The hottest Technology Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
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Top Technology Topics

Senior Developers understand Composition Over Inheritance.

System Design Classroom • 599 implied HN points • 15 Jun 24
🕹 Technology Software Design Development Practices System Architecture Modularity
  1. Using composition is often better than inheritance because it allows for more flexible and maintainable code. You can mix and match simpler components to create complex systems.
  2. With composition, you can easily swap out parts of your code at runtime, making it better for projects that change frequently. It's all about keeping things modular and manageable.
  3. Though inheritance can be useful for stable hierarchies, focusing on composition is generally a safer bet, especially when you expect to make a lot of changes to your code.

Static, Dynamic, Mergeable, oh, my!

Jacob’s Tech Tavern • 7872 implied HN points • 18 Nov 24
🕹 Technology Software Development Programming iOS Development Frameworks Libraries
  1. Libraries are just code you use in your projects. There are two types: static and dynamic, which impact how they are linked to your app.
  2. Dynamic linking happens at runtime, making builds faster but can slow down app launch times. Static linking copies everything into the app, which can make the app bigger but loads faster.
  3. Mergeable libraries combine the benefits of both static and dynamic linking, aiming to speed up builds while keeping app launch times quick.

Generative AI’s Continuing Copyright Problems, an Essay in Memory of Suchir Balaji, 1998 - 2024

Marcus on AI • 7035 implied HN points • 14 Dec 24
🕹 Technology AI Copyright Ethics Legal issues Innovation
  1. Generative AI is raising big questions about copyright. Many people are unsure if the way it uses data counts as fair use under copyright laws.
  2. There have been cases where outputs from AI models were very similar to copyrighted material. This has led to lawsuits, showing that the issue isn't going away.
  3. Speaking out against big tech companies can be risky. There needs to be more protection for those who voice concerns about copyright and other serious issues.
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WhatsApp is Finally Starting to Dominate in the United States. Here’s Why.

Big Technology • 18639 implied HN points • 12 Jan 24
🕹 Technology Social media Messaging Mobile Apps
  1. WhatsApp is experiencing significant growth in the United States, with a 9% increase in daily users in 2023.
  2. Many Americans are now turning to WhatsApp as their go-to messaging app, avoiding the blue vs. green bubble debate.
  3. This surge in popularity is attributed to the influence of Tim Cook and strategic planning efforts.

Irreconcilable Differences

Doomberg • 7505 implied HN points • 20 Nov 24
🕹 Technology AI Energy Infrastructure Telecommunications Innovation
  1. AI's need for power is too high for current energy grids. This means we might face problems trying to meet that demand.
  2. What if new rules stopped data centers from using the main power grid? This could change how we think about energy sources.
  3. If data centers found their own power, it could ease strain on existing grids. But, it would also create new challenges and shifts in the market.

How to build a data moat

Generating Conversation • 116 implied HN points • 05 Feb 26
🕹 Technology AI Machine Learning Product Design Data Strategy Enterprise Software SaaS Product Management
  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.

Agent Analytics Engineer

davidj.substack • 95 implied HN points • 06 Feb 26
🕹 Technology AI Data Engineering DevOps Automation Analytics Software Engineering
  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.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis: The Path To AGI, LLM Creativity, And Google Smart Glasses

Big Technology • 5754 implied HN points • 23 Jan 25
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Innovation Tech industry Digital Transformation
  1. Demis Hassabis thinks we're still a few years away from achieving AGI, or human-level AI. He mentions that while there's been progress, we still need to develop more capabilities like reasoning and creativity.
  2. Current AI models are strong in some areas but still have weaknesses and can't consistently perform all tasks well. Hassabis believes an AGI should be able to reason and come up with new ideas, not just solve existing problems.
  3. He warns that if someone claims they've reached AGI by 2025, it might just be a marketing tactic. True AGI requires much more development and consistency than what we currently have.

Roche SBX Chip Die Size Estimate Update (It's small!)

ASeq Newsletter • 21 implied HN points • 05 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Semiconductors Hardware Sensors Chip Design
  1. A newly found die photo lines up with the AGBT sensor module because the screw holes and exposed vias match, confirming they’re the same module.
  2. By rescaling the die image to the PCB (for which sizes are known), you can derive a size estimate for the die.
  3. The resulting estimate indicates the Roche SBX die is quite small, implying a more compact sensor/chip than many might expect.

You Are Not The Man In The Arena

Where's Your Ed At • 24184 implied HN points • 30 Aug 23
🕹 Technology Startup Culture Tech industry Venture Capital Cryptocurrency Artificial Intelligence
  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
🕹 Technology Software Engineering Artificial Intelligence DevOps Automation Software Architecture Engineering Management 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.

The Software Games: Endless Grind

Leading Developers • 73 implied HN points • 10 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Software Engineering Career development Management Workplace Gamification Productivity
  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
🕹 Technology Cryptography Hardware Algorithms Performance Standards
  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
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Automation Software Engineering Machine Learning Startups Operations
  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
🕹 Technology Machine Learning Deep Learning Algorithms Performance Parallelism 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
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Computing Innovation Tech Ethics
  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.

Welcome to the age of Hard Tech

Taylor Lorenz's Newsletter • 2030 implied HN points • 04 Aug 25
🕹 Technology AI Silicon Valley Entrepreneurship Surveillance Defense Tech
  1. Silicon Valley is changing from a fun, liberal place to a more serious and right-leaning environment focused on defense tech and surveillance. People are less interested in making the world better and more into creating new tech.
  2. Tech jobs are different now; many companies aren't hiring as aggressively, and the workplace vibe is more about cutting down on excess than supporting employees. Knowledge of advanced tech like AI and neural networks has become essential.
  3. The culture in tech has evolved to include some unusual partnerships, like blending faith with business. There are rising interests in industries, like defense, that used to be seen as taboo in the tech community.

How Starship Will Change Humanity Soon

Uncharted Territories • 4481 implied HN points • 25 Apr 23
🕹 Technology Space Transportation Communication Imagery Innovation
  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.

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
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Creativity Digital Media User Interfaces Design Future work Automation
  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.

AI Resume Builder 101: A Claude Skill That Customizes Your Resume for Every Job in 60 Seconds

The Product Channel By Sid Saladi • 10 implied HN points • 14 Mar 26
🕹 Technology AI Tools Productivity Automation SaaS Software
  1. Many AI resume tools fabricate experience, invent metrics, and add skills you don’t have, and they usually charge monthly fees.
  2. A skill that only draws from your personal experience library can generate ATS-friendly .docx resumes tailored to each job without inventing anything, rewriting summaries and reordering experience to match job keywords.
  3. With the right Claude plan the skill is essentially free and gives you full control; you just enable code execution, spend 10–45 minutes filling your experience library, and then get a tailored resume in about 60 seconds.

Weekly Dose of Optimism #179

Not Boring by Packy McCormick • 82 implied HN points • 06 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Robotics Autonomous Vehicles Neurotech Compute Semiconductors Space
  1. Leading labs released much smarter models this week—one general reasoning model and one focused on coding—and teams are using agent workflows to speed up research and engineering.
  2. Smarter models mean a surge in demand for inference compute, data centers, and energy, which is prompting massive CapEx plans from cloud and hardware companies.
  3. Breakthroughs are happening across fields: cultured brain cells can control drones, Waymo just raised huge funding while scaling many autonomous rides, and AI tools are being adopted and monetized far faster than prior technologies.

Spilling the Tea

Don't Worry About the Vase • 2060 implied HN points • 29 Jul 25
🕹 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
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Robotics Software Development Startups
  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.

A letter to myself at 22

Kathy PM • 23 implied HN points • 06 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Careers Programming AI Software Developer Tools Startups Education
  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.

OpenAI's Ad Business Is Misunderstood

Enterprise AI Trends • 189 implied HN points • 17 Jan 26
🕹 Technology AI Advertising Monetization Platforms E-commerce Enterprise
  1. Negative sentiment is causing investors to underprice OpenAI’s ad opportunity, treating ads as a sign of desperation instead of a strategic revenue hedge.
  2. OpenAI created a new ad format—sponsored products shown alongside answers—that could reshape direct-response advertising and drive big e-commerce revenue.
  3. The rollout is limited and privacy-forward (Free and Go in the U.S., paid tiers ad-free, ads don’t change answers), so ads are more likely to help OpenAI win market share from incumbents than to alienate users.

Let's Talk DeepSeek, AI, Etc. on Big Technology's New Discord Server

Big Technology • 5379 implied HN points • 30 Jan 25
🕹 Technology AI Discord Communication Social media Technology News
  1. A new Discord server has been launched for Big Technology's paid subscribers. It aims to create a space for discussions about recent tech news.
  2. The Discord will allow members to share ideas and communicate more easily. It's a chance to connect with each other and tackle current tech stories together.
  3. If you're a paid subscriber, you can join through a special link. If you want to participate, signing up will give you access to the Discord server.

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
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Cloud Computing Data Centers Semiconductors Open Source Platform Strategy AI Policy
  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
🕹 Technology Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning 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.

o3, AGI, the art of the demo, and what you can expect in 2025

Marcus on AI • 6481 implied HN points • 21 Dec 24
🕹 Technology AI Software Ethics Research Economics
  1. OpenAI's new model, o3, was shown in a demo, but we can't be sure yet if it truly represents advanced AI or AGI. The demo only highlighted what OpenAI wanted to show and didn't allow public testing.
  2. The cost of using o3 is really high, potentially making it impractical compared to human workers. Even if it gets cheaper, there are concerns about how effective it would be across different tasks.
  3. Many claims about reaching AGI might pop up in 2025, but those claims need to be taken with caution. True advances in AI should involve solving more foundational problems rather than just impressive demos.

10 Takeaways From Tech’s Biggest News Week of the Year

Big Technology • 3002 implied HN points • 23 May 25
🕹 Technology AI Software Innovation Business Networking
  1. AI models are still getting better with size, but people are also focusing on new algorithms to improve them. This means companies like NVIDIA will continue to thrive for now.
  2. There's a growing belief that algorithm improvements might be more important than just making AI bigger. This might change how we think about developing AI in the future.
  3. AI technology is rapidly evolving, especially in video generation and coding, which could lead to significant advancements and some ethical concerns as it becomes more powerful.

ChatGPT, at Age Two

Marcus on AI • 7074 implied HN points • 28 Nov 24
🕹 Technology AI Software Innovation Data Digital ethics
  1. ChatGPT has been popular for two years, but many of the initial uses people expected, like taking over Google, haven't happened. Companies are not as impressed with its real-world results.
  2. Despite promises of improvement, ChatGPT still struggles with inaccuracies and generating false information. Users continue to experience 'hallucinations' where the AI makes things up.
  3. The investment in AI is huge, but the fundamental issues with reliability and factual accuracy haven't improved significantly. There's a call for new approaches to make AI more trustworthy.

Poor Person Software's Write-Hand Man

Computer Ads from the Past • 512 implied HN points • 01 Dec 25
🕹 Technology Software Operating Systems Utilities User Interface Retro Computing
  1. Write-Hand Man brought Sidekick-style pop-up utilities to CP/M, letting users call up a notepad, phonebook, calendar, calculator, file viewer and a communications tool without leaving their main program.
  2. It used memory-saving and swap-to-disk tricks so it could run in 64K CP/M systems, but that made it slow on floppy drives and could conflict with some modem programs unless you had a RAM disk or hard drive.
  3. Poor Person Software was an obscure small company that sold the utility at a modest price and had its product enhanced by Technical Micro Systems to add H/Z19 graphics and extra features.

Interviews! YouTube Silver Award Thingy! 50% Off Subs!

The Lunduke Journal of Technology • 574 implied HN points • 16 Nov 25
🕹 Technology Software Interviews Online Media Content creation Digital marketing
  1. Two interviews were conducted, one with the creator of Ruby on Rails and another with a lawyer for 4chan, showing a variety of topics covered.
  2. The Lunduke Journal's YouTube channel reached 100,000 subscribers, which means they'll receive a silver award plaque.
  3. There’s a 50% discount on subscriptions available until November 24, making it a great time to sign up and get perks like access to videos and exclusive forums.

The Pentagon Just Bet $100 Million on a Drone Contest. History Says That’s Either Brilliant or a Waste of Money

Gad’s Newsletter • 32 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26
🕹 Technology Defense Tech Autonomy Drones AI Innovation policy R&D Procurement
  1. Prizes pay only for results and are best when the problem is genuinely uncertain and open to many different approaches, because they attract diverse outsiders and reward solutions that actually work.
  2. Well-designed competitions can spark whole ecosystems and huge private investment when they have crystal-clear goals, measurable outcomes, and built-in paths to turn demos into real, deployable systems.
  3. Prizes also carry big risks—winner-take-all waste, IP headaches, and demos that don’t survive real conditions—so competitions need multi-tier rewards, requirements to capture losers’ learnings, and follow-on funding to avoid squandering resources.

Carole Cadwalladr: The Entire Business Model of Silicon Valley Is Surveillance

God's Spies by Thomas Neuburger • 90 implied HN points • 14 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Surveillance Privacy Big Tech Government National Security Data Policy
  1. Big tech’s business model is based on mass surveillance and data mining, and that data can be used to manipulate public opinion and influence elections, which threatens democratic self-rule.
  2. Major technology companies are being embedded into government through “strategic partnerships” and large contracts, effectively making them instruments of state power and creating security and sovereignty risks.
  3. Governments and tech firms are forming many-to-many information-sharing relationships that seduce and assimilate companies into state functions. This process turns tech firms into ‘bricks’ in a corporate-state wall that expands surveillance and control.

How Anthropic Builds Claude’s Personality

Big Technology • 2877 implied HN points • 29 May 25
🕹 Technology AI Chatbots Ethics Research Innovation
  1. Anthropic builds its chatbot, Claude, to have a personality similar to a friendly traveler. This means it tries to be open and adaptable when talking to different people.
  2. Instead of strict rules, Claude's behavior is based on a set of qualities, like kindness and wit, that should naturally show in all its conversations.
  3. The chatbot's personality is fine-tuned after training by using examples of what good conversation looks like, guiding it to respond in ways that reflect the desired traits.