For the past couple of weeks, I've found that probably 20-30% of front page HN links are unresolvable with "this site can't be reached" errors. Checking the comment thread, it's clear that the links are loading for other people.Has HN become such a traffic cannon that we bring down anything that hits the front page and I'm always late to the party? Are the sites being brought down by heavy AI...
https://www.georgesaines.com/blog/2026/9/24/the-best-25-book...
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It opened my eyes to the mathematical inevitability of short-term population contraction. Seriously, there is no way to avoid short term population contraction at this point. None. Zilch. Zero. We made our proverbial bed in the 1980s.
They convinced me that population contraction is almost certainly bad for people alive today, but also probably for our species as a whole.
Finally, they present a dozen or so hypotheses about what might be at the root of declining birth rates and what we might be able to do to stop reverse current trends.
The thing that made the book a true 5/5 for me is that they end with questions, not false certainty. Basically, demographers aren’t completely sure what’s driving the trends nor do they have fully baked conclusions about how it can be solved or if that’s even possible.
The problem is that it's not a very good idea to invest in that way if you both like money and can hold down a corporate job (not saying everyone meets these two criteria BTW).
The 4 steps to epiphany is outdated, and The Mom Test is great if you have existing deep industry expertise and credibility. If you lack either, though, it's really not obvious how anyone tests product ideas without 12+ months of investment.
Maybe it's just that the AI noise has been cranked to 11, but it sure feels like there's something fundamentally different from building and selling software today vs the last time I was building new products back in 2015. A decade is a long time, but it didn't feel nearly so weird even as recently as 2021 / 2022. That makes me think it's the AI slop noise, but maybe I'm incorrect.
I want a lot of things and would be willing to pay for some of them, but unless there is a way to reach me, it doesn't matter.
There is this cultural meme that if an amazing product simply exists, then people will tell other people and it'll grow organically. The reality is that amazing, ahead-of-their time products and services are constantly being created and dying. Not because they don't solve a need, but because they weren't able to reach customers economically with the right message.
That ability to reach customers and contextualize the solution in language that matches their expectation is actually a lot rarer than building a good product.
What I mean is that you have to understand what you most want to accomplish. If you want to build a growing business, the best way to do that is not to start from a product and then figure out how to attract users, it's to test product / user acquisition channels together.
I have some authority in the space because I've done it the wrong way twice! www.skritter.com is the first company I built way back in 2008 and growing it was really challenging. It's a niche within a niche and most growth tactics simply didn't work. I'm proud that it's become so durable and taught so many people, but from a customer acquisition perspective, it was very challenging.
www.codecombat.com had some organic acquisition channels that worked well, but they proved to be mostly non-repeatable.
I'm now working on my third company (also an AI B2C SaaS play), but I started first and foremost by identifying a viable discovery channel / product pair. In this case, I found that paid advertising in the elder care space converts well.
To put it more bluntly, a product without a customer acquisition channel is closer to a hobby than a business. A product with an acquisition channel that is somewhat scaleable and repeatable is likely to be a profitable business. A product with high growth / viral acquisition channel is a startup.
I'm not knocking operating a hobby product. I've done that and there are good and bad parts to the experience. But if you want to grow, you shouldn't be asking the question "how do I grow this product?" you should instead be asking "what product could I build that has a demonstrable acquisition channel?"
Most nations appear to have their own brand of populist hard-right political leaders at the moment and I've cautioned people that unless they know a lot about where they are moving to, they are likely to just be exchanging one scary regime for another and taking on outsider immigrant status in that new society.
I'm genuinely curious about this, no sarcasm of cynicism here.
Figured you might want to know / provide some instructions in case others are running into this issue too.
Pros: cheap cost of living for a tech city, warm most of the year, BBQ and live music
Cons: it's hellishly hot for 2-3 months, it's expensive compared to other (non-tech) cities, politically liberal folks will find state politics oppressive
I wrote a much more in-depth analysis of the best city for techies in 2024. TLDR, I think Seattle is probably the best place overall. The Bay is still king if you want to maximize for career growth, though: https://overthinkingmoney.com/2023/11/21/best-city-for-techi...
Seriously, though, if you know of a way to proof posts (services, forums, etc), I'd be interested. What I need is an editor as a service. The blog is just a hobby, so I can't afford a real professional editor.