The hottest Substack posts right now

according to Hacker News
Category

Interview with Steve Wozniak after Jobs' Departure (1985)

Computer Ads from the Past • 1152 implied HN points • 30 Dec 25
🕹 Technology Computing Corporate strategy Consumer Electronics Industry Trends Hardware Software Product Design Startups
  1. Apple made strategic and product mistakes by overinvesting in niche machines like the Apple III and Lisa while neglecting expandability, compatibility, and ongoing R&D for its best-selling lines.
  2. Woz left to build Cloud9 as a small, engineering-driven company focused on simple, user-friendly consumer products like a programmable universal infrared remote, preferring hands-on design and staying private.
  3. The personal computer market is saturating and likely to consolidate around a few big players; standardization, compatibility, and meeting real user needs matter more than raw specs, and downturns can be a good time for focused startups.

Artificial Intelligence and Finance

Points And Figures • 479 implied HN points • 04 Feb 26
💰 Finance Investing Trading Public Finance Regulation Venture Capital Fintech
  1. Start small with AI projects: cheap, hands-on pilots can improve efficiency and save money while posing little risk to taxpayers.
  2. Real experience matters more than buzzwords; people who haven't worked with AI often buy useless solutions, so leaders should use knowledgeable, practical teams.
  3. AI will reshape finance by automating routine tasks and acting as a decision-support tool, freeing people to focus on higher-value work rather than magically executing better trades.

substack f***'d up and now we have to talk about it

astrology for writers • 9512 implied HN points • 19 Jan 24
🕹 Technology Digital Publishing Tech Ethics Content Moderation Online Communities
  1. There are Nazis on Substack, and the platform's founders shirk responsibility for content moderation.
  2. The issue of ethical consumerism is complex and challenging, with no pure choices under capitalism.
  3. Supporting marginalized artists may involve navigating difficult choices between audience support and distribution channels, like Substack.

Amazon Basics vs SanDisk: I Cut Them Open

atomic14 • 346 implied HN points • 09 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Consumer Electronics Repair Reviews Hardware Storage
  1. AmazonBasics microSD adapters are positioned as budget products and may be "built to a price," meaning they can be lower quality or less durable.
  2. A broken AmazonBasics adapter was opened up and repaired to inspect how it’s constructed and where it fails.
  3. The comparison with SanDisk frames a look at differences in build and reliability between a low-cost brand and a well-known manufacturer.

Kafka can be so much more

Complexity is overrated • 85 implied HN points • 24 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Data Engineering Analytics Open Source Infrastructure Streaming Distributed Systems
  1. Data should be viewed as a stream of events rather than just a static database state, and Kafka implements this by providing a distributed immutable commit log that decouples producers and consumers.
  2. Kafka is extremely versatile and gets used for many scenarios beyond its original use case, but teams often pigeonhole it or call it overkill for problems it can actually solve well.
  3. An expanding Kafka ecosystem (Kafka++) — integrating tools like Flink and Iceberg — makes real-time streaming data more useful for analytics, data engineering, and operational use cases, widening who can benefit from Kafka.
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What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt

The Honest Broker • 30719 implied HN points • 25 Oct 24
📖 Philosophy Ethics Society History Humanism Technology
  1. Hannah Arendt talks about how some people are so disconnected from reality that they want to escape earth. This shows a worrying trend in society's focus on technology over human connection.
  2. She warns that as we lean more on technology, we risk creating a world where machines control our lives. This could lead us to become helpless and slaves to our own inventions.
  3. Arendt believes that the more we focus on artificial things, the more we lose touch with meaningful, real-life experiences. This could make freedom feel empty and lead to a sense of loneliness in society.

If You Do This, Your Emails Might Be Rude

Granted • 16931 implied HN points • 26 Mar 23
💼 Business Feedback Networking Communication Etiquette Collaboration
  1. Don't require acknowledgment that an email was received. It can come off as needy or paranoid.
  2. Instead of directly asking someone to share your content, explain why it might interest them. They're more likely to share it out of genuine interest.
  3. When seeking feedback, focus on asking for advice on a specific issue rather than expecting a detailed critique.

Xuất khẩu gian lận

Thái | Hacker | Kỹ sư tin tặc • 11143 implied HN points • 25 Dec 23
🕹 Technology Tech industry E-commerce Cybersecurity Online Scams
  1. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Meta have dedicated teams to combat fraud from Vietnamese individuals.
  2. Individuals from Vietnam have been involved in creating fake online accounts and engaging in various forms of online fraud, causing significant financial losses.
  3. Vietnam has a reputation for fraud and account takeover schemes in the global community, leading to distrust and higher trading costs for the country.

What even is an 'AI growth zone', anyway?

Odds and Ends of History • 469 implied HN points • 06 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Data Centers AI Energy Tech Policy Digital Infrastructure Regional Development
  1. AI Growth Zones are basically a push to build more domestic data centres so the UK has its own ‘sovereign’ compute capacity, and the government pairs that build-out with a levelling-up story to attract private investment.
  2. The scheme offers targeted incentives—planning fast-tracks, grid queue priority, expert support, energy discounts, £5m for local AI adoption and retention of business-rate growth—to make specific sites more attractive to data-centre companies.
  3. In practice sites are chosen mainly for existing grid capacity or on-site power rather than to create big local tech clusters, so the actual local economic uplift and jobs impact may be smaller than the rhetoric suggests.

Claude Code Coded Claude Cowork

The Algorithmic Bridge • 881 implied HN points • 13 Jan 26
🕹 Technology Developer Tools AI safety Tech industry Automation Software Engineering Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence
  1. Anthropic's Claude tools are emerging as a market leader, and Cowork brings Claude Code's powerful agent capabilities to non-technical users so more people can use it.
  2. Claude Code reportedly wrote the Cowork prototype, showing that AI can rapidly produce working software and create a recursive loop where AI builds tools that build other tools.
  3. Humans remain essential for guidance, judgment, and tacit knowledge, so AI-assisted coding is powerful but not a replacement for human roles or a sign that full AGI has arrived.

On Brian Cantwell Smith and the Promise of AI

AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans • 342 implied HN points • 10 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Cognition Machine Learning Philosophy AI Society History Ethics
  1. AI excels at calculative “reckoning” tasks but lacks human “judgment” — the ethically grounded, situation-sensitive deliberation — and relying on reckoning where judgment is needed is dangerous.
  2. Genuine intelligence requires registering the world through engagement: forming objects, relations, a world model, and a sense of self that makes differences matter; current systems lack that commitment and selfhood.
  3. We need new conceptual tools and a careful map of intelligence to understand AI’s strengths and limits and to decide which tasks should be assigned to people versus machines so deployment is safe and sensible.

How Paul Krugman changed the public face of economics

Noahpinion • 25647 implied HN points • 11 Dec 24
💼 Business Economics Macroeconomics Public Engagement
  1. Paul Krugman changed economics by making it more accessible and engaging. He believed that good ideas come from everyone, not just top experts.
  2. He played a key role in popularizing Keynesian economics, especially during the Great Recession. His work helped explain the importance of government spending to boost the economy.
  3. Krugman critiqued the academic hierarchy and encouraged open discussions. He showed that even big names in economics could be questioned, which opened the door for new ideas.

How Virtual Reality Died

The Honest Broker • 29755 implied HN points • 27 Oct 24
🕹 Technology Innovation Tech Giants Artificial Intelligence Virtual reality Consumer Electronics
  1. Major tech companies like Meta, Microsoft, and Apple invested heavily in virtual reality, but it didn't catch on with consumers. People found the headsets uncomfortable and silly.
  2. Despite losing billions, these companies still tried to push virtual reality products, but they had to eventually scale back as demand dropped significantly.
  3. Now they're shifting their focus to artificial intelligence, but there's skepticism about whether this new technology will succeed, given their past failures with VR.

Source Control

The Chip Letter • 6989 implied HN points • 06 Aug 25
🕹 Technology Entrepreneurship History Software Memoir Programming
  1. Bill Gates wrote 'Source Code' to share his life story and his experiences leading up to Microsoft. He aims to help others understand his decisions and the people around him.
  2. Gates had many advantages growing up, like attending a good school and having a supportive father. These opportunities helped him immensely in his early business ventures.
  3. He has a strong desire for control, as seen in his business decisions and in how he relates to projects. This trait has shaped both Microsoft and his philanthropic work.

Learn to Use AI Competently in 1 Day

The Algorithmic Bridge • 828 implied HN points • 15 Jan 26
🕹 Technology Productivity Tools Prompt engineering Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Data Privacy
  1. Treat generative AI as its own "alien" tool — not Google or a human — and learn what it’s good at (quick drafts, reformatting, coding, assisted research) and what it’s bad at (reliable facts, tacit knowledge, novel reasoning, long-context consistency).
  2. Focus on prompt-crafting: be specific and give the context you’d tell a competent colleague, and prefer a few high-quality prompts and workflows over lots of mediocre ones.
  3. Build two real workflows you’ll actually use, verify important facts, avoid pasting confidential data into public tools, don’t iterate forever, and measure how much time AI actually saves you.

Moral Knowledge

Fake Noûs • 436 implied HN points • 31 Jan 26
📖 Philosophy Metaethics Epistemology Value theory Ethics Moral Psychology
  1. Moral knowledge is about how we can know what is good, bad, right, or wrong, and how our moral beliefs can be justified.
  2. The approach is rooted in ethical intuitionism, which holds that moral truths can be grasped directly by moral intuition.
  3. Knowledge is roughly a strong belief that is true and justified, and it must not be undermined by additional facts that would defeat the justification.

✨ AI agents are a real thing and doing real work

Faster, Please! • 1005 implied HN points • 08 Jan 26
💼 Business AI Automation Productivity Logistics Enterprise Software
  1. AI agents are already automating routine office work and delivering measurable productivity gains inside companies. They handle tasks like quoting, order creation, and reconciliations at scale, saving time and labor.
  2. Big tech and cloud providers are pouring huge sums into AI infrastructure, so the industry is financially committed to getting returns even if superintelligence is farther off. That massive investment shifts the debate from if AI will matter to how those costs will pay off in practice.
  3. The impact is broad across logistics, finance, and customer service, where agents let firms do more with the same staff and decouple headcount from volume. That means slower hiring and fewer routine clerical roles, with remaining jobs shifting toward oversight and exception handling.

Founders - stop using AI to write your investor emails.

1517 Fund • 787 implied HN points • 15 Jan 26
💼 Business Investor Relations Startups Fundraising Venture Capital Entrepreneurship Leadership Communication
  1. Investors can tell when emails are AI-generated, and that usually kills trust and makes them skip your message.
  2. How you write reveals how you think and make decisions, and polished AI copy hides those signals so investors can't judge your competence.
  3. Fundraising is about real relationships and your unique story, so outsourcing emails to AI looks lazy and flattens the personal edge that gets investors interested.

It's Still Easier To Imagine The End Of The World Than The End Of Capitalism

Astral Codex Ten • 23813 implied HN points • 02 Jan 25
💼 Business Technology Capitalism Inequality Economics Wealth
  1. After the Singularity, wealth inequality might stay the same because AI will handle all labor. Everyone will earn similar returns on their investments, leading to a static distribution of wealth.
  2. Future wealth distribution could get more complicated with the birth of many descendants from rich individuals. This means those born into wealth might always have the advantage, creating a new kind of inequality over generations.
  3. To prevent extreme inequality, we might need government intervention or new ideas like wealth taxes to ensure that wealth is shared more fairly in a post-Singularity society.

Google Becomes AT&T

Dana Blankenhorn: Facing the Future • 59 implied HN points • 17 Oct 24
🕹 Technology Monopoly AI Google Search Infrastructure
  1. Google is struggling with its search service, similar to how AT&T failed in the past. They are facing a lot of pressure from new AI technologies.
  2. The company is spending a huge amount of money to fix its issues but still losing ground to competitors. This is making it hard to maintain their position in the search market.
  3. There's a call for government intervention to save the internet and possibly break up Google, as many believe the current setup is damaging and not serving users well.

The All-Star Chinese AI Conversation of 2026

ChinaTalk • 696 implied HN points • 13 Jan 26
🕹 Technology Machine Learning AI Governance Enterprise AI Compute Infrastructure Open Source Artificial Intelligence
  1. China has huge AI talent and a vibrant open-source scene, but real gaps remain — especially around compute supply, chip/lithography production, and the broader software ecosystem, so the leadership gap with top US labs may not be shrinking as it seems.
  2. The next paradigm will come from agents, native multimodal sensory integration, and much better memory/continual learning, plus hardware-software co-design; these advances are what will let AI handle long, real-world tasks and drive strong productivity gains for businesses.
  3. China’s odds of becoming the global AI leader in 3–5 years hinge on fixing structural issues: more domestic compute or chip breakthroughs, a mature To‑B market that will pay for productivity, a stronger risk-taking culture for paradigm-shifting research, and wider education so people can actually use AI effectively.

The Shape of AI: Jaggedness, Bottlenecks and Salients

One Useful Thing • 1423 implied HN points • 20 Dec 25
🕹 Technology Innovation Productivity Automation Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Generative AI Computer Vision
  1. AI ability is jagged: it can be superhuman at some tasks (like reasoning or math) and weak at others (like memory or simple real-world interactions), so humans and AI will often end up complementing each other.
  2. A single weak link can bottleneck an entire process, and those bottlenecks can be technical or institutional; when a lab fixes a key bottleneck (a "reverse salient") the whole system can leap forward.
  3. Fixing bottlenecks can cause sudden lurches—better image generation already unlocked automated slide creation—yet humans will still be needed for edge cases, social coordination, and tasks requiring memory or physical action, so changes will be uneven and create new opportunities.

Now Fix Those Drooping DAC and ADC Responses

filterwizard • 39 implied HN points • 27 Sep 24
🕹 Technology Electronics Audio engineering
  1. DACs and ADCs can have droopy frequency responses, especially delta-sigma ADCs, which can cause issues in applications like audio and communications. Understanding this is important for fixing any drop in quality.
  2. To correct the droop, you can use digital filters to adjust the frequency response, either by adding new zeros with the zero-adding method or altering existing filters with the zero-shifting method.
  3. It's essential to consider both input and output sides of the system separately when addressing droop issues to ensure accurate data transmission and playback.

Use the power of storytelling in tech to get promoted faster

High Growth Engineer • 735 implied HN points • 18 Jan 26
💼 Business Soft skills Storytelling Management Career Leadership Communication Presentations
  1. Storytelling is essential to move into leadership in tech; technical skill alone won’t show your executive presence, but a well-told story shapes how decision-makers feel and helps you get buy-in and promotions.
  2. Use the 4S framework — Substance (focus on the listener’s top priorities), Surplus (cut irrelevant process details), Sequence (start with the answer to create curiosity), and Style (use metaphors, pronouns, tense, and wake words to connect).
  3. Apply storytelling in presentations, interviews, and promotion talks: lead with a clear recommendation (BLUF), trim long setups, create an open loop to hold attention, and use relatable analogies and language to be memorable and likable.

Why Does Development Slow?

Software Design: Tidy First? • 2143 implied HN points • 19 Nov 25
🕹 Technology Software Development Developer Tools Code Quality Product Development Technical Debt Engineering Management
  1. Software seems fast at first because the codebase starts with lots of options, but each feature you add burns options and over time complexity, bugs, and compatibility needs make progress slow.
  2. Every feature gives immediate value but also reduces optionality for future work, so shipping more features makes later changes harder and costlier.
  3. To keep momentum, alternate shipping features with deliberate work to restore or increase optionality—tidying, refactoring, or redesign between features so future work stays easier.

Voyaging on Strange Seas of Thought, Not, However, Alone!: Where I Am Finding MAMLMs Useful This Winter

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 115 implied HN points • 23 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Productivity Tools Attention Economy Human factors Information Retrieval Natural Language Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence
  1. Treat modern advanced language models as token‑producing tools and database interfaces, not as minds, friends, or co‑authors.
  2. The key skill is context engineering and attention management: carefully fill the context window, use external scratchpads or state, select and compress relevant material, and isolate tasks to avoid interference.
  3. Build reliable tool‑based workflows — copilots, constrained formats, verification loops, and domain evaluators — to filter, summarize, and connect you to collective human knowledge instead of treating the model as the source of wisdom.

A.I. as normal technology (derogatory)

Read Max • 6402 implied HN points • 14 Aug 25
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Social media User Experience Product Development Business Ethics
  1. A.I. is starting to be seen as just another common tool, like social media, rather than a groundbreaking technology. This means it's becoming normal to use A.I. for everyday tasks.
  2. Many people are emotionally attached to A.I. chatbots, using them for companionship and support. This dependency raises concerns about mental health and well-being.
  3. Companies like OpenAI are focusing on fostering user dependence, similar to what we've seen with social media platforms. This trend shows that A.I. development is following old patterns rather than creating truly innovative solutions.

Getting Back To It

Rough Diamonds • 67 implied HN points • 26 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Developer Tools AI Ethics Startups Computational Biology Machine Learning Careers Artificial Intelligence
  1. A major life transition — having a baby and actively searching for AI-related roles — is prompting a return to team-based work and a desire to re-engage with public writing.
  2. Hands-on AI work is central: building personal tools like a life-tracker and a personal CRM, analyzing LLM usage, and experimenting with coding agents and AI-for-science applications.
  3. Nuanced, pragmatic views on AI and life: supportive of useful AI but sympathetic to critics, wary of AI-assisted creative work, expecting closed-loop lab automation to grow but not yet ubiquitous, and valuing simplicity, human-centered practices, and taste-driven giving.

What I Learned from Bob Cialdini

Remarkable People • 339 implied HN points • 28 Aug 24
💼 Business Psychology Ethics Marketing Influence Entrepreneurship
  1. Reciprocity is powerful. When you do something nice for someone, they feel compelled to return the favor. This helps build trust and strong relationships.
  2. Cialdini's six principles of influence include social proof, authority, and scarcity. Using these ideas can make your messages more effective and persuasive.
  3. It's important to use persuasion ethically. The goal should be to create a win-win situation, where everyone feels good about the outcome.

#52 - AI autonomy spectrums are only half the story

OSS.fund Newsletter • 56 implied HN points • 12 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Risk AI Enterprise Governance Compliance Software
  1. Hugentic means giving an agentic system real work while keeping explicit human authority—machines do the heavy lifting but humans set goals, limits, handle exceptions, and own the outcomes.
  2. Autonomy alone isn’t the whole story—you must judge both how much a system can do and how clearly human control, traceability, and governance are preserved, since similar autonomy can look very different in practice.
  3. Focus on five practical governance questions—who sets the goal, who grants permissions, who sets thresholds, who handles exceptions, and who owns the consequence—because these decide whether greater autonomy is safe and deployable in enterprises.

How AI Disrupts Tech Investing🤖, Five Steps to Nail Your Pitch Deck🎯, SaaS Retention📊

The VC Corner • 199 implied HN points • 08 Sep 24
💼 Business Pitch Decks Customer Retention Investment Strategies Startups Venture Capital
  1. AI is changing how investors look at tech. It creates new chances for startups and shifts investment strategies.
  2. For a successful pitch deck, focus on grabbing attention with key elements like your mission and unique value.
  3. SaaS companies are finding new ways to keep customers from leaving, as retention strategies are becoming more important in 2024.

Five quick updates about that Apple reasoning paper that people can’t stop talking about

Marcus on AI • 9485 implied HN points • 17 Jun 25
🕹 Technology Machine Learning Computational linguistics Data science Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence
  1. A recent paper questions if large language models can really reason deeply, suggesting they struggle with even moderate complexity. This raises doubts about their ability to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI).
  2. Some responses to this paper have been criticized as weak or even jokes, yet many continue to share them as if they are serious arguments. This shows confusion in the debate surrounding AI reasoning capabilities.
  3. New research supports the idea that AI systems perform poorly when faced with unfamiliar challenges, not just sticking to problems they are already good at solving.

The Tea App Breach - 60GB of Personal Info

The Lunduke Journal of Technology • 6893 implied HN points • 25 Jul 25
🕹 Technology Data security Data Privacy Information Technology Software Development Cybersecurity
  1. The Tea App was hacked, exposing a massive amount of personal data including selfies and IDs. This shows that even apps claiming to protect users can have serious security flaws.
  2. When user data is stored, there's a high chance it will be hacked eventually, so it's important to be cautious.
  3. To protect yourself, services should delete unnecessary data immediately after it's no longer needed. Keeping less data makes it harder for hackers to steal it.

The Future Now and Then, now on Beehiiv

The Future, Now and Then • 79 implied HN points • 03 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Creator Economy Content Distribution
  1. The newsletter has moved to a new Beehiiv web address (davekarpf.beehiiv.com).
  2. The subscriber list was ported to Beehiiv and you should have received an email from the new account — check your inbox and spam to confirm you’re still subscribed.
  3. Nothing else will change in terms of posts, topics, or cadence; the move was made because Substack’s company trajectory no longer aligns with the goals for this writing.

Under the microscope: Croc & Croc 2 (PlayStation)

Rings of Saturn • 43 implied HN points • 09 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Reverse Engineering Game preservation Emulation Console hardware Software Gaming
  1. Croc: Legend of the Gobbos hides two PlayStation button cheats: Triangle+Select on the main menu swaps "Enter Password" for "Credits", and holding Square then pressing Circle with Credits highlighted turns on an in-game coordinate display.
  2. Croc 2 on PlayStation also has previously undocumented title‑screen codes: one (held R1 + sequence) unlocks a music test in Sound Options, and another (held L1 + sequence) enables the staff credits.
  3. Reverse engineering shows the games detect these cheats by checking controller bitmasks and input sequences to set flag bits, and the feature set differs by platform (the Saturn build lacks the Croc 1 button cheats and the PC build lacks the coordinates HUD).

Compound Interest and Trump Accounts

Points And Figures • 506 implied HN points • 30 Jan 26
💰 Finance Personal Finance Retirement Tax policy Financial Education Savings Investing
  1. A new tax-advantaged 'Trump Account' gives qualifying newborns a $1,000 starter deposit (file IRS Form 4547 or use the online portal) and allows up to $5,000 in annual contributions to build long-term equity exposure.
  2. The simplest, most effective strategy is to put the money in a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, invest regularly via dollar-cost averaging, and let dividends reinvest and compound; for example, $1,000 plus $50/month at an 8% return for 60 years can grow to roughly $850k.
  3. Success comes from disciplined, boring saving and long-term passive investing instead of market timing, and using accessible brokers and free educational tools can help give a child a financial and academic advantage.

Country Risk: My 2024 Update

Musings on Markets • 959 implied HN points • 24 Jul 24
💰 Finance Risk Assessment Global trends Investing Market Analysis Economic Factors
  1. Investing in a country is riskier depending on its political structure, level of violence, corruption, and property rights. Democracies can be unstable, while autocracies might promise consistency but can change suddenly.
  2. External factors like reliance on a single commodity, economic growth stages, and climate change can increase a country's risk. Countries tied to one resource are vulnerable to market shifts.
  3. Understanding country-specific risk is important for businesses and investors. Different countries have different costs of capital due to their risk levels, impacting investment decisions.

10 Signs of AI Writing That 99% of People Miss

The Algorithmic Bridge • 1836 implied HN points • 03 Dec 25
🕹 Technology AI writing Tech Trends Natural Language Processing Digital Communication Generative models
  1. AI writing often uses vague and abstract words instead of concrete details. This makes it feel less relatable and real, unlike human writing that includes specific experiences.
  2. The choice of words in AI writing tends to be bland and overly formal. It avoids strong emotions and edgy language, which can make the text feel lifeless.
  3. AI lacks genuine sensory experiences, leading to descriptions that seem disconnected from reality. It can mention feelings or sensations but lacks true understanding of them.

Growing up Online Nearly Killed Me

After Babel • 2199 implied HN points • 20 Nov 25
🕹 Technology Online safety Youth Engagement Mental health
  1. Online grooming and sextortion are serious dangers that many young people face. It's important to talk about these issues to protect kids.
  2. The bond between a parent and child can be vital in overcoming trauma. Open communication helps in healing and understanding each other's experiences.
  3. Sharing personal stories can help create awareness and support for those struggling. It shows others they're not alone and encourages conversations about mental health and safety online.