skmurphy

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.

A decision is always an irrevocable commitment of resources: time, effort, cost, reputation, relationship capital, opportunity cost, etc. The trick is understanding the size of the commitment and having a plan for what you will do if things don't go as planned.

Key Takeaways

+ Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, launched Garry's List, a California nonprofit organization.

+ The 501(c)(4) will distribute voter guides, research explainers, and digital content on economic policy.

+ Tan argues that California's innovation environment faces pressure from upcoming ballot measures.

Closing quote: “California should prioritize retaining and attracting entrepreneurs and investors—the people who create jobs, strengthen the tax base, and fund essential services,” Tan said. “Policies that drive them out of the state harm innovation and make it more difficult to support core public needs, from infrastructure to public safety to education."

Related article https://missionlocal.org/2026/02/sf-garry-tan-california-pol... with related HN discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46980591

February 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.”®

Useful perspective. I think viable second sources can also lower costs. They might not increase QUALYS but would probably lower the cost of existing QUALYS so that money could be spent on other needs.

There are a number of tools out there that help map who you may know at a target firm or may know someone at the firm. I think it's critical that you handcraft craft a thoughtful personal email and not generate a flood of "fake personal." It's also a good idea to dig your well before you need the water and help others find work in what is a very challenging economy. My $.02 your mileage may vary.

I found several Dr. Ned Hallowell's books helpful, see https://drhallowell.com/read/books-by-ned/ in particular "Delivered from Distraction" and "Answers to Distraction."

The Amen Clinics use PET scans of the brain to differentiate between seven types of ADD: https://www.amenclinics.com/conditions/adhd-add/ You may find these write-ups helpful in refining your understanding. Dr. Amen has a book that I found helpful https://www.amazon.com/Healing-ADD-Revised-Breakthrough-Prog...

I don't take stimulants beyond caffeine, I meditate most days at least once a day, which I find helpful, as well as not stay up too late. I keep a pad of paper by my bed to capture ideas. Working to music seems to help.

If you get a lot of ideas, you should reconcile yourself to only acting on a small fraction of them and worry less about all of the possibilities.

I try to take care to keep the commitments that I make, writing them down and tracking them. And here it is important to keep a close track.

I may be less impaired than you are, although many people have noticed I seem to get a lot of ideas. I collaborated with a partner on a book once, and at one point, about halfway through, he was frustrated with me and said, "You are a geyser of ideas. We don't need more ideas, we need to complete what we set out to do."

January 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.”®

Dyslexia affects both reading and writing. It's an inherited difference in brain connection structure that can cause difficulty in associating the phonemes or sounds with letters and letter combinations. It provides advantages in three dimensional visualization and enables athletes to be ambidextrous.

December 2025 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.”®

Bennett offered a number of suggestions for improving Claude Code, three stood out:

A markup tool: I wish I could easily point to things: screenshots, UI glitches, layout issues, or share a whiteboard with Claude. Currently, all of these must be described completely in text. Often twice. Sometimes three times. I’ve tried uploading a marked-up screenshot, but with mixed success. A markup tool would be enormously helpful.

We need a larger context window. In regular Claude, the current 200k is being upgraded, in beta test now, at the 1M mark! But I think Claude Code’s limits are much lower. I see errors like Error: File content (27931 tokens) exceeds maximum allowed tokens (25000); 25,000 is pretty small when dealing with entire source code files.

Unprompted Git commits (This is the worst surprise.) Claude Code sometimes commits to Git without being asked. And even worse: it may commit before the change is tested; I don’t like checking in obviously broken code.