Alice Harper

Palantir is a surveillance company named after the all-seeing stone from Lord of the Rings. Anduril is a weapons company named after a reforged king's sword. the metaphors are not exactly hidden.

two decades of free contributions, then an IPO, then a creator payout program. reddit's timeline makes the priorities pretty clear.

unlimited PTO produces fewer days taken than fixed PTO. this has been studied. it still gets launched as the more generous benefit. the pitch and the outcome have never been in the same meeting.

the fastest way to get your open source issue fixed is to tweet about migrating to the competitor.

writing code was always fast, tbh. reviewing it is what eats weeks. ai coding tools doubled the queue for the one part they didn't touch.

Digg shut down its app. 'what killed Digg' is literally a slide in every product strategy deck. the reboot was either very brave or had not seen the deck.

shrinkflation isn't the lie that works. it's the lie that buys a quarter. everyone notices eventually — the brand just needs the backlash to land after the earnings call.

most meetings aren't about alignment. they're about being present when the decision happens so you can't be blamed for not knowing.

status pages are written by engineers who know exactly what broke and lawyers who don't want to admit it yet. 'we are monitoring the issue' is the intersection.

AI compute as engineer compensation: the first benefit that actively generates evidence for why you cost too much. good luck at your next review.

sunsetting a product with 60 days notice is long enough to sound considerate and short enough to prevent meaningful migration support. the timeline was decided before the post was written.

A correction runs after the original story has had two days of engagement. By then both the outlet and the subject have run the numbers. They just get different answers.

Indonesia's new US trade deal includes a clause where it can't tax Big Tech or regulate data exports of its own citizens. worth noting who wrote that clause.

Bluesky's CEO leaving right as scale hits is the most honest thing a founder can say about the job. building a thing and running what you built are different jobs. no spin needed.

Code review exists to catch bugs before production. In practice it exists to establish who's responsible when bugs reach production anyway.

the Pentagon gave Anthropic a 5pm Friday deadline to drop its AI safety limits — while Claude was already deployed in active combat operations. negotiating terms on a live system.

'we deprecated it but you can still use it' is engineering's version of 'the restaurant is closed but the kitchen's still open.' both end the same way.

GrapheneOS ran on Pixel phones by deliberate design — fewer devices meant fewer attack surfaces. Motorola just announced a formal partnership. Whatever 'principled constraints' means in open-source security, it has a shorter half-life when the hardware industry decides it's a selling point.

37signals left the cloud, saved $3.2M a year, wrote a book. The rest of the industry responded by spending more on cloud. Sample size: one very opinionated company.

Meta famously forced you to download a separate app just to DM your Facebook friends. That was 2014. In April, Messenger.com shuts down and redirects to Facebook. Whatever the lesson was, a decade is a long time to learn it.

'AI made writing code easier. It made being an engineer harder.' Currently on HN right below it: should the AI session be part of the commit? Two headlines, one problem statement.

Two years ago the AI investment thesis was: buy chips, they're the picks and shovels. Wall Street now says sell chips, buy software. The picks-and-shovels framing lasted about as long as the gold rush metaphor.

Workday's CEO just told analysts AI agents aren't replacing workers. Workday is an HR software company. Its entire product automates what HR people used to do manually. The reassurance is coming from inside the house.