The hottest Substack posts right now

according to Hacker News
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How Google Blew Up Its Open Culture and Compromised Its Product

Big Technology • 16387 implied HN points • 07 Mar 24
đź’Ľ Business Tech industry Employee Relations Product Development Corporate culture Leadership
  1. Google's open culture deteriorated, impacting its product quality and employee morale.
  2. Issues began when Google shut down discussions on sensitive topics like diversity and employee concerns.
  3. The closure of open channels for questioning within Google led to a negative impact on the company's innovation and decision-making processes.

Profile: Ryan Reynolds and Owning the Outcome

Creating Value from Nothing • 132 implied HN points • 22 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Culture Strategy Revenue Growth Operations Sales Onboarding Hiring
  1. Own inbound sales end-to-end by building systems that route leads quickly and make signing up simple, so growth doesn’t stall.
  2. Solve root causes instead of surface symptoms by creating repeatable workflows, clear handoffs, and measurable definitions of “good” so the team doesn't rely on heroics.
  3. A scrappy, cross-functional culture with a bias toward action and rituals that celebrate gritty execution helps teams move fast, learn from outcomes, and sustain improvements.

Subscrive Drive 2025 + Free Unlocked Posts

Astral Codex Ten • 6400 implied HN points • 14 Jan 25
đź’Ľ Business Finance Subscriptions Marketing Media Economics
  1. You can subscribe to Astral Codex Ten for paid access, which includes extra articles and special threads for subscribers. It's a chance to support the blog and get more content.
  2. The blog had strong subscriber growth at first but has seen a drop in recent years. The author encourages financial support but understands if people cannot afford it.
  3. Several subscriber-only posts offer unique insights, covering topics like historical figures and personal reflections. When you subscribe, you can access a lot of great content.

Europe's rigid labor markets are an economic death sentence

Economic Forces • 26 implied HN points • 05 Mar 26
đź’Ľ Business Regulation Labor markets Productivity Employment Economic Growth Investment
  1. When it's hard to fire workers, companies treat employees like long‑lasting capital and are much more reluctant to hire, so labor supply can't adjust quickly.
  2. That rigidity makes uncertainty especially harmful: firms hold back hiring and investment during downturns because they can't easily unwind staff, which creates lasting scarring and reduces reallocation to more productive firms.
  3. The result is less economic dynamism and weaker growth, especially in risky, fast‑changing industries where firms need to experiment and scale quickly.

$20 Tabs

Perspective Agents • 21 implied HN points • 26 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Organizational Change Digital Transformation Talent Management Enterprise Tech AI adoption Leadership
  1. Frontline workers are skipping expensive corporate AI and getting real work done with cheap consumer tools, so formal platforms often sit unused.
  2. Top-down mandates and one-off programs don’t stick; find the people already using AI and build sandboxes and practices around their work so useful systems emerge.
  3. Investing in human readiness is essential because judgment, oversight, and experience matter as models drift; without that investment AI pilots will launch loudly and then fade away.
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How to build a data moat

Generating Conversation • 116 implied HN points • 05 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology Product Management Product Design Machine Learning AI SaaS Enterprise Software Data Strategy
  1. Think of a data moat as a loop: usage generates data that improves the agent, which drives more usage. Optimize both short-loop (real-time guidance) and long-loop (periodic model training) because the short loop speeds up gains and makes training more effective.
  2. Loop density — how often the loop runs and how much users trust it — determines whether a moat forms. Small, frequent units of work with low cost of failure (like code edits) create far better signal than rare, high-cost tasks (like full slide decks).
  3. Maximize high-fidelity signals by engineering for more and varied feedback: run multiple hypotheses, capture implicit negative and positive signals, and don’t rely only on explicit buttons. You generally need frequency plus either natural feedback or clear ground truth to collect useful, hard-to-replicate data.

Why your LinkedIn is about to get very busy

Taylor Lorenz's Newsletter • 6359 implied HN points • 12 Jan 25
đź’Ľ Business Employment Job Market Company Culture
  1. Many people are unhappy with their jobs and looking to switch. A lot of employees feel under-compensated and are actively searching for new opportunities.
  2. Paparazzi often take risks to capture celebrity moments, even during natural disasters. Some question whether the images are worth the danger involved.
  3. Mark Zuckerberg's claims about free speech seem insincere, as he continues to censor content under pressure from the government. Both political sides prioritize controlling speech that opposes them.

Agent Analytics Engineer

davidj.substack • 95 implied HN points • 06 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology Software Engineering Data Engineering Automation DevOps Analytics AI
  1. Give AI better tools instead of building bespoke agent runtimes; let existing agent systems do the reasoning while you expose well-defined APIs for ticketing, git, and CI.
  2. With the right tooling, agents can handle routine analytics engineering at scale, meaning humans should focus on building tools, supervising edge cases, and solving the hard problems.
  3. Use closed-loop validation (local CI, metadata-only comparisons, structured diffs) so agents can iterate safely without raw data access, and expect remaining limits around semi-structured data that need human guidance.

Lessons from $1/day challenge

Kenny’s Sub • 299 implied HN points • 22 Jul 24
đź’Ľ Business Sales Entrepreneurship Marketing E-commerce Product Development
  1. Haggling often doesn't work well in the long run. It's better to stick to your price and negotiate on other terms if needed.
  2. $1 can feel expensive to some people. They may not see the value in what they are buying or find it too much effort for a small price.
  3. You need to have products ready to sell. Without anything to offer, it's tough to make money. Planning ahead is crucial.

Judgment Day Has Arrived for the Journalism Business

The Honest Broker • 30220 implied HN points • 07 May 23
đź’Ľ Business AI Journalism Media Subscription Advertising
  1. Media platforms struggling with advertising rely on gimmicky clickbait strategies that eventually fail.
  2. Subscription-based models are becoming successful in journalism, shifting the focus back to quality writing.
  3. AI-generated articles, the latest gimmick in media, reduce writing costs but sacrifice quality and are doomed to fail.

This is Math Meets Money

Math Meets Money • 139 implied HN points • 19 Aug 24
đź’Ľ Business Operations Finance Consulting Recruitment Strategy
  1. Math Meets Money is a newsletter that helps scientists understand the business world using clear explanations. It's designed for those with scientific backgrounds who want to transition into business roles.
  2. The newsletter addresses common barriers scientists face when entering the business world. These include feeling over-qualified, under-qualified compared to others, and struggling with the specialized language of business.
  3. Readers can expect daily briefings on business terms and concepts, along with deeper dives into case studies and current events on weekends. This is all aimed at empowering scientists to innovate in industry.

You Are Not The Man In The Arena

Where's Your Ed At • 24184 implied HN points • 30 Aug 23
đź•ą Technology Artificial Intelligence Startup Culture Tech industry Venture Capital Cryptocurrency
  1. The man in the arena speech by Theodore Roosevelt emphasizes the importance of taking action over criticism.
  2. Chamath Palihapitiya symbolizes a detrimental mindset in Silicon Valley of valuing image over actual value creation.
  3. The tech industry's obsession with funding specific kinds of founders and companies has created a harmful monoculture that prioritizes profit over societal impact.

Preparing for a world where humans don’t write code

Brick by Brick • 72 implied HN points • 09 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology Engineering Management Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence DevOps Automation Software Architecture Observability
  1. AI agents will increasingly write production software autonomously, making human code writing and review a bottleneck and causing many current development practices to stop scaling.
  2. Trust should come from continuous validation, observability, scenarios, and invariants rather than relying on humans to read code, and code should be treated as disposable when generation is cheap and continuous.
  3. Organizations should create small AI-first teams that build real production systems under strict constraints (no human-written or human-reviewed code) to learn what breaks, then let successful practices spread while humans focus on intent, constraints, and outcomes.

welcome to not boring world

Not Boring by Packy McCormick • 235 implied HN points • 06 Jan 26
đź’Ľ Business Publishing Media Community Monetization Creators Content Startups Subscriptions
  1. Not Boring World is a paid section that gathers smart founders, researchers, and creators and helps them co-write longform essays so their best, frontier ideas actually get published.
  2. This is a bet on the written word over podcasts and video: deep, canonical ideas are meant to be written, and the project aims to surface fresh inputs you won't find in LLMs.
  3. They'll build editorial infrastructure and a contributor network to curate those inputs into a coherent 'means and meaning' worldview, funded by subscribers, with community features like chats, debates, and more frequent co-written pieces.

The Threat of Delivery

Points And Figures • 559 implied HN points • 01 Dec 25
đź’° Finance Futures Risk management Commodities Market Analysis Investing
  1. Futures contracts help manage risk, especially for farmers and manufacturers. They use these contracts to lock in prices and protect against price changes and other uncertainties.
  2. The silver market is facing issues because demand is exceeding supply. Many companies need silver, but instead of hedging through futures, they rely on banks, which are finding it hard to meet delivery demands.
  3. High interest rates are causing problems in the silver market. With fewer physical stocks available, banks that are short on silver are getting pressured to cover their positions, which could lead to bigger consequences.

The Software Games: Endless Grind

Leading Developers • 73 implied HN points • 10 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology Workplace Productivity Gamification Management Career development Software Engineering
  1. Careers can feel like an RPG: early on you level fast, but over time routine work gives less value and progression slows.
  2. When the XP you earn shrinks while promotion requirements grow, engineers get stuck, demotivated, and often consider leaving.
  3. Managers should actively create stretch opportunities and tune work difficulty so people stay in the learning zone; internal moves or new responsibilities can provide growth without switching companies.

RISC-V and Post Quantum Cryptography

Fprox’s Substack • 186 implied HN points • 18 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology Performance Standards Cryptography Algorithms Hardware
  1. Quantum computers threaten today’s public-key cryptography, so governments and industry are already moving to post-quantum algorithms and rolling out standards and deployments now.
  2. Post-quantum schemes (e.g., Kyber, Dilithium, SPHINCS+, Falcon) rely on heavy math like NTT and Keccak, and they trade off key/signature sizes, signing speed, and verification cost differently.
  3. RISC-V can run PQC today using its vector extensions, but lacks dedicated PQC ISA support; targeted accelerations for NTT and Keccak (and vector crypto extensions) would greatly improve performance and are being explored by the community.

"Automate the entire company"

next big thing • 48 implied HN points • 16 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology Machine Learning Startups Operations Automation Artificial Intelligence Software Engineering
  1. Automating an entire company now feels realistic because modern agentic AI can run end-to-end workflows across functions without constant human involvement.
  2. Teams are already embedding AI agents to write and deploy code, run experiments, monitor training, handle sales outreach, and keep finance operations running, producing rapid productivity gains.
  3. As AI handles more grunt work, humans will shift to directing agents and making high-level judgments, so taste and decision-making become more valuable than ever.

The One Property That Makes FlashAttention Possible

Software Bits Newsletter • 257 implied HN points • 29 Dec 25
đź•ą Technology Parallelism Performance Algorithms Deep Learning Machine Learning Software Engineering
  1. Associativity is the key property that lets you split work, combine partial results, and safely parallelize or stream computations without changing the answer.
  2. Softmax has a hidden associative state — tracking a local max and a scaled sum lets you correct and merge chunked results, which is the math behind FlashAttention’s memory- and time-saving trick.
  3. When optimizing a global computation, look for a small combinable state and an associative combine rule; if it exists you can chunk and parallelize, and if it doesn’t (for example, median) you need a different algorithmic approach.

The Five Stages of AGI Grief

Marcus on AI • 6205 implied HN points • 07 Jan 25
đź•ą Technology Artificial Intelligence Innovation Tech Ethics Machine Learning Computing
  1. Many people are changing what they think AGI means, moving away from its original meaning of being as smart as a human in flexible and resourceful ways.
  2. Some companies are now defining AGI based on economic outcomes, like making profits, which isn't really about intelligence at all.
  3. A lot of discussions about AGI don't clearly define what it is, making it hard to know when we actually achieve it.

LinkedIn

Public Universal Friend • 79 implied HN points • 02 Sep 24
đź’Ľ Business Customer Engagement Data Analysis Growth Strategies Marketing
  1. Using a customer engagement platform like Customer.io can help marketers improve their targeting and maximize growth. It offers better data management and less need for technical support.
  2. Spring is a great time for businesses to focus on improving conversions through digital marketing strategies. Real-time data can help companies get more return on their investment.
  3. Personal connections and genuine interactions are valuable, even in business communication. Taking the time to show real interest can make a difference.

How Starship Will Change Humanity Soon

Uncharted Territories • 4481 implied HN points • 25 Apr 23
đź•ą Technology Communication Imagery Innovation Space Transportation
  1. SpaceX's Starship rocket is set to significantly reduce space transportation costs, potentially shifting civilizations and economies.
  2. Decreasing transportation costs can lead to increased trade, wealth, and societal growth, similar to the impact of navigable rivers in history.
  3. Starship's impact goes beyond satellite communications, enabling possibilities like real-time, detailed Earth imaging for various applications and businesses.

50% Off Lunduke Journal for August

The Lunduke Journal of Technology • 1723 implied HN points • 11 Aug 25
đź’Ľ Business Pricing Technology Subscriptions Marketing Sales
  1. The Lunduke Journal is having a 50% off subscription sale for the entire month of August. This is a great chance to save money while supporting independent tech journalism.
  2. You can choose between a monthly or yearly subscription, with prices starting as low as $3 a month or $27 a year, making it very affordable.
  3. There's also a special Lifetime Subscription available for half price this month, allowing you to pay once for lifetime access to all content from The Lunduke Journal.

Why Creativity Will Matter More In An AI Age.

The Future Does Not Fit In The Containers Of The Past • 68 implied HN points • 08 Feb 26
đź•ą Technology Digital Media Automation Artificial Intelligence Creativity Future work Design User Interfaces
  1. AI is putting powerful creative tools into everyone's hands, making creativity a widely accessible way to stand out and add value.
  2. Creativity is fundamentally human self‑expression and choice, so authenticity and emotional perspective will matter more than purely data‑driven decisions.
  3. As interfaces shift from search and scrolling to conversation, storytelling and imaginative, poetic work will become the primary source of value rather than technical plumbing like targeting.

Americans are ten times more likely to be fired than Germans

The Works in Progress Newsletter • 61 implied HN points • 18 Feb 26
đź’Ľ Business Startups Innovation Regulation Manufacturing Venture Capital Automotive
  1. Europe’s strict job protections, high severance costs, and long collective dismissal procedures make firing expensive, so companies avoid risky experiments that could require later layoffs.
  2. That incentive steers firms toward safe, incremental improvements, keeps startups small or drives them to relocate, and reduces ambitious acquisitions and radical innovation in Europe.
  3. Models like Danish flexicurity, Austria’s portable severance fund, and Switzerland’s looser rules show you can protect workers while lowering the cost of failure, meaning targeted reform could boost big, risky innovators without abandoning social safety nets.

What I learned in year three of Platformer

Platformer • 4461 implied HN points • 19 Sep 23
đź’Ľ Business Industry Tech Platforms AI Journalism Advertising
  1. Platformer has experienced significant growth in subscribers over the past year, thanks to various factors like talented staff, impactful stories, and the Substack recommendations engine.
  2. The broader tech media ecosystem is facing challenges with layoffs and diminishing vitality, prompting journalists to consider the challenges and opportunities of transitioning to independent journalism.
  3. Platformer's plans for the future include expanding the team with new hires, experimenting with newsletter ads, and potentially supporting independent journalism through investments or grants.

The SPAC is Back!

TK News by Matt Taibbi • 2604 implied HN points • 24 Jun 25
đź’° Finance Market Trends Private Equity Stock Market Investments Regulations
  1. SPACs, or Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, allow investors to put money into a company without knowing what it is. This makes them riskier and less transparent than traditional investments.
  2. Goldman Sachs is returning to the SPAC market because stricter regulations are being relaxed, and there's a huge backlog of private equity deals to be made. They see this as a way to boost their earnings while providing funding for private companies.
  3. The past SPAC craze was filled with celebrity endorsements and light regulations, but many ended poorly. Investors should be cautious as the market returns, since the fundamental issues that caused past failures might still exist.

When Power Corrupts Before It's Even Yours

The Stoic Journal • 55 implied HN points • 14 Feb 26
đź“– Philosophy Leadership Stoicism Moral Psychology Ethics Character Ancient Philosophy
  1. Power and privilege can make people act cruelly even before they officially hold authority, treating others as obstacles or entertainment.
  2. Change is possible; your worst moments don’t define you, they just mark where you start and you can choose to grow.
  3. Real leadership means using power responsibly and caring for others instead of using them for amusement or advantage.

Spilling the Tea

Don't Worry About the Vase • 2060 implied HN points • 29 Jul 25
đź•ą Technology App Development Data Privacy Social media
  1. The Tea app is meant for women to share experiences about the men they date, but it has huge security flaws that can expose users' personal information.
  2. While the app promotes reputation among men, it might encourage false information sharing, making dating riskier for both men and women.
  3. As the app grows, it could lead to chaos if users attempt to game the system, reducing trust and making dating much more complicated.

AI Links, 12/31/2025

In My Tribe • 243 implied HN points • 31 Dec 25
đź•ą Technology Software Development Startups Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Robotics
  1. Robots are rapidly approaching human-level ability for many physical tasks; they could cook in ordinary kitchens within a few years and handle most physical labor by the 2030s.
  2. AI-powered services are being built to curate real-world social experiences and match compatible strangers for in-person events, offering a cheaper, friendship-first alternative to swipe-based dating apps.
  3. Programming is being reshaped by AI agents and new tooling, so developers must learn agent-based workflows, prompts, and integrations or risk falling behind.

Match The Pipes

Software Design: Tidy First? • 1745 implied HN points • 13 Aug 25
đź’Ľ Business Strategy Leadership Management Operations Productivity
  1. In a system, the capacity of the output is limited by the narrowest part, or pipe, so expanding other parts won't help if that part doesn't change. It's important to identify and address this bottleneck to improve overall performance.
  2. As an executive, you have the unique ability to see the entire process and make decisions to improve it, unlike those focused on their own tasks. This broader perspective allows you to manage resources and workloads effectively.
  3. Creating pressure to increase productivity can have negative consequences, such as stress and burnout. It's better to find a balance that promotes a healthy work environment and supports productivity.

We need to get rid of weekends

The Novelleist • 629 implied HN points • 10 Nov 25
đź’Ľ Business Remote work Productivity Workplace Economics
  1. We all tend to work and play at the same time, which causes congestion. If people worked different hours or days, it could ease traffic and make things less crowded.
  2. Flexible work hours have shown to be beneficial. By shifting our work schedules, local businesses like restaurants and parks could thrive on weekdays instead of just weekends.
  3. Companies can change the traditional workweek model. If more businesses adopt flexible schedules, it might solve congestion issues without spending millions on new roads.

A letter to myself at 22

Kathy PM • 23 implied HN points • 06 Mar 26
đź•ą Technology AI Developer Tools Careers Education Startups Programming Software
  1. Don’t stress about finding a single perfect passion — start by getting good at something practical, and passion often grows out of skill and momentum.
  2. Take risks early: try different roles, join startups, and be willing to fail because those experiments create big career leaps and help you figure out what you want.
  3. Trust your curiosity and grit; staying determined and adaptable will let you turn uncertainty or setbacks into defining opportunities.

As a Nightmare Brews on Wall Street for CVS, Executives Scramble to Quell Investors

HEALTH CARE un-covered • 859 implied HN points • 16 May 24
đź’° Finance Insurance Healthcare Investing Corporate Governance Stock Market
  1. CVS executives are under pressure from investors after a bad financial report. This has caused them to make changes that could negatively affect patient care.
  2. The company plans to cut benefits and possibly remove around 420,000 Medicare members to improve profits. This decision could leave many people without needed healthcare.
  3. Insurers like Aetna are prioritizing stock performance over patient welfare. This focus on profits may mean that people struggle to get the medical services they need.

A dying industry dies a bit more

Material World • 2647 implied HN points • 25 Jun 25
đź’Ľ Business Employment Industry Economics Regulation Manufacturing
  1. The Wilton chemical plant that once thrived has become unsustainable due to factors like decreased oil supply and increased competition from Asia. It’s a sad story of change in the industry.
  2. The decline of the plant reflects a larger trend in the UK chemicals industry, highlighting how smaller job losses at various plants can go unnoticed compared to bigger closures like British Steel.
  3. As the UK loses its chemical production capacity, it becomes more reliant on imports, which could have serious implications for important products in everyday life.

The AI-Bubble's Most Likely Endgame Looks to Be Not Apocalypse, But an Awful Lot of Useful Compost

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality • 453 implied HN points • 05 Dec 25
đź•ą Technology Semiconductors Open Source Platform Strategy AI Policy Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Cloud Computing Data Centers
  1. The AI boom probably won’t deliver a superintelligent AGI, but it will leave a lot of useful infrastructure, open models, and tools that improve weather forecasting, drug discovery, copilots, and other practical applications.
  2. Proprietary LLM businesses face high operating costs, thin moats, and fast commoditization, while big platforms are mainly spending to defend existing monopolies, so much innovation will diffuse rather than create new dominant platforms.
  3. If AI capex is financed mostly with equity a crash would look more like the dot‑com bust and leave stranded but reusable assets; watch signals like falling GPU prices, datacenter subleases, and free copilot bundles, and plan policies to repurpose assets and limit attention‑harvesting harms.

Skills, Tools and MCPs - What’s The Difference?

Artificial Ignorance • 172 implied HN points • 24 Jan 26
đź•ą Technology Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence Developer Tools Software Engineering APIs Infrastructure Product Design
  1. Tools let models perform real actions by calling functions or APIs, but each integration is bespoke and coordinating multiple tools quickly becomes hard to scale.
  2. MCP standardizes discovery and access to capabilities so connectors can be reused across models, but it raises security, auditability, and decision-quality risks that standardization alone doesn't solve.
  3. Skills package human expertise as reusable prompts and workflows so models know when and how to use tools, and together tools + MCP + skills form a stack for AI-native experiences even though the primitives and standards are still evolving.