The Curious Engineer

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Diego Basch

diegobasch.com

Essays / personalTech news / industrySoftware / engineering practice

’10’15’20’25
Posts
127 from 13 Sep 2010 to 22 Aug 2025
Posting
now and then
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://diegobasch.com/feed

2025 1

  1. Vibe Coding and the Law of Leaky Abstractions

2022 1

  1. Things I Did In 2021

2021 5

  1. NFTS, OpenSea and Conflicts of Interest
  2. We Do Not Vote Every Four Years. We Vote Every Day.
  3. Adjusting the Dial of Fear
  4. Twitter: The Machine to Rage Against
  5. Is Bitcoin Really Throwing Energy Away?

2020 3

  1. Generic VC Advice Letter for COVID Times
  2. Short Story: Smoke on the Water
  3. Why Learn to Code for Fun and Not Profit

2019 7

  1. What Americans Get Wrong About Freedom
  2. The Algorithm Excuse – an Exploit in the Wild
  3. Nobody Knows Anything About Startup Ideas
  4. The News Is a Liability – How to Be Informed in 2019
  5. Technologies of Distraction
  6. The New Order of Silicon Valley: Forget the Silicon Part
  7. Startups and Privilege

2018 1

  1. The Pitfalls of Software Complexity, Part [NaN]

2015 7

  1. From Zero to Building and Flying Drones in a Month
  2. Why We Hate Ads
  3. Startups Compete Against Background Noise
  4. Failure Criteria for Startups
  5. College Is (Almost) Obsolete
  6. The Investors You Want
  7. Pre-startup Advice

2014 9

  1. Random Partition of a Sequence
  2. Life, the Universe and Technical Interviews
  3. Job interviews go both ways (My story with Netscape in ’98)
  4. Why I Built cointipping.com
  5. Do You Know Enough to Securely Own Bitcoins?
  6. Have You Received Bitcoin Spam?
  7. Dogecoin and the Appeal of Small Numbers
  8. The Harsh, Logical World of Cryptocurrencies
  9. Markov Chains in Clojure, Part 2 – Scaling Up

2013 8

  1. Fun with Markov Chains and Clojure
  2. Software Development Estimates, Where Do I Start?
  3. Uber for Everything
  4. Why Search Is Hard
  5. Open-source Something Often
  6. Another Silly Startup Analogy
  7. Being the First Employee of a Startup Could Be Right for You
  8. My Criteria for Investing in Startups

2012 62

  1. Guns and Preventable Suicides
  2. More Charts: Murders, GDP, Inequality
  3. Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
  4. Homicides vs. Gun Ownership
  5. Why Investors Want Co-founders
  6. Analysis of People’s Running Habits Using #nikeplus Tweets
  7. Do Female Executives Drive Start-up Success?
  8. 42% of US Internet Users Have a Facebook Account. For Twitter, It’s 16%
  9. Yahoo Poll: Yet Another Example of Crowd Innumeracy
  10. When I Hear “Fastest Growing” I Reach for XKCD
  11. Traditional VCs and First-time Entrepreneurs Are not Aligned
  12. PSA: The 32-Bit Version of MongoDB Is a Toy
  13. I’ll Give MongoDB Another Try. In Ten Years.
  14. Search for Obama on Facebook and You Get Romney
  15. Optimizing for the Right Thing (Yahoo and Ads)
  16. Social Networks Implode Quickly
  17. Startup idea: short, paid email
  18. Google Surveys: Know What You Are Asking
  19. First Month on app.net – Charts and Stats
  20. Please Stop Working on Ads
  21. The Socialist Republic of Twitter
  22. Silicon Valley != The Internet (The CEO of Yammer says the darndest things)
  23. Facebook and Twitter Don’t Know What You Want
  24. Enforcing Different Passwords for Different Sites
  25. The Dangers of Being a Product Instead of a Customer
  26. Using Foursquare to Detect Tax Evasion / Money Laundering
  27. The “Taken Username” Effect on Twitter
  28. Some Fresh Twitter Stats (as of July 2012, Dataset Included)
  29. There Is No Retirement
  30. Exploiting Silicon Valley For Profit (and Maybe Fun)
  31. Infallible Formula to Create a Money-Making Startup
  32. “Hello, Want to Buy IPO Shares?” 13 Years Ago I Said No.
  33. Builders and Guardians
  34. Are You in a Bubble?
  35. The Real Problem with Facebook
  36. The End of a Seven-Year Cycle: Leaving LinkedIn
  37. I’m a Small-Time Investor
  38. A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
  39. If You Use Comcast DNS Servers, You Cannot Read This
  40. Interviewing Engineers? Enough with the Whiteboard Coding!
  41. Should You Do a Startup? I Have No Idea
  42. How to Be a Horrible Boss
  43. Idea: Driving Time Predictor
  44. Frighteningly Ambitious People
  45. Hey Klout, One-dimensional Reputation Is Meaningless.
  46. Privacy Is a Continuum
  47. Handshakes, Term Sheets and Trust
  48. Why Do Alumni Donate to Their Alma Mater?
  49. Do You Know How Long It Took to Develop Word for Windows 1.0?
  50. Open Source and Big Data: Two Things I Love About LinkedIn.
  51. Starting a Company Is Not Risky
  52. Why Software Development Estimations Are Regularly Off
  53. Markets for Ideas and Patent Trolls
  54. Apple Doesn’t Need a Twitter Account but You Do
  55. Kill Hollywood Remixed
  56. Luck, Be A Lady While Our Funding Lasts
  57. PandoDaily: The Next Huffington Post?
  58. Stop the Presses: Essay Shows That Hard Work Can Be Unpleasant
  59. Journey to the Center of an Espresso Machine
  60. I Always Expected Hindsight Bias from the Financial Press
  61. The Seven Habits of Awesome Dolphins
  62. Don’t Do Whatever It Takes

2011 22

  1. Amazon Has Drastically Changed the Way I Read
  2. My New Year’s Resolutions
  3. VCs Also Succumb to Cognitive Biases
  4. Killer phone app: taking pictures FAST
  5. Think Like a VC
  6. Search Engines Cannot Be Objective
  7. Should your startup to do remote development?
  8. Youtube please
  9. If you’re not famous, joining Twitter is painful
  10. Survived an AWS outage? Don’t gloat!
  11. Marketing for Hackers: a 5-min intro, 97% BS-free
  12. Going Full Stack
  13. BitCoin will be made illegal, but cryptocash is here to stay
  14. The Siren Song of AWS
  15. Peggy
  16. How did you become a hardcore back-end developer?
  17. SSD vs HD on the Mac – Quick and Dirty Benchmark
  18. But nobody rocks like… [your town]
  19. Lamabot (fortune cookies and Markov chains)
  20. Why Non-engineers Think Engineers Are Better Off Joining Startups
  21. Ah, Southwest…
  22. Double Sunset

2010 1

  1. The Upside of Irrationality