Tech Industry & Business
The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 522 posts.
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Why Japanese companies do so many different things
The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations
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We haven't seen the worst of what gambling and prediction markets will do
I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity
We reward complexity and ignore simplicity. In interviews, design reviews, and promotions. Here’s how to fix it.
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I said no and Apple said yes
The one where Apple decides consent doesn’t matter anymore.
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Domain expertise has always been the real moat
The hard part of writing software has never been the writing. It was building a working model of the domain in your head first. Before you could ship a payroll…
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How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I've seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I've never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions…
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Did my old job only exist because of fraud?
Early in my software engineering career, the UK-based startup I worked at, GenieDB, was taken over by a US Venture Capital fund, Frost VP, owned by Stuart Frost. I was functionally the only piece that came to the US. The code was rebuilt, the rest of the team eventually rotated out, even the core strategy was…
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Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service
How Delve managed to falsely convince hundreds of customers they were compliant and then lied about it when exposed and called out
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Microsoft hasn't had a coherent GUI strategy since Petzold
A few years ago I was in a meeting with developers and someone asked a simple question: “What’s the right framework for a new Windows desktop app?” Dead silence. One person sugges…
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Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product
Building in consumer hardware as a software engineer
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Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise
Why senior developers talk in terms of complexity while the rest of the business is worried about uncertainty. And what to do about it now that AI is in the picture.
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How many products does Microsoft have named 'Copilot'?
Update (9 Apr 2026): Another one. A helpful person sent in Microsoft 365 Copilot for US Government. That's 81. Chart updated.
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First, make me care
Writing advice: some nonfiction fails because it opens with background instead of a hook—readers leave before reaching the good material. Find the single anomaly or question that makes your topic interesting, lead with that, and let the background follow once you’ve earned attention.
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Pledging another $400k to the Zig software foundation
My family is pledging another $400,000 1 to the Zig Software Foundation (ZSF). This brings our total pledged support for ZSF to $700,000, after our initial donation in 2024 .
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Zuckerberg's war on whistleblowers
More than a decade ago, a group of young, internet-connected Belarusian dissidents launched a series of increasingly high-stakes, increasingly surreal confrontations with the corrupt, authoritarian government of Alexander Lukashenka, a man who is often called "the last Soviet dictator."
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Small Models Have Arrived
For the past few weeks, I've been playing with gpt-5.6-luna . It is shockingly capable, fast, and smart. I regularly see it do ~100 tps, and rip around my codebase, email, and knowledge base.
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Curl will not accept vulnerability reports during July 2026
The curl project will not accept or otherwise handle any vulnerability reports during the month of July 2026. We call it the curl summer of bliss. curl's submission form on Hackerone will be paused starting July 1, 2026. Summer of bliss starts: July 1, 2026. 00:00 CEST Submissions resume: August 3 2026. 09:00 CEST The…
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Never buy a .online domain
I’ve been a .com purist for over two decades of building. Once, I broke that rule and bought a .online TLD for a small project. This is the story of how it went up in flames.
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Google's Antigravity bait and switch
The day was to begin like any other, with Antigravity open (yes, there are tens of us!), expecting to get some work done before my attention fragments. But Google had other plans. They had rolled out a new version of Antigravity the day before, at I/O 2026 , presenting it as a shiny, standalone Codex-style experience.
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Xbox goes down. You can't play games you own on disc
Jay Peters: Xbox’s huge outage even blocked games on disc An extended Xbox outage that began Sunday evening hasn’t just caused issues for people trying to play digital games — it blocked people from playing their disc-based games, too. When Sony announced that they were discontinuing physical discs
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Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
The world tried to kill Andy off but he had to stay alive to to talk about what happened with databases in 2025.
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“It works better in the app”
The monkey-punchers at Google never quite seem to finish any of their apps. There's always some useful bit of work left undone, or showstopping bug which remains unfixed, a thousand jagged edges as yet unsolved by the greatest minds of their generation. I wanted to subscribe to an events calendar. I had a URl. I had…
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The quiet renovation at Bitwarden
Back in March, I wrote about Bitwarden doubling their Premium price — and specifically how they did it. Buried in a feature announcement. Priced in fake...
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Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free
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…
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GLM 5.2 and the coming AI margin collapse
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.