News is ham-fisted as much by news organizations themselves as much as it is Apple. They don't want to sell through the News+ subscriptions, they want to tease a few articles and then upsell you to their subscription.

News organizations have really become quite aggressive about negotiating these things now, I think in large part because Meta (aka Facebook at the time) screwed them badly when it stopped revenue sharing.

This leads to a situation where a product that actually could at least be good and serviceable is a mess. They don't see News+ as being a positive to their businesses to bundle it into the subscription.

edit: I'm open to hearing others on this. I am only pointing out both Apple and the publishers are at fault for varying aspects of why Apple News+ ends up being a mediocre product

Every news organisation thinks they're the one you want to read, they want you to be a loyal customer to them and not read other newspapers. Google News used to have "see 349 other articles on this story" which really showed how pointless news organisations were, constantly rewriting/licencing other people's content.

Any news aggregator platform is only used by news organisations under duress.

That seems really short-sighted. A fair share of more than $100/year is a lot of money for news.

Every single time I try to get a domain expert at $job to let me learn more about the domain it goes goes nowhere.

My belief is that engineers should be the prime candidates to be learning the domain, because it can positively influence product development. There’s too many layers between engineers and the the domain IME

I mostly agree, but I see programmers more as “language interpreters”. They can speak the computer’s language fluently and know enough about the domain to be able to explain it in some abstractions.

The beauty of LLMs is that they can quickly gather and distill the knowledge on both sides of that relationship.

I think the value is lost on the end user, but it’s more readily apparent to everyone above them.

I’ve talked to many non engineering managers that love Jira, love the reports, the way they can see work flows, do intake etc.

Engineers and even alot of engineering managers loathe it, largely, but I think we’re the collective afterthought

Also, FWIW, a lot of pain people have with Jira is self inflicted by the people who setup the instance and how it works, vs vanilla Jira

Did vanilla Jira for a while, battled with a web app that is actively trying to make you hate it—switched our team to Linear, couldn't be happier ever since.

As far as the Atlassian suite goes I do much prefer Trello.

I only mean this all to be fair to Atlassian, that not all issues with Jira derive from anything they’re doing specifically

TailwindUI unfortunately sits in a position of being an easy to disrupt business with current AI.

Now attempt the same with Zoom, I suspect vibe coding will fall down on a project that complex to fit the mental model of a single engineer maintained a widely used tool

Bubble money is paying that out, much like in the past

I can only personally speak for myself and I'm not giving financial advice here. I use the Bolgehead strategy of the 3 fund portfolio is still the tried and true I follow, and I have yet to not benefit from doing so, even in economic downturns[0]

[0]: https://www.bogleheads.org

The missing the third ingredient which is passing rollback resistant legislation in its place that protects these freedoms.

That makes efforts far more durable.

Than it’s a matter of showing up in court to defend attacks against the law(s) that protect it.

In this way, we can have durable change, but it’s a high cost road. By design I am sure.

That chart is telling about the durability of this business, but do we actually know the precise point at which YCombinator as an entity sold out?

For instance, I know Coinbase may be down -22% from the IPO price, but that doesn't mean YCombinator lost money nor made very little. If they, for instance, sold off during the first few days of the IPO they would have made out quite well.

There's also the whole question of how much money did YCombinator put in vs what they got out.

Without knowing this, about all the chart tells me is YCombinator is not a predicated on building exceedingly durable businesses, but it doesn't mean they lost money on any of these investments either.

YC isn’t the “bigger fool”, their business model is great for them. Of course they made money at IPO. They don’t care about durable businesses. More than likely they sold at IPO.

I realize, but that's my entire point: the durability of the business as represented by these valuations says nothing meaningful about YCombinator startups other than they aren't building alot of highly durable businesses.

I'm no fan of the current US administration, however I have questions about this.

What currency controls have been implemented? A cursory search turns up no results, though there is some speculation that capital controls could be coming, they never the less haven't materialized, at least in such a way that no credible news outlet has plainly stated it.

The debasing of the USD is again, a fear, and Trump is absolutely stoking the fire around it, but it hasn't actually happened, as far as I can tell.

If you have evidence of the contrary to either of these I'm quite curious to see it. I wouldn't put it past this administration in the slightest, but there is a difference between implementing them and talking about them and for correctness sake I want to understand.

This is one, at least technically. Though in practice I'm considering more like what you see in China, where they have very strict capital controls.

The Remittance tax has an enormous amount of exemption businesses (because no institution that is subject to the Bank Secrecy Act is subject to it, neither is cryptocurrency, which I find interesting) its functionally a tax on individuals that send money to their home countries, as once you work through all the exemptions its the only transfer function left.

While its deplorable, I thought something much more draconian was afoot

The fear is the loss of safe guards and independence of the Federal Reserve. Trump is actively trying to remove safe guards and independence that would allow the Federal Reserve to counteract anything like this. If for instance Trump wants to hold interest rates low regardless of what anyone is telling him, he wants that power[0][1].

The upcoming decision by the Supreme Court on case Trump v. Cook is about this very issue[2]

[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/29/economy/federal-reserve-indep...

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/why-the-federal-reserves...

[2]: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/will-the-federal-reserve-remai...

Trump v Cook is not upcoming it has been argued already

https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/25A312

Edited! Though it was suppose to be written as upcoming decision, as yes the case was argued already but not ruled on

If Trump v. Cook is a loss for Trump, they won't be in fear of losing independence, as I understand it.

Which branch of government is the fed under?

None. As per the Federal Reserve Act it is an independent agency not under any branch of government.

Trump is trying to change that through judicial means, rather than purusing a legislative one. Dubious at best, but the Supreme Court as of late has not been reliable in upholding important precedent.