The hottest Substack posts right now

according to Hacker News
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There's a technology built into our cars to make driving safer – but we're not using it.

Odds and Ends of History • 1541 implied HN points • 19 Jan 24
🕹 Technology Innovation Cars Safety Emergency Response Data Sharing
  1. There's a built-in technology in cars for safer driving that's not being utilized properly.
  2. The eCall system can connect drivers to emergency services with just a press of a button, providing important data like location and car details.
  3. The potential of eCall data to optimize emergency response and improve road safety is hindered by lack of integration among different emergency service systems.

Death smiles at us all

Becoming Noble • 378 implied HN points • 22 Mar 23
📖 Philosophy Time God Free will Fear Existence
  1. Time is an alien force that impacts all of us, and we must learn to embrace it.
  2. Existence in time means every decision becomes permanent, leading into an unknowable future.
  3. Despite the fear of time and God's eternal view of our actions, individual agency is crucial, and we have a limited window to act.

China On Track To Pass Japan in Auto Exports

Japan Economy Watch • 479 implied HN points • 25 Apr 23
💼 Business Industry Market Technology Automotive Competition
  1. China is set to overtake Japan in auto exports, driven largely by the rise of EVs.
  2. Japanese automakers risk repeating the decline of the Detroit Three by resisting the shift to electric vehicles (EVs).
  3. The dominance of Japanese automakers is being challenged by Chinese brands, mirroring a historical pattern of established companies failing to adapt to technological shifts.

Using Psychology to Improve User Onboarding

UX Psychology • 377 implied HN points • 14 Jul 23
🕹 Technology UX Design Decision-making User Experience Psychology
  1. Leverage psychology in user onboarding to create informative, enjoyable, and memorable experiences.
  2. Utilize the Zeigarnik effect by using progress meters, reminders, and allowing partial profile completion to keep users engaged.
  3. Decrease complexity with Hicks' law by reducing choices, highlighting easy options, and using progressive onboarding to improve decision-making and enhance user experience.
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Marc Andreessen: Understand "Onion Theory Of Risk" To Raise Funding For Your Startup | VC Remote Jobs & More

Venture Curator • 259 implied HN points • 18 Dec 23
💼 Business Startups Investors Milestones Funding Venture Capital
  1. Understanding the relationship between risk and cash flow is crucial for successfully raising venture capital funding for a startup.
  2. Peeling away layers of risks through achieving milestones is key to pitching your startup effectively to investors at different funding rounds.
  3. The Onion Theory of Risk highlights the layers of risk a startup faces and emphasizes the importance of systematically reducing these risks to attract funding.

I launch it, it fails, and I feel like shit

Kenny’s Sub • 179 implied HN points • 11 Feb 24
💼 Business Marketing Mindset Entrepreneurship Personal Growth Product Development
  1. Treat your failures as experiments. Instead of feeling like a failure, see it as a chance to learn and improve.
  2. Try many ideas and reflect on them. The more you try, the better you get at figuring out what works and what doesn’t.
  3. Use mindfulness techniques like meditation and journaling. This helps you understand your feelings and bounce back faster after setbacks.

Q3 Update: Delinquencies, Foreclosures and REO

CalculatedRisk Newsletter • 43 implied HN points • 04 Dec 25
💰 Finance Banking Credit Risk Mortgages Housing Market Real Estate
  1. A large wave of foreclosures is unlikely because lending standards are solid and most homeowners have substantial equity, so distressed sales shouldn’t trigger cascading price declines.
  2. Delinquencies and foreclosure activity have increased modestly year‑over‑year (30/60/90‑day delinquencies and foreclosure starts are up), but overall levels remain historically low.
  3. The recent rise is concentrated in certain loan types (notably FHA and resumed VA activity) and REO dollar values have climbed, so expect a modest uptick in foreclosures rather than a systemic crisis.

DeFi Education's Holiday Book List

DeFi Education • 1079 implied HN points • 07 Dec 22
💰 Finance Economic History Books Investing Venture Capital Markets
  1. Reading is important for investors. It helps you understand new information and gain different viewpoints.
  2. The recommended book list includes diverse topics, not just crypto, to foster a well-rounded understanding of finance and business.
  3. Books like 'Digital Minimalism' and others help readers refine their focus and learn important historical lessons about money.

The Arm Story Part 2 : Archimedes to Advanced RISC Machines

The Chip Letter • 2839 implied HN points • 19 Feb 23
🕹 Technology Innovation Startups Mobile History Computers
  1. Acorn built a fast microcomputer called ARM but struggled to sell it, leading to Apple acquiring the technology and creating a separate company - ARM.
  2. The Acorn team focused on keeping manufacturing costs low for ARM, making it affordable and power-efficient compared to other designs at the time.
  3. The Archimedes, powered by ARM chips, received positive reviews for its speed and performance, offering a cost-effective alternative to other computers available.

One question to know if you’re truly independent

Kenny’s Sub • 219 implied HN points • 13 Jan 24
💼 Business Client Relations Income Streams Freelancing Mental health
  1. Being able to walk away from a situation means you have leverage and control. It shows you can handle consequences and find alternatives.
  2. If you're not confident about walking away from something, you might want to explore other income options. This way, you create choices for yourself.
  3. Sometimes you might have to accept a lack of leverage and deal with situations you can't change. It's okay to move on and not let it affect your peace of mind.

Use interpretability to improve and debug your ML model

Mindful Modeler • 279 implied HN points • 05 Dec 23
🕹 Technology Machine Learning Interpretability Debugging
  1. Identify target leakage using feature importance to prevent accidental data pre-processing errors that leak target information into features.
  2. Debug your model by utilizing ML interpretability to spot errors in feature coding, such as incorrect signs on feature effects.
  3. Gain insights for feature engineering by understanding important features, and know which ones to focus on for creating new informative features.

Mark It Zero, Dude

QTR’s Fringe Finance • 62 implied HN points • 10 Nov 25
💰 Finance Markets Banking Debt Credit Investing
  1. BlackRock drastically changed the value of its loans to Renovo from full value to zero very quickly. This shows how fast things can change in the financial markets.
  2. Many companies are hiding their bad investments and avoiding the truth about their financial situations. They often delay admitting losses until the last possible moment.
  3. Renovo's bankruptcy is not an isolated event; it reveals deeper problems in the private credit market. There are many companies facing similar issues, indicating a potential bigger crisis ahead.

Physics Professors Are Using AI Models as Physics Tutors

The Algorithmic Bridge • 552 implied HN points • 27 Dec 24
🕹 Technology Science Education AI Physics Computing
  1. AI is being used by physics professors as personal tutors, showing its advanced capabilities in helping experts learn. This might surprise people who believe AI isn't very smart.
  2. Just like in chess, where computers have helped human players improve, AI is now helping physicists revisit old concepts and possibly discover new theories.
  3. The acceptance of AI by top physicists suggests that even in complex fields, machines can enhance human understanding, challenging common beliefs about AI's limitations.

Ticker Take: a weekly newsletter on investing.

Jon’s Newsletter • 59 implied HN points • 01 Jun 24
💰 Finance Dividends Market Analysis Investing Stocks Economic Trends
  1. The stock market often rises after hitting record highs, so there's less to worry about than some investors think. History shows the S&P usually has a positive return in the year after an all-time high.
  2. Many major companies are currently valued below their usual 5-year averages, meaning there might be good buying opportunities. It's worth looking at stocks like Amazon and JP Morgan as potential investments.
  3. Investing in dividend stocks is still important, but many options are becoming less attractive compared to bonds. Focusing on companies with lower dividend payout ratios can help mitigate risk.

Vision 20/26: Charting India

Tigerfeathers! • 35 implied HN points • 19 Dec 25
💼 Business Technology Consumer Venture Capital Startups Investing Markets Economy
  1. AI has to prove real results in 2026 — products that deliver measurable customer value, cut routine decisions, and automate common tasks (including voice and edge AI) will win, not just flashy promises.
  2. India’s economy is shifting to a homegrown engine of growth — strong SIP-led domestic capital, an active IPO market, rising founder ambition, deep‑tech gains, and massive SMB digitisation are creating large, local opportunities with global potential.
  3. Infrastructure and resource gaps are becoming critical constraints — data centres need reliable clean power, clean‑tech investment is misaligned with where future energy demand will grow, and water security is an urgent problem that requires tech and policy solutions.

Import AI 330: Palantir's AI-War future; BLOOMChat; and more money for distributed AI training

Import AI • 399 implied HN points • 22 May 23
🕹 Technology Training AI Models Funding Regulation
  1. Palantir is making a big bet on AI for defense and intelligence, integrating it with large language models to enhance capabilities for conflict-based scenarios.
  2. SambaNova introduces BLOOMChat as a competitor to chatGPT, showcasing the ongoing race between open source models and proprietary ones in the field of AI development.
  3. Startup Together.xyz secures $20m in funding to promote open source and decentralized AI development, aiming to make AI training more accessible and widespread.

Making the U.S. the home for open-source AI

Democratizing Automation • 451 implied HN points • 05 Feb 25
🕹 Technology Regulation Open Source AI Development Innovation
  1. Open-source AI is important for a future where many people can help build and use AI. But creating a strong open-source AI ecosystem is really challenging and expensive.
  2. Countries like the U.S. and China are rushing to create their own open-source AI models. National pride and ensuring safety and security in technology are big motivators behind this push.
  3. Restricting AI models could backfire and give control to other countries. Keeping models open and available allows for better collaboration and innovation among users.

Permissions, AI, and Plato’s Ideal API

Permit.io’s Substack • 79 implied HN points • 09 May 24
🕹 Technology AI APIs Infrastructure Authorization Development Security
  1. APIs are now seen more as tools that users consume rather than just things developers create. This shift means we have to think about how APIs are used and managed from both ends.
  2. As APIs are used more, especially with AI, monitoring costs and handling errors are super important. Developers need to be careful about how many calls they make to avoid big bills and errors.
  3. The way we set permissions and handle security for APIs is changing. It's crucial to apply consistent security rules across all parts of an application, not just in isolated areas.

Crafting something beautiful ♥️

André Casal's Substack • 19 implied HN points • 01 Aug 24
🕹 Technology Software Development Programming Entrepreneurship User Experience Product Design
  1. Improving customer access made it easier for users to start using LaunchFast. Instead of multiple steps, they can now just run one command.
  2. A conversation with Neeraj from BigBinary led to important changes in pricing and marketing strategy for LaunchFast. These adjustments should help clarify its value and appeal more to potential users.
  3. Learning about deploying an NPM package simplified the process of launching LaunchFast. This helped create an efficient script that sets everything up quickly.

Why I Don't Buy The Moral Argument

Bentham's Newsletter • 196 implied HN points • 29 Jan 24
📖 Philosophy Existence Morality Atheism Theism Ethics
  1. The traditional moral argument for the existence of God is not convincing because the premise that without God, objective moral values do not exist is not plausible for all.
  2. Having God as the source of morality does not provide a satisfactory grounding for morality as it creates more questions and issues.
  3. Explaining the existence of moral facts by positing God as the source is as arbitrary as positing other explanations like pleasure being good.

The Essential Cybersecurity Skillsets for 2024

Rod’s Blog • 257 implied HN points • 18 Dec 23
🕹 Technology Professional development Certifications Skills Books Cybersecurity
  1. Cybersecurity professionals should have curiosity and critical thinking skills to question and understand cyber events.
  2. A strong technical foundation in IT, cybersecurity, and cybercrime is crucial for protecting digital assets.
  3. Cybersecurity professionals need impactful problem-solving abilities to make a difference in people's lives by safeguarding their data and privacy.

Apple

Business Breakdowns • 373 implied HN points • 11 Apr 23
💼 Business Strategy Retail Finance Technology Economy
  1. Apple's revenue is divided into five segments: iPhone, Mac, iPad, Wearables, Home and Accessories, and Services.
  2. Apple's Services segment has high margins and benefits from the large installed base of iPhone, Mac, and iPad users.
  3. Apple has a negative cash conversion cycle, giving the company leverage over its suppliers and improving working capital.

The Revaluation of All Values, Part 4

Intimations of a New Worldview • 373 implied HN points • 14 Mar 23
📖 Philosophy Ethics Empiricism Influence Metaphysics Value theory
  1. The will to power is a metaphysical doctrine similar to Heraclitus' Logos and Schopenhauer's primacy of the will.
  2. Nietzsche's will to power aims to promote and justify the flourishing of life, opposing pessimistic philosophies like Schopenhauer.
  3. The will to power is based on empirical findings in biology and psychology, generalizing to explain all aspects of life.

Chip Wars

Voss Capital • 373 implied HN points • 10 Sep 23
💼 Business Technology Geopolitics Investing Globalization Market Trends
  1. The semiconductor industry has been heavily influenced by geopolitical strategy, with countries like Taiwan and China playing crucial roles in chip manufacturing and innovation.
  2. The United States, while a dominant force in technological leadership, is in a precarious position due to dependence on Taiwan and China for chip manufacturing and assembly.
  3. Investors should consider companies like Intel as strategic assets, monitor the monopoly of companies like ASML, and be aware of potential geopolitical tensions impacting the semiconductor industry.

eisenhower as cybernetician

Dan Davies - "Back of Mind" • 373 implied HN points • 30 Jun 23
🕹 Technology Cybernetics Decision-making Information Technology Computers Systems theory
  1. Dwight Eisenhower highlighted the importance of maintaining balance in national programs and between private and public sectors.
  2. There was a new decision-making system created by the conjunction of military and industrial establishments.
  3. The warning was given that this system could generate outcomes not necessarily desired, seek growth, and be influenced by technological advancements.