Age of Invention: How the Dutch Did It Better
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 8,982 posts.
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
Japan's debt crisis has been building for a decade. Back in 2001 I wrote an essay on Japan's exploding debt and the dire consequences of what I called Japan's Runaway Debt Train (2001) :
A bespoke software revolution? I don't buy it. It'll exist. It already exists. Small consultants and big consulting firms have made custom software for years. It almost always sucks. It’s bloated, confusing, and because the client pays, it’s built in all the wrong ways. Who’s excited about bespoke software? Software…
S o Steve Jobs just shot the cloners in the head, indirectly doing the same to the growing percentage of Mac users who prefered cloned Mac systems to Apple's own. So his message to everybody was no different than it was at Day One: all I want from the rest of you is your money and your appreciation for my Art.
The AI era is speedrunning the Web 2.0 story. Open and accessible MCPs are not our future. Integrations will be tightly governed.
Has it really been 10 years? It seems just yesterday we were playing around on my blog, and the blogs of a few high school friends. Two of those friends are married, one isn’t anymore, two are stil…
The transparency movement has finally come of age. Power has shifted to the users. Their trust has to be earned in different ways now.
A solution to the Epstein problem
I’m an independent developer who built Punge, an on-device NSFW image detection app. The idea was simple: give people tools to manage…
Conventional wisdom is: Don’t raise money from a ton of angel investors because it’ll clutter the cap table and be a pain in the butt. I strongly disagree.
With all the controversy surrounding Glee’s ripoff of Jonathan Coulton’s Baby Got back I thought I would makes a remix that combines the two versions. The remix alternates between the t…
Looking back at the last 12 months feels surreal. I have learned so much about selling, it's insane.
We all know, I think, that there are now far more smartphones than PCs, and we all know that there are far more people online now than there used to be, and we also, I think, mostly know that big tech companies today are much bigger than the big tech companies of the past. It’s useful, though, to pu
Leading UK expert on innovation & startup validation. Transform ideas into validated, investable businesses with proven methodologies.
Where are you in your company's layoff list? Every company has one, even if it's just a vague idea in the mind of the CEO. By looking a...
If two companies have the same revenue, one from a few large customers and the other from many little customers, which is better? Which would you rather build?
To go back a ways, back in 2006 I suggested that you could look at the winding path a piece of media takes to the public in this way:
Intuition works from the shadows. Look at it directly and you get rationalization, not explanation—the verbal brain fills the gaps with a plausible story.
programming, philosophy, history, internet, startups