This is a really big week for our yet-to-be-revealed company. While I can’t yet reveal why, I can say this: this immense milestone takes us very close to our public launch.
Post-launch, we plan to share updates here. Subscribe to be the first to hear.
What We’re Reading
Ask HN: I'm an MIT senior and still unemployed – and so are most of my friends: That MIT Course 6 kids would be unable to find work would seem impossible four years ago. This thread is filled with great, thoughtful advice from the HN community for job seeking in adverse market conditions.
Cyberattacks by AI agents are coming: it’s not just phishing emails anymore. This speculative but thoughtful article walks through scenarios where autonomous AI agents could carry out sustained cyberattacks. Worth reading if only to understand how attack surfaces are evolving beyond humans clicking bad links.
Someone hacked ransomware gang Everest’s leak site: a ransomware gang got ransomware’d, with their leak site defaced with a cheeky message. The Everest ransomware gang has claimed credit for hacks and breaches including at NASA and the Brazilian government.
The unique genetic change that turned horses into athletic powerhouses: a single “nonsense” mutation, common among elite racehorses, seems to enhance muscle fiber formation, directly affecting athletic performance. Researchers think this adaptation could have implications for treating human diseases, like cystic fibrosis and muscular dystrophy.
DOGE Is Planning a Hackathon at the IRS. It Wants Easier Access to Taxpayer Data: creating “one new API to rule them all” that would likely touch all data within the IRS (very sensitive information) raises some pretty meaningful concerns over data privacy. Who will be able to access these new systems? What controls will be in place? As one source quoted in the story puts it, “It’s hard to imagine more sensitive data than the financial information the IRS holds.”
The Pandemic Is Not the Only Reason U.S. Students Are Losing Ground: an important look at how early academic failure compounds over time. Apart from the pandemic, increased screen time (less time reading) and lingering impacts of the Great Recession (slashes to school spending) may be contributing factors to score declines.
Nerd CornerTM
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
- Charles Goodhart (kind of)
Once you know Goodhart’s Law, you start seeing it everywhere. Especially if you work at a B2B SaaS company. It’s the hydra of unintended consequences: if you create an incentive, the system will contort itself to optimize for it, often in ways that render the original goal meaningless. I shared my thoughts on some commonly used SaaS metrics and their meaning (or lack thereof) in this video.
Some personal favorites from outside the tech world:
The Great Hanoi Rat Massacre: in an attempt to control the Hanoi, Vietnam rat population, the French government created a bounty program that paid a small reward for each rat killed. To collect the bounty, people would need to provide the severed tail of a rat. What ultimately happened, however, was that people would catch rats, cut their tails off, then release them into the sewers to breed and… produce more rats. AKA, more opportunities for bounty. Ultimately, the policy (perhaps obviously) led to an even worse rat problem.
The Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal: through aggressive internal sales goals, Wells Fargo employees were rewarded for opening more accounts. So they opened millions of unauthorized ones. Clients noticed the fraud after being charged unanticipated fees and receiving unexpected credit or debit cards. Ultimately, the bank was fined $185M by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and faced billions of dollars in additional civil and criminal suits.
Four Pests Campaign: In the 1950s, Mao declared war on sparrows (among other pests) to improve crop yields. The sparrows were killed en masse, their nests destroyed, and eggs smashed. Yes, sparrows eat grain, seed, and fruit… but also bugs like locusts. After millions of sparrows were killed, locust populations exploded. Guess what locusts eat? Grain and rice… this policy led to massively devastating crop losses.
Startups (and VCs) fall in love with KPIs, north stars, OKRs. But the minute you turn a proxy into the goal itself, whether it’s MQLs, DAUs, or whatever Franken-metric your board wants this quarter, you invite optimization and distortion. Just something to keep in mind next time someone suggests “we just need to make this number go up.”
Other Cool Stuff
CloudHiker: Remember StumbleUpon? This is kind of a curated version of StumbleUpon filled with interesting random sites. In my first few clicks, I happened upon MelonLand, some optical illusions, and an old pseudorandom number generation contest.
OpenAge: I spent some time this week reading about old game engines. In particular, I was interested in the proprietary Genie game engine that powered a few major RTS games that I loved as a kid: Age of Empires, Age of Empires II, and Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds. Genie needed to do some not-very-obvious things like supporting fog of war and pathing units around the map with a reasonably sophisticated AI. OpenAge is an open-source project that’s trying hard to recreate Genie – a pretty ambitious undertaking.
From The Archives
(1997): The History of Video Tape Recorders before Betamax and VHS
(2005): Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
(Eternal): Dial Up Sound
(2022): The Magic Cookie: How Lou Montulli Cured the Web’s Amnesia
Thanks,
Ned