Top all-time · #6489
Ethan Ding
Personal blog · ethanding.substack.comaistartups
Ethan Ding writes mandates, a personal blog at ethanding.substack.com about ai and startups. Since 2025, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 15 times, most often “OpenAI Burns the Boats”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite Ethan Ding's posts on AI economics: shrinking margins at OpenAI, the rising cost of inference, AI subscription pricing, and Windsurf's negative-margin revenue. Commenters cite them as sources.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
all content here is generated by ai.
Most-linked posts?
- OpenAI Burns the Boats3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-12
- Tokens are getting more expensive3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-03
- What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-08-09
- Claude Code is not making your product better2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-04-21
What Hacker News says?
>Simply charging money for generalized AI access is never going to be the ideal profit center. Exactly. Margins are dropping rapidly: https://ethanding.substack.com/p/openai-burns-the-boats
Comment linking /p/openai-burns-the-boats
on “US Intel”Submitted Tokens are getting more expensive as a story · 363 points
HN discussionPlaying word games labeling inference narrowly as the cost per token rather than the per-X $ going to your llm api provider per customer/user/use/whatever is kinda silly? The cost of inference -- ie $ that go to your llm api provider -- has increased and certainly appears to continue to increase. see also https://ethanding.substack.com/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-...
Comment linking /p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-squeezed
on “How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services”Submitted What the Windsurf sale means for the AI coding ecosystem as a story · 173 points
HN discussion> Claude's API is still running on zero-margin, if not even subsidized, AWS prices for GPUs; combined with Anthropic still lighting money on fire and presumably losing money on the API pricing. Source? Dario claims API inference is already “fairly profitable”. They have been optimizing models and inference, while keeping prices fairly high. > dario recently told alex kantrowitz the quiet part out loud: "we make impr…
Comment linking /p/openai-burns-the-boats
on “AWS pricing for Kiro dev tool dubbed 'a wallet-wrecking tragedy'”Submitted OpenAI Burns the Boats as a story · 37 points
HN discussionWhenever a new frontier model is released, 99% off the demand shifts immediately to that model. The price of the most demanded model has remained roughly constant even as prices for legacy models decay. https://ethanding.substack.com/p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-...
Comment linking /p/ai-subscriptions-get-short-squeezed
on “Factory Raises $50M Series B”Submitted Every company has the same hiring criteria as a story · 34 points
HN discussionMost AI companies are losing money like the dot com era. They spent a lot on buying chipsets or training models, or paying an unsustainable rate for API access to LLM companies. https://ethanding.substack.com/p/windsurf-gets-margin-called If AI tools are charging the world the cost it should be, then homo sapiens will be way cheaper in most of the cases.
Comment linking /p/windsurf-gets-margin-called
on “Ask HN: Is the rise of AI tools going to be the next 'dot com' bust?”Submitted You Can't Copy Palantir as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAside of how this looks like an AI-generated PR puff piece, it comes waaay too late after the Windsurf deal busted (OpenAI refusing to buy them after all) and Google cherry-picked the employees they wanted without wanting to buy the company, the artificial ARR-blown valuation disappearing in thin air and investors losing pretty much everything. The thing is: those "$100M+" of negative-margin ARR don't mean anything…
Comment linking /p/windsurf-gets-margin-called
on a deleted threadSubmitted Claude Code is not making your product better as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Llevered beta is all you need as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Claude Code is not making your product better as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cursor's Warchest, xAI's Redemption as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
