Top all-time · #2591
Diego Basch
Personal blog · diegobasch.comstartupsbusinesseconomics
Diego Basch's personal blog at diegobasch.com covers startups, business and economics. Since 2012, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 110 times, most often “A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-08-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (8) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Diego Basch's posts on Facebook user numbers, social network decline, gun ownership versus homicide, and a technical interview algorithm problem, usually as supporting data or links in discussion.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 8 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-05-03
- 42% of US Internet Users Have a Facebook Account. For Twitter, It’s 16%2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-10-03
- Life, the Universe and Technical Interviews2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2014-08-02
- Some Fresh Twitter Stats (as of July 2012, Dataset Included)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-07-31
- /homicides-vs-gun-ownership2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-12-17
- I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-24
- The New Order of Silicon Valley: Forget the Silicon Part2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-12
- Traditional VCs and first-time entrepreneurs are not aligned2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-26
- The dangers of being a product instead of a customer2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-08-13
- Social Networks Implode Quickly 2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2012-09-14
What Hacker News says?
This essay is very disingenuous. Businesses are hard work, Paul Graham wants to invest in the next Facebook, he needs younger founders who are ridiculously ambitious and won't take an early exit. http://diegobasch.com/stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard... Edit: pg, don't downvote me :)
Comment linking /stop-the-presses-essay-shows-that-hard-work-c
on “Schlep Blindness”Submitted A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi as a story · 350 points
HN discussionIt's worth noting that as investors (you a professional, me small fry) we are biased. I just wrote a quick post about my reasons to prefer startups with more than one founder: http://diegobasch.com/why-investors-want-co-founders
Comment linking /why-investors-want-co-founders
on “You can do it alone”Submitted Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun) as a story · 283 points
HN discussion> Comments: The 32 bit limit is noted (perhaps it should be a warning) on the download page but the main problem was the author did not know when writes started to fail. MongoDB uses unsafe writes by default in the sense that from the driver, you do not know if the write has succeeded without a further call to getLastError. This is because one of the often cited use cases for MongoDB is fast writes, which is achieve…
Comment linking /ill-give-mongodb-another-try-in-ten-years
on “Does everyone hate MongoDB?”Submitted Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers as a story · 245 points
HN discussionHere's a list of books that I read this year and liked. My favorite was Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. The rest are all worth reading. I hesitated to put "The Joy of Clojure" on that list because it's too narrow, but it's one of the best programming books I've seen. http://diegobasch.com/books
Comment linking /books
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012”Submitted There is no retirement as a story · 185 points
HN discussionMy team at LinkedIn (Search) is hiring engineers and engineering managers. We are in Mountain View, CA. Full-time only, and we can sponsor H1B. We are building reusable infrastructure, some of which we'll probably release as open source according to the LinkedIn tradition (see my blog post about it, http://diegobasch.com/open-source-and-big-data-two-things-i-... ) Apply here: http://www.linkedin.com/jsearch?keywords…
Comment linking /open-source-and-big-data-two-things-i-love-ab
on “Ask HN: Who is Hiring? (March 2012)”Submitted Job interviews go both ways (2011) as a story · 145 points
HN discussionI agree completely, in fact I wrote an article about dubious advice today. It's not sexy, so it didn't get any votes on HN. http://diegobasch.com/luck-be-a-lady-while-our-funding-lasts
Comment linking /luck-be-a-lady-while-our-funding-lasts
on “How to Be Relentlessly Resourceful [a practical guide]”Submitted Software Development Estimates: Where Do I Start? as a story · 143 points
HN discussionSurvey numbers certainly support the "facebook is full of shit" idea. There was a post recently where someone did a poll with google consumer surveys and found only 42% of US internet users have a facebook account: http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-faceboo...
Comment linking /42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-facebook-account-for-twitter-its-16
on “Facebook has 1 billion monthly active users ”Submitted Why Software Development Estimations Are Regularly Off as a story · 141 points
HN discussion73% http://diegobasch.com/42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-faceboo...
Comment linking /42-of-us-internet-users-have-a-facebook-account-for-twitter-its-16
on “Facebook has 1 billion monthly active users ”Submitted I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try In Ten Years as a story · 140 points
HN discussionIt's not just the graph. Intent is very fleeting. You can't know "instantaneous intent" from someone's history and graph (e.g. what will be my next Google query?) More about this point on my blog if you're interested: http://diegobasch.com/facebook-and-twitter-dont-know-what-yo...
Comment linking /facebook-and-twitter-dont-know-what-you-want
on “Peter Thiel Sells Majority Of His Facebook Shares In Deal Planned Pre-IPO”Submitted How To Be A Horrible Boss as a story · 135 points
HN discussionI agree. There's a great "Yes Prime Minister" video about this. I just wrote a blog post about how it relates to this poll. http://diegobasch.com/google-surveys-know-what-you-are-askin...
Comment linking /google-surveys-know-what-you-are-asking
on “34.5% of US Internet Population Not using Facebook/Twitter”Submitted Uber for Everything as a story · 114 points
HN discussionI recently heard of two teenagers (relatives of a business acquaintance) who quit FaceBook because -- well, because it's no longer the freshest gumbo. They no longer feel it's cool. A few anecdotes do not make a trend, but FaceBook should be worried, because social networks can implode quickly when they stop being perceived as 'the place to see and be seen:' http://diegobasch.com/social-networks-implode-quickly -- P…
Comment linking /social-networks-implode-quickly
on “Is Facebook dying?”Submitted Please Stop Working on Ads as a story · 83 points
HN discussionIt's not just fear of money. In consumer apps, "free" means the potential of having hundreds of millions of users globally. This includes people in relatively poor countries, who would never pay for anything online. Nevertheless, they pad your numbers. Not to mention that you can have multiple accounts, sock puppets, etc. The market rewards this behavior: Facebook is worth $40B not because of ads, but because of the…
Comment linking /the-dangers-of-being-a-product-instead-of-a-customer
on “Fear of Money”Submitted Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking as a story · 81 points
HN discussionAuthor here, see my previous post plotting homicides vs gun ownership across countries: http://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership Yes, the average American (not necessarily you, it varies a lot depending on where you live) is more likely to be killed by a gun than the average person in Finland. That is completely irrelevant to my post. It's not a competition among countries, it's about making the US better. "…
Comment linking /homicides-vs-gun-ownership
on “Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking”Submitted Silicon Valley != The Internet (The CEO of Yammer says the darndest things) as a story · 64 points
HN discussionTrue, but a common argument from gun owners is that if you're feeling homicidal, you'll find a way to commit murder with or without a gun. Looking at all homicides vs gun ownership seems to bear that out. In fact, there appears to be a negative correlation with gun ownership: http://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership (Can we start abbreviating Correlation Is Not Causation as CINC now? In any case, if you're g…
Comment linking /homicides-vs-gun-ownership
on “Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking”Submitted Should You Do A Startup? I Have No Idea as a story · 62 points
HN discussionNothing, so most people should use Coinbase the same way they use a grocery store: buy what they need and take it somewhere else. Unfortunately most people do not know enough to do that. I wrote a blog post about it if you're interested. http://diegobasch.com/do-you-know-enough-to-securely-own-bit...
Comment linking /do-you-know-enough-to-securely-own-bitcoins
on “A Major Coinbase Milestone: 1 Million Consumer Wallets”Submitted Google Surveys: Know What You Are Asking as a story · 61 points
HN discussion
