skmurphy

tldr; Here are five signs your startup may still be a hobby:

1. You are not making real offers that include a price, delivery date, and a promised result.

2. You rely on a spouse, significant other, inheritance, savings, or a tolerable day job for support, but you have not shared a credible plan for reaching break-even and then profitability.

3. You have not defined working hours, milestones, and what you expect to accomplish in a specific timeframe.

4. You are only getting feedback from people you already know.

5. You have not set up a separate bank account, business structure, and expense log.

"While reviewing a list titled “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners” (https://retractionwatch.com/retractions-by-nobel-prize-winne...) compiled by the industry watchdog Retraction Watch, historian Yves Gingras found that two essays by physics pioneer Max Planck had been retracted. Gingras, a historian at the Université du Québec à Montréal, found that the papers were retracted decades after their publication in 1940 and 1942 in Die Naturwissenschaften. [...]

Tim Kersjes, the publisher’s head of research integrity, explained that the “decision to retract the papers was a human error and we can confirm that no software or ‘bot’ would have been involved in the process. Unfortunately, our records are limited, as the retractions occurred in 2011, the individuals involved have mostly left the company and the systems by which we record integrity matters have since changed.”"

related https://www.science.org/content/article/why-have-papers-one-...

Interesting analysis of the consequences for Scientific American breaking with tradition and endorsing Joe Biden in 2020 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-americ... and Kamala Harris in 2024 https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/vote-for-kamala-h...

This July 2026 roundup lists online events for bootstrappers including Bootstrappers Breakfast and Lean Culture.

There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®

I don't care if it's trivial to implement and impossible to bypass: it's an effort to eliminate anonymous Internet browsing/commenting because everyone over 16 has to submit ID as well. Its the end of free speech on the part of the Internet the UK controls.

That was my experience as well. Paid for it for a year, it was a clean presentation of a subset of Google results, but when I was really looking for something I would fall back on Google. It's a shame their execution does not match their brand promise.

And start to build a relationship with sales that, at least in a B2B firm, can be of significant benefit.

From Chapter 8, available online at https://deepness.trmm.net/c08b/

"Our main cargo is a one-time cryptographic pad. The source is Commercial Security at Sjandra Kei; the destination is the certificants' High colony. It was the usual arrangement: We're carrying a one-third xor of the pad. Independent shippers are carrying the others. At the destination, the three parts would be xor'd together. The result could supply a dozen worlds' crypto needs on the Net for --"

I agree: a "state of nature" leads to lives that are "nasty, brutish and short." How do we find legislators who are good stewards for the public trust and welfare. We subject public companies to transparency regulations, perhaps legislator would benefit from more transparency. I am not sure where to draw the line to prevent mob rule or other undesirable outcomes, but legislators manage enormous budgets. Arnold Kling looks at ways to reorganize to create tighter accountability in https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-unbalance-of-power

"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." Gideon J. Tucker

We are truly living in a science fiction future where quantum code cracking is not a remote possibility but a near term risk we are planning for.

In Vernor Vinge's novel "A Fire Upon the Deep" one of the most valuable commodities were one time pads that are physically transported to communication nodes to enable unbreakable communication. The pads are split into three pieces that are XORed to create the actual pad to reduce risk of compromise.

This June 2026 roundup lists online events for bootstrappers including Bootstrappers Breakfast and Lean Culture.

There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®

The Chinese are at peak family connection density. I found this analysis very interesting, here are some highlights:

+ The simulations show that the Chinese family is about to undergo a radical and historically extraordinary evolution, as extended kinship networks weaken across the nation and close blood relatives disappear entirely for many.

+ In terms of sheer quantity, Chinese networks of blood kin were never before nearly as thick as at the start of the 21st century. Due to dramatic increases in survival, men and women in their 30s as of 2020 have on average five times as many living cousins as in 1960. China’s kin increase may be a significant, previously overlooked factor explaining the Chinese economy’s astonishing performance since Mao Zedong’s death.

+ The kin explosion has reached its peak, and China is now on the cusp of a severe, unavoidable, and relentless kin crash, driven by its sustained and progressively steep sub-replacement fertility relationships. The implosion of consanguineous family networks, in the models, means that China’s rising generations will likely have fewer living relatives than ever before in Chinese annals.

+ Any encounter by China’s security forces involving significant loss of life will almost inevitably foretell lineage extinction for many Chinese families.

+ Researchers and decision makers in China and the West pay close attention to many major Chinese population trends and their consequence. Among these are pronounced and continuing sub-replacement fertility, shrinking working-age manpower, rapid population aging, and emerging surpluses of marriageable men, partly due to sex-selective abortions.

+ Despite this, the looming macroeconomic consequences of old- age dependency burdens, the most significant economic impact of China’s coming revolution in the family, may actually concern the micro-fundamentals of the national economy. Since earliest recorded history, China’s guanxi/social & business networks have helped get business done by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs. Just as propagation of blood relatives likely proved a powerful stimulant for growth during the era of China’s extraordinary upswing, the severe coming plunge in living biological kin in China between now and 2050 may prove an economic depressant.

+ The ability of China’s increasingly sparse younger working age cohorts to support many times their number of elders is very much in question.

I think your statement is correct in the absence of a clear statement of direction and/or product launch by Kagi. I tried Kagi for a year and came away disillusioned as you were.

This May 2026 roundup lists online events for bootstrappers including Bootstrappers Breakfast and Lean Culture.

There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®

Key graf on page 5: "Prior to the pandemic, downtown San Francisco saw strong net new business formation, with 711 net new establishments in the information, financial, and professional services sectors in 2017 (Figure 3). The trajectory reversed sharply during the pandemic and by 2025, this figure fell to just 25 – a decline of 96%."

You and I have a very different reading of both that paragraph and the full article.

That "American business advocated most for weakened Western market regulation and the expansion of China's industrial base" is clearly stated in the excerpt I posted from the article: "The West’s greed and complacency became Chinese tailwinds, IP theft was rampant, expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred, industrial and institutional leverage was ceded."

Key graf:

As for the strategic thinking elsewhere in the world, I think a secondary problem with all the cover stories and columns marveling at China’s overwhelming strength and infinite wisdom is that they not only mischaracterize Chinese motivations today, but they confuse the qualities that were the primary drivers of this story all along. China became a superpower not because of uniquely clever or patient industrial planning (which was tremendously successful, but not particularly novel), but first and foremost because of a political and corporate culture that was both entirely rational and absolutely relentless about understanding and capitalizing on Chinese advantages (winning on scale and service with a massive and unusually skilled workforce, leveraging a billion consumers to lure foreign investment, and offering the world lax environmental and labor laws that helped them grow their economies), while simultaneously exploiting a raft of weaknesses in the Western system. The West’s greed and complacency became Chinese tailwinds, IP theft was rampant, expertise and trillions of dollars were willingly transferred, industrial and institutional leverage was ceded, the PLA was modernized, and now here we are.

I find HN Replies very useful. https://hnreplies.com

tldr; "One common approach we see is for bootstrapping teams that have a basic understanding of customer needs to start by offering a service. Once they get uptake on their service offers, they start to take advantage of existing solutions prospects are using to create a "system integration" or extension offering. For example, if your goal is to replace Excel where it's being used for a particular purpose, first offer an Excel template. This is more compatible with current practice, easier for prospects to trial, and easier to iterate on than a fully coded solution. Once they get uptake on the system integration offer, they can start to offer a product. "

This April 2026 roundup lists online events for bootstrappers including Bootstrappers Breakfast and Lean Culture.

There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®

A critique of the NRDC in light of research on the impact of fossil fuel plants on human health. Key paragraphs:

"Akrasia is weakness of will. You know you shouldn’t eat the cake; you eat the cake anyway. Temptation overwhelms correct reasoning in the moment. This is not what’s happening at the NRDC (assets ~$300M, Yale Law pipeline, board stocked with people who have read every document I’m about to cite). Akrasia would require that the people setting obstruction strategy haven’t connected the climate math to their own filings. At staff quality and funding levels that high, that’s not credible.

What’s actually happening is correct calculation with externalized cost. The NRDC’s litigation revenue model and donor base cannot survive a pivot to pro-nuclear. The fundraising enemy has to remain the enemy. The obstruction is the product. So obstruction continues, the costs land on people who will never attend a Rockefeller Brothers Fund board meeting, and everyone who filed the intervener petition goes home with their career intact."

Several good insights, compelling if true.

The problem:

"An American consumer wants a German duvet cover, 130x200 cm. They go to Amazon. They get four pages of Chinese-manufactured polyester comforters keyword-stuffed with every bed size ever conceived by humanity. The sponsored listings at the top are for products that share no meaningful attributes with what was searched. The organic results, if you scroll far enough to find them, are identical in kind if not in degree.

This is not a search failure. Amazon’s search works exactly as intended. The intent is not to return what you asked for. The intent is to return what someone paid to show you.

Every subsequent problem in Amazon’s retail business is downstream of that choice, and the choice was rational at every level of the org chart."

The threat: "The threat to Amazon’s retail search isn’t a startup. It’s Grainger. W.W. Grainger sells industrial and MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) supplies to corporate and institutional buyers. Roughly 1.7 million products. Catalog search that returns what you searched for, because the customer is a procurement manager with a part number who will immediately go elsewhere if the results are wrong. Grainger doesn’t sell sponsored placements above the right answer. Grainger’s business model depends on the right answer appearing first. They have existing distribution relationships, existing shipping infrastructure, existing corporate account relationships, and a search product that works because their incentive structure requires it to work."

After a long and detailed analysis, the bottom line on what Amazon businesses survive:

"Prime Video survives. Content lock-in is real. The subscriber base that stays for The Boys and doesn’t care about retail benefits is real, and it’s underrepresented in how people analyze Amazon’s decline narrative.

What doesn’t survive at current scale: the everything-store growth story, the AWS infrastructure dominance thesis, the 33% cloud market share trajectory, the Bedrock-as-AI-moat narrative, the $2 trillion valuation multiple."

Articulate exchange between Emmanuel Saez and Josh Rauh. Saez fundamentally believes the billionaires won't leave and presents the tax as a five year experiment. Rauh believes it will lead to the disintegration of Silicon Valley.

March 2026 roundup lists online events for bootstrappers including Bootstrappers Breakfast and Lean Culture.

There are also in-person Bootstrapper Breakfast meetings in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

These events are for “entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.”®

Henry Newbolt's Vitai Lampada https://net.lib.byu.edu/english/wwi/influences/vitai.html Captures a sense of duty against the realities of war.

Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57860/the-death-of-th... Is a much grimmer perspective.

Richard Grenier captured the truth for civil society: "As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." (h/t https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/)

All we have of freedom, all we use or know – This our fathers bought for us long and long ago. Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw— Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law. Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899 https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/kipling/old_issue/

Looks like they may be cancelling half of F-35 order in favor of Swedish Gripen

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2026/02/16/once_un...

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/john-ivison-sources-ottawa-conside... "The most likely scenario seems to be that Canada will buy around 40 F-35s and complement them with up to 80 Saab Gripens, which would be made in Quebec."

Gripens are less capable but half the price of F-35, allowing Canada to trade 40 F-35's on order for 80 Gripens to be built in Canada.

Key quote: "People misunderstand what built Silicon Valley. It wasn’t just intelligence. It was the stamina to endure embarrassment, the courage to diverge from the 'ideal path,' and the sheer will to keep going."

Absolutely, the size of a decision is the amount of resources you are committing irrevocably. Based on the size and the lack of a proven path, you need to invest effort in planning, adjusted for any deadlines the situation imposes on you. For example, when do you lose certain options, or, through inaction, commit to a course of action?

Sizing the decision also allows you to avoid the other side of the coin of "analysis paralysis," which is "extinction by instinct," where you proceed purely on pattern matching. Obviously, you need to rely on reflexes in situations where you don't have time to calculate, like maintaining your balance or pulling your hand away from something very hot. And there is value in letting the smell of smoke, a fire alarm, a cry for help, or other critical interrupts immediately redirect your attention to a new action.

My frustration with the “reversible decision” or “recoverable decision” framing is that it ignores the need to acknowledge the irrevocable commitment of resources and the opportunity cost of a course of action, and use those to guide the level of planning needed.

Planning is expensive, and overplanning is a waste. Still, a prudent survey of likely risks and outcomes should encourage you to plan in advance for certain likely situations and undertake mitigation efforts.