News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

akharris

Re:Claude Cookbook on Friday July 24, 2026 @11:54AM (#49037503)
They missed a great chance to call this "To Serve Man."
Re:Rocketships and Slingshots on Thursday September 04, 2025 @07:01PM (#45133216)
These are great.

I particularly like Waymo because of aggressively most of the media/talking heads wrote them off as "never going to beat Tesla" because google.

In the end, they took a fundamentally different approach at all levels of the product and won.

Re:Rocketships and Slingshots on Thursday September 04, 2025 @06:52PM (#45133155)
My list wasn't meant to exhaustive. Honestly not much of a list, just a few examples. SpaceX and Nvidia are both examples of deep technical moats, as are some of the others mentioned by commenters.

I agree with you that many moats are regulatory, but disagree that most moats are. Networks are powerful moats, customer lockin can work well, brand is a strong moat (at least for a time), speed and culture can function as moats.

Fwiw, I don't think any moat is ultimately perfect. Moats themselves are not meant to permanently stop an attacker - they are delaying tactics at best. Companies that stay ahead continuously re-invent and rebuild their differentiation and defenses.

Re:Rocketships and Slingshots on Thursday September 04, 2025 @06:05PM (#45132757)
Fair enough. I definitely should have added nvidia to the list.
Thank you.

What I love about that quote is that he knew that, some day, the cure rate would go even higher.

Thank you. I've only ever had bad luck creating Wikipedia entries, though it's been a while.
Thank you.
Thank you so much. He was.
Thank you.

My sister is an incredible write and he was a perfect subject.

Thank you.
I don't fully understand how he did it. I know he took a lot from the line in the Talmud that said "whoever saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

My mom says that his baseline was incredibly high and that he was incredibly resilient. He also had a big rebellious streak, an analytical mind, and endless compassion.

Thanks for saying that.

Here's a bit more about him from the obituary my sister wrote: https://www.northjersey.com/obituaries/pnys1147090

My dad started his work as a Pediatric Hematologist Oncologist in the late 60s. He had a firm belief that cure rates could and would climb as a result of research and better clinical care. He spent his life pursuing both.

When people would ask him how he managed to stay so positive - he was one of the happiest people I’ve ever known - he’d reference the trends highlighted in this article.

That didn’t change how hard it was when he lost a patient, but I know he always had his eyes and his mind on the future.

This is an incredible example of science and medicine. Thanks OP for posting it.

Re:They Might Be Giants Flood EPK Promo (1990) [video] on Thursday March 27, 2025 @12:12PM (#43495100)
I was six when Flood came out. My brother had a bootleg copy, which I later "borrowed" and carried around with me in my walkman (also "borrowed"). It was so...different than anything any of my friends listened to, and I loved it.

But maybe the greatest thing about Flood was seeing Particle Man and Istanbul on Tiny Toons. It was as if all my favorite weird things in the world (at least for a kid) were part of the same pocket universe.

I still find myself humming different songs from Flood on the regular, unprompted. Thanks for posting this.

Re:Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting on Friday February 28, 2025 @04:38PM (#43211640)
Much as I’d love to debate you about this here, I don’t think either of us will convince the other - or anyone else - in this format.

Always happy to have a real conversation about difficult issues.

Re:Zelensky leaves White House after angry meeting on Friday February 28, 2025 @04:05PM (#43210849)
The overall tenor of this thread, and this comment in particular, is diving right into deep conspiracy theory territory.

There’s a huge difference between supporting an ally with common interests and being somehow controlled by them.

The idea that Israel - or AIPAC - is somehow in control of the US government is straight out of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

On photography, in no real order, and probably overweight on street photography.

- Henri Cartier Bresson - Joseph Koudelka - Gordon Parks - Phil Penman - Alan Schiller - Annie Leibovitz - Micha bar Am - Bruce Gilden - Steve McCurry - Constantine Manos - Dorothea Lange

Re:Always Run an Auction on Tuesday December 17, 2024 @12:59PM (#42443553)
Well I do have you to thank for teaching me about combinatorial auctions :).

That said, you can think of the auction in two parts - the first gets the relevant people from the starting line to the actual bidding. The second part is where you actually make decisions. The latter part in this dynamic usually has few enough participants that a founder can run the variables in his/her head.

What would be interesting to see is whether or not more funds would get to the bidding stage with a robust combinatorial auction at the beginning of the whole thing.

Re:The World’s First Known Deep-Sea Octopus Nursery on Tuesday October 03, 2023 @01:33PM (#37755001)
The editing and music choice for the video are both incredible.
Re:Avoiding Errors in Demo Day Fundraising on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @04:49PM (#35252327)
There's no perfect mix.

In an ideal world, you'd build an order book of every investor that wants in and how much they want. Once you had that book filled, you'd allocate by weighing long term value, price, etc.

Realistically you can't do this (ok sometimes you can). The situation is dynamic and you generally want to take the bird in hand vs. risking the longer process. BUT there's a limit to that, and if you sequence things well - say start the longer processes first - then you have more flexibility.

But remember, the biggest point is that the seed round is just 1 moment in time. If you can't fit someone in but you like them, build the relationship for next time.

Re:Avoiding Errors in Demo Day Fundraising on Tuesday March 21, 2023 @12:20PM (#35248376)
Author here: Lost count of the various demo days coming up in the next few months. Happy to chime in on questions of how to deal with the run up to a demo day or the after effects.

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