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The most popular blog posts about tech industry & business on Hacker News. 8,981 posts.

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2164

Calculating the cost of a Google DeepMind paper

Recently, GDM released a great paper titled, Scaling Exponents Across Parameterizations and Optimizers, in which they conduct over 10,000 LLM training runs to obtain optimal hyperparameters under different regimes. After reading it (it was great), I wanted to test my understanding of the paper by tallying up all…

2166

Reviewing Steve Yegge's Prediction Record

I try to avoid making predictions 1 . It's a no-win proposition: if you're right, hindsight bias makes it look like you're pointing out the obvious. And most predictions are wrong. Every once in a while when someone does a review of predictions from pundits, they're almost always wrong at least as much as you'd expect…

2168

Action Plan for a New CTO

This post previously appeared in Fast Company. How does a newly hired Chief Technology Officer (CTO) find and grow the islands of innovation inside a large company? How not to waste your first six …

2173

State of the Sanderson 2022

State of the Sanderson 2022 Introduction Wow. What a year. I can remember writing this essay last year, and being all giddy about the fact that I was hiding four secret novels from you all. I said, “Maybe next year, I’ll be able to explain to you all why my year was so strange.” One big part of it was those novels. The

2179

Founder Control

December 2010 Someone we funded is talking to VCs now, and asked me how common it was for a startup's founders to retain control of the board after a series A round. He said VCs told him this almost never happened. Ten years ago that was true. In the past, founders rarely kept control of the board through a series A…

2183

How Paul Graham Is Wrong

I love Paul Graham’s essays and his latest is no exception: Let the Other 95% of Great Programmers In. I agree that the US deserves dramatically better immigration policies, but in the meantime I’m…

2186

The Uber Dilemma

Benchmark’s lawsuit against Uber is extraordinary; that is because Uber, despite everything, remains an extraordinary company. Game theory explains the implications.

2190

Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)

I’ve enjoyed playing a game called Avalon recently. I won’t go too far into the rules, but it’s a hidden role game in the vein of Secret Hitler or Werewolf, where one team is “good”, trying to uncover who among them is “evil”, before the evil team wins.