Hasnain says:

Worth bookmarking again as this is chock full of timeless advice for small software businesses.

“Whoopsie! Simple error in assumptions in my Excel modeling, Tarsnap actually cost 4X what I thought it would.

By which I mean that instead of costing me $0.60 a month it actually costs me $2.40 a month.

This error is symptomatic of what Tarsnap forces every single customer to go through when looking at their pricing. It is virtually impossible to know what it actually costs. That’s a showstopper for many customers. For example, at many businesses, you need to get pre-approval for recurring costs. The form/software/business process requires that you know the exact cost in advance. “I don’t know but we’ll get billed later. It probably won’t be a lot of money.” can result in those requests not getting approved, even if the actual expense would be far, far under the business’ floor where it cared about expenses. It is far easier for many businesses to pay $100 every month (or even better, $1,500 a year — that saves them valuable brain-sweat having to type things into their computer 11 times, which might cost more than $300) than to pay a number chosen from a normal distribution with mean $5 and a standard deviation of $2.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting/inspirational read that took me a while because I took a detour through some of the links.

“This frequently debated question paints a picture of a world where the only choice is between being a cog at a giant semi-monopoly, or taking investment money in the hopes of one day growing to be head cog at a giant semi-monopoly.

Role models matter. So I made a list of small companies that I admire. Neither giants nor startups - just people making a living writing software on their own terms.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting interview, albeit veering a little into “productivity porn” territory at times.

Not sure how he managed to steel himself enough to give up on books partway though.

“In a recent podcast, Naval Ravikant talks about how he doesn’t finish books anymore. He let go of the guilt of needing to finish books. Tyler Cowen has said something similar. Do you finish every book?

Yeah, I really struggle with that. I have a whole bunch of books that I haven’t finished which I really should just toss. Patrick Collison talks about this too. The problem of having to finish every book is you’re not only spending time on books you shouldn’t be but it also causes you to stall out on reading in general. If I can’t start the next book until I finish this one, but I don’t want to read this one, I might as well go watch TV. Before you know it, you’ve stopped reading for a month and you’re asking “what have I done?!” I think that’s part of it. This moral hectoring of “don’t do that” which can only be so successful. The other technique is to read a dozen books at a time.”

Hasnain says:

Such a good read combining a human interest story with an analysis of game design techniques. And on one of my favourite games to boot!

“X-COM: UFO Defense shipped a few months later in North America, into a cultural zeitgeist that was if anything even more primed for it. Computer Gaming World, the American industry’s journal of record, gave it five stars out of five, and its sales soared well into the six digits. As the quote that opened this article attests, X-COM was in many ways the antithesis of what most publishers believed constituted a hit game in the context of 1994. Its graphics were little more than functional; it had no full-motion video, no real-time 3D rendering, no digitized voices; it fit perfectly well on a few floppy disks, thank you very much, with no need for any new-fangled CD-ROM drive. And yet it sold better than the vast majority of those other “cutting-edge” games. Many took its success as a welcome sign that gaming hadn’t yet lost its soul completely — that good old-fashioned gameplay could still trump production values from time to time.”

Hasnain says:

“The case has triggered a review of police and prosecutorial processes. Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam admitted "something has gone wrong in the chain of events".

What the government does next will be watched very closely. If it fails to address Singaporeans' demands for "greater accountability and systemic fairness", this may lead to "a gnawing perception that the elite puts its interests above that of society's," wrote Singapore commentator Donald Low in a recent essay.

"The heart of the debate [is] whether elitism has seeped into the system and exposed a decay in our moral system," former journalist PN Balji said in a separate commentary.”

Hasnain says:

This is such a good interview and worth reading. The interviewee keeps honestly rejecting the premise of leading questions and cutting through the BS.

Also surprised that they published it. If only more stuff was like this.

“Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen. “

Hasnain says:

Even more damning :(

“Deutsche’s problems were so striking they prompted Bank of America to file a confidential alert known as a suspicious activity report, or SAR, to the US government. Bank of America employees had visited Deutsche’s London office to discuss worries about Russian money laundering. They were stonewalled when a Deutsche manager interrupted their meeting and asked them to leave the building. Bank of America found the situation troubling enough that it raised the matter with Achleitner, according to its filing.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting read on the economics of various business models and how they seep into product and company culture.

"I think that over time, the revenue model is the dominant term. The limit of a product towards infinity, so to speak, is based on its revenue model. If your revenue model is ads, it doesn’t matter if your stated mission is “to organize the world’s knowledge and make it universally accessible and useful”, “to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together”, or anything else. If your revenue model is ads, you are an ads company."

Hasnain says:

Seemed relevant given a lot of the current and ongoing discussions of algorithmic bias - especially in light of the twitter facial recognition terribleness this weekend.

“Many of the cases of algorithms gone rogue that we know about could have been stopped by critical reflection earlier in the process. Such reflection however, is unlikely to come introspectively. Despite their best efforts, those developing algorithms will be prone to bias and intellectual lock-in.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really enlightening read on the pursuit of satisfaction in life. Especially relatable given the Pakistani focus on always climbing up some ladder or the other or being given a focus in life.

“Okay, so, what do we think about TarSnap? Dude was obviously a genius, and spent his time on backups instead of solving millennium problems. I say that with the greatest respect. Is this entrepreneurship thing a trap?”

(I usually leave out author bios but it’s relevant in this case, he started university at 13, got a PhD from Oxford and won the Putnam to boot)