The hottest Substack posts right now

according to Hacker News
Category
Not Boring by Packy McCormick • 297 implied HN points • 18 Feb 26
  1. New technologies make key inputs abundant, which magnifies the value of scarce, industry-specific assets so a few winners capture a growing share of economic value.
  2. To win you must identify the industry’s bottleneck (the Schwerpunkt), break it, seize the High Ground by owning the scarce defensible asset, and then integrate outward to lock in those gains.
  3. That often means building full‑stack businesses or using hardware and services instead of defaulting to SaaS, and investors must judge bespoke strategy and execution rather than rely on standard SaaS metrics.
Tanay’s Newsletter • 113 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
  1. AI erodes labor-based moats like switching costs, application-layer scale, and generic process advantages, making it cheaper and faster to build features, migrate systems, and iterate.
  2. Defensibility shifts to hard-to-reproduce assets: proprietary first-party data, real marketplace liquidity and reputation, regulatory or physical rails, and unique processes that rely on exclusive signals.
  3. Some powers strengthen or split — model and infrastructure scale plus institutional trust grow in importance, while marketing-driven consumer brand shortcuts weaken as agents can deeply evaluate options.
The Wolf of Harcourt Street • 219 implied HN points • 10 Oct 24
  1. A new community chat has been launched for subscribers to connect and share insights. It's a place for investors to learn from each other and discuss strategies.
  2. The chat does not change the existing newsletter; it simply adds more ways for subscribers to engage. Subscribers can participate in real-time discussions and network with others.
  3. To join the chat, users need to download the Substack app and access the chat feature. It's easy to start, and everyone is welcome to jump in.
Software Design: Tidy First? • 1104 implied HN points • 20 Jan 26
  1. Telling a model to adopt a persona improves small-scale behaviors like clearer variable names and modular, test-driven code. It doesn’t reliably change the overall architecture on its own.
  2. Giving explicit design constraints (for example, prescribe the Composite pattern and small specialized classes) reliably drives macro-architecture and produces simpler, finer-grained designs. These structural prompts change high-level decisions even without a persona.
  3. Combining a persona with clear architectural constraints gives the best result—good style plus the right structure. Scaling this by generating many variants and selecting the lowest-cost successful implementations can further evolve better model-driven development.
In My Tribe • 258 implied HN points • 16 Feb 26
  1. Over the last 40+ years labor’s share of income has fallen while profits and capital’s share rose, and much of the stock-market boom is due to investors paying much higher valuations (P/E) rather than a big rise in earnings relative to GDP.
  2. Bitcoin trading relies heavily on highly leveraged perpetual-futures contracts that can force margin calls and cause cascading liquidations, making the market prone to sharp crashes.
  3. The income gap between the median family and the 80th percentile has widened a lot, so what counts as a ā€œmiddle-classā€ lifestyle has shifted up and leaves median earners feeling poorer by comparison.
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From the New World • 415 implied HN points • 16 Feb 26
  1. The "New Cold War" story is a dead end; both the US and China run similar boomer-led schemes that enrich the old and scapegoat others, so blaming the foreign enemy misses the real problem.
  2. A startup-focused network state near Singapore shows you can recreate SF-style software and philosophy culture with much better safety, lower cost, and stronger talent networks, making human capital flight a powerful geopolitical and personal option.
  3. AI’s biggest near-term economic effect will be to supercharge B2B SaaS, lowering the bar to start useful automation businesses and creating an "AI middle class" of process-setting jobs rather than only producing huge research breakthroughs.
The Honest Broker • 38864 implied HN points • 21 Jan 25
  1. Google has become a powerful force in the digital world, much like the East India Company was for trade in the past. It controls key connections or 'links' that affect how users and businesses interact online.
  2. Just like the East India Company faced backlash for its ruthless business practices, Google is also experiencing growing resentment from users and governments who feel exploited and manipulated.
  3. The story of the East India Company's rise and fall serves as a warning for Google. Unchecked greed and ambition can lead to eventual downfall, and history shows that those who gain too much power often attract a pushback.
The Kaitchup – AI on a Budget • 259 implied HN points • 07 Oct 24
  1. Using 8-bit and paged AdamW optimizers can save a lot of memory when training large models. This means you can run more complex models on cheaper, lower-memory GPUs.
  2. The 8-bit optimizer is almost as effective as the 32-bit version, showing similar results in training. You can get great performance with less memory required.
  3. Paged optimizers help manage memory efficiently by moving data only when needed. This way, you can keep training even if you don't have enough GPU memory for everything.
QTR’s Fringe Finance • 24 implied HN points • 18 Mar 26
  1. Self-driving cars are inevitable because AI and autonomy are improving fast and the industry is moving toward autonomous fleets.
  2. These vehicles are already safer than many human drivers in tests. They could cut accidents and save tens of thousands of lives each year.
  3. Widespread autonomy will lower costs, reduce parking and commute stress, and expand mobility for people who can’t drive, but regulation and public acceptance are the main remaining barriers.
Material World • 1542 implied HN points • 16 Jan 26
  1. Britain's chemicals industry is rapidly shrinking, with long-standing plants for things like soda ash and ammonia closing and domestic salt production now at risk.
  2. Salt is a surprisingly vital raw material that feeds into many everyday and high-tech products, from glass and paper to the chemicals used in semiconductors and batteries.
  3. This points to a bigger trade-off: do we prioritise cheap imports or keep strategic manufacturing at home, and do we really understand how global supply networks are configured?
Res Obscura • 4354 implied HN points • 19 Nov 25
  1. Gemini 3 is a strong AI model that can create interactive games, like a Henry James simulator set in 1889 Paris. It shows good skills in making maps and storytelling.
  2. The quality of AI-generated content varies, as seen with models like Claude Sonnet 4.5 and GPT-5.1, which struggled to create usable simulations. This shows that human guidance is important.
  3. Using AI in education can be creative and engaging. It offers a chance for students to learn about history through interactive play, encouraging them to think critically about primary sources.
Tiny Empires • 36 implied HN points • 07 Mar 26
  1. Most business problems are visible frictions—old pricing, unused features, and clunky onboarding—and can be fixed in one focused day by looking for what you’ve been avoiding.
  2. Use a simple schedule: raise prices and fix billing, cut or stop maintaining low-value features, improve onboarding, then automate a recurring task to reclaim time and boost revenue.
  3. Protect your attention by writing down what you’re not going to do; small, focused fixes compound over weeks and months, though they won’t save a fundamentally broken business model.
ChinaTalk • 844 implied HN points • 26 Jan 26
  1. They’re seeking deeply reported, analytically sharp pitches that go beyond headlines and are willing to pay and edit work from first-time or non-native-English writers.
  2. Priority topics include China’s escalation and economic-coercion options, energy and data-center build-out (and its ties to AI), China’s global tech and infrastructure influence, scientific and biotech progress, and Taiwan’s democratization.
  3. Reporters with local language skills, on-the-ground access, archival finds, or ideas for novel formats (interactive pieces or economic modeling) are especially encouraged and can earn higher pay.
Chartbook • 1845 implied HN points • 29 Dec 25
  1. In 2025 US stocks and gold rose together into bubble territory, a simultaneous surge not seen in about 50 years.
  2. The likely drivers are a mix of abundant liquidity and shifting risk appetite: pandemic stimulus, low nominal rates, big deficits and easier retail trading have boosted credit creation and pushed asset prices higher.
  3. Retail investors have been buying aggressively while institutions pull back, creating a self-reinforcing bubble concentrated in the asset-owning top 20 percent and raising the risk of sharp market swings and wider political and social consequences.
Arpitrage • 2194 implied HN points • 22 Dec 25
  1. Transformer-based models can learn the dynamics of a New Keynesian economy from simulated data and produce accurate out-of-sample forecasts, outperforming simple reduced-form benchmarks.
  2. They often predict the direction and rough magnitude of policy shock responses, but misestimate impulse-response dynamics and can exhibit overshooting, so they do not fully recover the true causal structure.
  3. These advances weaken the practical bite of the Lucas critique by improving prediction, but they do not eliminate the need for structural models for causal interpretation, welfare analysis, and interpretability; transformer methods are a promising complementary tool.
Astral Codex Ten • 39093 implied HN points • 23 Jan 25
  1. People often care more about issues close to home than distant suffering, even if they claim to be indifferent. It's easy to ignore problems that don't directly affect us.
  2. When something shocking happens, like the grooming gangs, people suddenly show emotional support and demand action. This shows that we can and do care about issues when they hit home.
  3. Our moral beliefs can be confusing and sometimes contradictory. We need to face these contradictions and acknowledge that we can care about suffering everywhere, not just where it's convenient for us.
Democratizing Automation • 720 implied HN points • 30 Jan 26
  1. Senior engineers and researchers who can steer complex LLM systems and provide long-term vision are hugely valuable, and their impact often outpaces adding more junior people.
  2. Junior candidates need a near-obsessive focus on making measurable progress and deep ownership in a narrow area, plus clear evidence (good evaluations, strong results) or they risk being replaced by tooling.
  3. Getting hired depends on alignment and signals: public writing, meaningful open-source work, and well-crafted cold emails help you stand out, while poor signals (many middle-author papers or low-quality AI-generated posts) hurt, and cultural fit matters as much as raw ability.
Marcus on AI • 16441 implied HN points • 28 Jun 25
  1. Generative AI struggles to create accurate models of the world. Without solid internal frameworks, they often get things wrong.
  2. Traditional AI uses clear and updateable world models for understanding, but current AI models like LLMs don't. This lack of structure leads to many errors in reasoning.
  3. Failures in AI, like making illegal moves in games or giving incorrect information, show that without proper world models, AI systems cannot reliably function.
beyondrevenueoperations • 19 implied HN points • 27 Oct 24
  1. Combining SQL and Python makes data management much easier. SQL helps you access and pull data, while Python helps analyze it and create reports.
  2. Using SQL, you can break down data silos from different systems to get a complete view of your customers and performance. This is crucial for making smart, data-driven decisions.
  3. With Python, you can automate tasks, build predictive models, and visualize data, which saves time and enhances your ability to understand trends and insights.
read • 16116 implied HN points • 20 Jan 24
  1. Frequent-flier point programs were initially designed for occasional free flights, but evolved into turbo-charged schemes for travelers to earn points quickly.
  2. Weighing ingredients in cooking can make a big difference in recipes, especially in baked goods, where even small variations can impact the final texture and taste.
  3. During winter, composting slows down as decomposition rates decrease, signalling a time for compost piles to rest and wait for the warmer season for active decomposition.
Heterodox STEM • 227 implied HN points • 25 Feb 26
  1. Large-scale immigration has often brought economic and political benefits to host countries, but those gains depend heavily on context like cultural fit, immigrant skills, and institutional responses.
  2. Mass low-skilled immigration can increase inequality, strain public services, and reduce assimilation pressures, producing social and economic costs that differ from past historical cases.
  3. A practical policy approach is to welcome high-skilled, high-achieving immigrants while greatly restricting low-skilled immigration to protect a high-wage, innovation-focused society.
Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 322 implied HN points • 17 Feb 26
  1. Modern multimodal and advanced language models often fabricate detailed but false information — like nonexistent book titles and imaginary historical maps — so hallucinations are common, not rare.
  2. These systems are essentially compressed correlation engines without a true world model, meaning they stitch patterns from training data instead of genuinely understanding or verifying reality.
  3. Techniques like RLHF and prompt engineering can reduce some errors but cannot fully eliminate unpredictable hallucinations, so reliable use often requires careful prompting or external verification of answers.
Ageling on Agile • 159 implied HN points • 13 Oct 24
  1. Agile is not a goal; it's a tool to achieve bigger goals like better teamwork and faster delivery. Coaches should focus on the benefits of Agile instead of just promoting the process itself.
  2. Some Agile Coaches act like salespeople, pushing their one-size-fits-all solution instead of customizing their approach to meet each organization's unique needs. Good coaches listen to what the company really needs first.
  3. Many Agile Coaches focus only on the teams without considering the rest of the organization. Everyone needs to understand how Agile impacts their work to truly benefit from it.
Progress and Poverty • 654 implied HN points • 10 Feb 26
  1. The Center for Land Economics launched a short-term Land Economics Fellowship that provides a $3,000 stipend, access to data and mentorship, and a public platform for 4–6 months of focused research; it’s open to people from many backgrounds and applications are due March 1.
  2. The Progress and Poverty Institute is offering Progress of Ideas grants (up to $10,000) to fund research on land value taxation and related topics; they’re especially interested in valuation methods, fiscal and distributional modeling, political messaging, legal constraints, and policy design, with applications due April 6 and eligibility limited to US 501(c)(3) organizations.
  3. The Henry George Foundation of Great Britain offers research grants for work on the modern political and ethical implications of Henry George’s ideas, especially with an international or UK focus, and there’s also a Land Research Network you can join via a short form to connect with other researchers and future opportunities.
Marcus on AI • 10750 implied HN points • 20 Aug 25
  1. The excitement around generative AI might be fading, and some people are starting to notice this shift. It seems that reality is catching up with the hype.
  2. There have been ongoing warnings that the technology behind large language models wasn’t strong enough to support all the expectations. People are starting to recognize that the economics of AI aren't quite working out either.
  3. Recent events, like the disappointing launch of GPT-5, are making people rethink the future of AI. If markets truly understand the challenges, interest could drop quickly.
More Than Moore • 186 implied HN points • 01 Mar 26
  1. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D is basically a higher‑binned 9800X3D with faster clocks, but it only delivers tiny performance gains while drawing significantly more power and costing more.
  2. AMD’s 3D V‑Cache really helps CPU‑bound, cache‑hungry games and makes memory speed matter less, but it doesn’t improve compute‑heavy workloads and offers no advantage for AI paths that need an NPU.
  3. On value, the 9800X3D or cheaper Intel options give better performance‑per‑dollar, so most buyers should pick the cheaper chip and spend any savings on other parts like memory amid volatile DRAM prices.
Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 292 implied HN points • 18 Feb 26
  1. Uncertainty about whether AI will plateau or trigger far-reaching, rapid change is freezing people up and making it hard to write or craft medium-run policy because so many scenarios point to very different prescriptions.
  2. Human collective knowledge and past waves of technology suggest AI is best seen as a powerful new tool that amplifies our existing, distributed intelligence rather than automatically becoming a silicon god, with historical tech shifts unfolding in distinct accelerations.
  3. Rather than throwing up hands, the practical move is to focus on concrete policy and investment now — treating AI as a tool that can be guided to redirect human talent (for example toward teaching) and to shape the next decade of outcomes.
Marcus on AI • 14781 implied HN points • 09 Jul 25
  1. Many people think LLMs are showing signs of consciousness, but experts feel it's more about clever wordplay than real thinking. LLMs just mix words and ideas they've learned without true understanding.
  2. Real consciousness involves complex experiences like joy, fear, and personal connections, not just technical jargon. It's about feeling and experiencing life, not just generating responses.
  3. Be careful not to be fooled by the convincing language of LLMs. Their responses can sound intelligent, but they often lack depth or genuine thought.
The Algorithmic Bridge • 1295 implied HN points • 19 Jan 26
  1. Ads in ChatGPT are a deal-breaker because they make the service prioritize advertisers over users and change the experience for people who don’t pay.
  2. The economics of running large AI models aren’t compatible with a free, high-quality consumer product, so companies will raise prices, cut quality, or turn to ads to cover costs.
  3. Promises about no ad influence and privacy are hard to verify, and the result will be a two-tier system where paying users get better, ad-free experiences while free users face subtle biases and worse outcomes.
Richard Hanania's Newsletter • 2121 implied HN points • 02 Jan 26
  1. Thus Spoke Zarathustra promotes the ideal of an individual who transcends the crowd, encouraging solitude, self‑overcoming, and a willingness to face social isolation.
  2. Nietzsche’s writings are easy to appropriate for many different causes, so his aphorisms are often twisted to justify everything from tech hubris to far‑right politics.
  3. His insights about inequality and resentment can aid personal understanding, but turning heroic struggle or the will‑to‑power into a public governing philosophy is dangerous and likely to end in disaster.
Pekingnology • 147 implied HN points • 08 Mar 26
  1. Ancient Chinese political debates still shape modern Chinese thinking and offer insight into pressing issues like family law, corruption, cultural policy, and military choices.
  2. Different schools—Confucianism, Daoism, Legalism, and Mohism—present competing answers (for example harmony vs freedom, ritual vs law, culture vs material welfare, realism vs idealism) that help frame policy trade-offs.
  3. Framing these debates as lively, contemporary dialogues makes their ideas easy to grasp and shows practical relevance, while leaving room for debate and differing interpretations.
Ageling on Agile • 39 implied HN points • 24 Oct 24
  1. Estimating work is hard, especially for complex tasks. It's okay to acknowledge that some work can't be easily estimated and to focus on learning instead.
  2. Teams often have different opinions on estimates, which can lead to valuable discussions. These conversations help everyone align on the work and understand each other's perspectives.
  3. Estimates shouldn't be treated as strict commitments. If people outside the team are pushing for deadlines based on estimates, it's important to push back and clarify that estimates are just rough calculations.
Construction Physics • 35493 implied HN points • 23 Jan 25
  1. Homeowners insurance costs have risen a lot over the past years, with a 33% average increase between 2020 and 2023. This has made it tough for many to afford insurance, leading some to rely on state-backed options.
  2. While rising construction costs and home sizes explain part of the increase, climate change and more frequent severe weather events are likely major factors driving up insurance prices further.
  3. Interestingly, even though some types of damage have become less frequent, the cost to repair them has increased, particularly for wind, hail, and water damage, which contribute significantly to higher insurance losses.
Arpitrage • 470 implied HN points • 09 Feb 26
  1. Finance work is mostly about processing large volumes of documents, and building pipelines to extract, index, and semantically understand those texts lets teams scale research, compliance, and automated actions. You still need provenance, governance, and clear workflows so those outputs are trustworthy.
  2. AI abilities are uneven: it can boost accuracy and productivity on tasks inside its capability frontier but can hurt performance outside that frontier, so humans need to stay engaged with clear roles (e.g., dividing work or iterating together). This also means guarding against cognitive complacency as tools get easier to use.
  3. Hallucinations are a core risk with LLMs, and the practical fix today is grounding models with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that pulls answers from a curated corpus. RAG reduces made-up claims but doesn't eliminate errors, so high-stakes outputs still require human verification.
The Novelleist • 325 implied HN points • 11 Feb 26
  1. Design cities by starting with a clear vision of how people should live together, using that utopian horizon to guide practical planning choices.
  2. Treat land as a public good and organize its use around long-term stewardship instead of short-term speculation.
  3. Capture and return the value created by land to the community so cities become more stable, humane, and make residents stakeholders in local prosperity.
The Intrinsic Perspective • 100547 implied HN points • 27 Feb 24
  1. Generative AI is overwhelming the internet with low-quality, AI-generated content, polluting searches, pages, and feeds.
  2. Major platforms and media outlets are embracing AI-generated content for profit, contributing to the cultural pollution online.
  3. The rise of AI-generated children's content on platforms like YouTube is concerning, exposing young viewers to synthetic, incoherent videos.
The Algorithmic Bridge • 1762 implied HN points • 06 Jan 26
  1. The claim that AI wastes huge amounts of water is largely exaggerated and not the major environmental problem people often portray.
  2. People focus on water because it’s a safe, simple moral hook that anyone can use to signal purity without needing technical knowledge.
  3. The water narrative sticks even after being debunked because it serves identity, social-status, and emotional needs, so facts alone rarely change minds.
lcamtuf’s thing • 3265 implied HN points • 04 Dec 25
  1. You can build a lowpass filter using just capacitors and a switch instead of resistors. This method is simpler and can lead to interesting circuit designs.
  2. The switch in this setup changes the connection of the capacitors, allowing them to charge and affect the signal based on their voltages. This simulates resistor-like behavior, even though no resistors are used.
  3. By adjusting the frequency of the switching, you can control how the filter responds to different input signals. This gives you flexibility in analog signal processing.
Interconnected • 262 implied HN points • 19 Feb 26
  1. AI is increasingly seen as a zero-sum force because its benefits are spread thin while real costs hit specific workers, towns, and companies hard, creating anger and political backlash.
  2. How leaders and companies talk about AI matters — boastful messaging and visible rivalries make the technology feel threatening instead of helpful.
  3. There’s not enough real investment in helping people adapt; temporary construction jobs and hand‑wavy retraining won’t fix long‑term displacement, so durable support and policy are needed.
Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 184 implied HN points • 24 Feb 26
  1. Even for closed, well-defined facts with a single right answer, large language models still confidently produce wrong lists and can contradict themselves when probed.
  2. Because they predict the next token rather than truly ā€˜understand’ content, models often pick plausible-sounding sequences that are fluent but unreliable; detailed prose is not proof of correct knowledge.
  3. Treat these systems as fallible tools: verify outputs against authoritative sources, design controlled tests and prompts, and avoid assuming their fluency equals truth.