David Smooke

One of the more subtle pitfalls of starting a startup when you're too young is that you can't hire well, because you haven't had enough experience to be a good judge of people. You can judge technical ability but not character, so you end up hiring smart jerks.

Full story, "From warehouse floor to Microsoft Store" is here on @hackernoon ! 👇 hackernoon.com/my-journey-fro… Grateful @DavidSmooke and the team keep giving indie builders a place to tell the real version. ❤️

Posted this article on HackerNoon yesterday. Yes, I love using localLLMs for solving data problems :) hackernoon.com/building-a-loc…

@andrsnu @hackernoon Hey Caroline, thanks for reporting. Should be fixed now.

Hey @hackernoon, your RSS feed (hackernoon.com/feed) has a bug — media:thumbnail URLs have your own domain doubled up, e.g. hackernoon.com/https://cdn.ha… instead of just the CDN URL. Breaks images for every RSS reader pulling the feed 🙂

@ArweaveEco Getting started doesn't require building anything from scratch. Platforms like @paragraph_xyz and @hackernoon already handle Arweave storage on behalf of authors. Both are established, feature-rich sites individuals can join today.

Places to get backlinks for startup (v3): 1. Hackernoon (DR 87) 2. DevHunt (DR 63) 3. Tiny Startups (DR 69) 4. Launch Directories (DR 64) 5. TinyLaunch (DR 72) 6. Microlaunch (DR 61) 7. StartupBase (DR 60) 8. ShowMeBestAI (DR 76) 9. Reddit (DR 95) 10. Quora (DR 91) 11. There's an AI for that (DR 77) 12. Hacker News (DR 91)

Thank you to the editorial team at @hackernoon for featuring my story. I hope it encourages more engineers to look beyond visible damage and ask better questions about the structures we rely on every day.

Read the full story👇 hackernoon.com/the-morning-i-…

Grateful to @HackerNoon for making my piece a top story on their homepage 🙏 And the timing couldn't be better, because Strategy's President just handed everyone a perfect example of what the article is about. Today he confirmed: BTC Yield more than doubled this quarter, from 3.7% to 7.8%. If you don't know what that means, here's why it matters — and why it's the most misunderstood number in this whole story. BTC Yield measures bitcoin-per-share. It divides the coins the company holds by its diluted shares. Notice what's missing: price. The dollar value of Bitcoin never enters the formula. Which means it can post record numbers while the stock is down 80% and the market screams "Ponzi." And that's exactly the point I make in the piece: this metric is real AND a mirage at the same time. Real, because the accretion is genuine — shareholders own more sats per share than before. The machine is working. A mirage, because it's engineered to look away from the one thing creditors and the taxman actually count: value in dollars. You can wave a triumphant BTC Yield while the collateral behind $22B in obligations melts. So when a Strategy exec shows you this number, both things are true at once: it's a genuine signal of the flywheel working, and it's the friendliest possible framing of a brutal year. That's the whole game with $MSTR — learning to hold two ideas at the same time. Wall Street has it down ~80% and calls it the next Ponzi; I sat down and read the balance sheet instead of the headline. The "42% discount" is misread leverage, there's no margin call possible, and the real risk isn't Bitcoin falling — it's Bitcoin rising too fast and triggering a cash tax on gains it never realized. Full breakdown — charts, plain-English explainers, not investment advice 👇 hackernoon.com/michael-saylor… Death spiral, or is the market overreacting?

@Lynnette_Novak I've got concept and ideas on technology. Right now being a regular contributor at @hackernoon is the fix but my books are like epic events.

A workflow I'm enjoying: "Walk-driven development" > go on a nice walk outside 🚶 > record a long audio note: ideas, goals, things to build 🎙️ > agent auto-creates docs/tasks, and kicks off cloud coding agents for me 🤖

We built vertical-specific newswires. TechnologyWire distributes your press release to actual tech publications: → TechCrunch → CIO → TechRepublic → eWeek → HackerNoon → dozens more Homepage placement. Not hidden subpages.

Just hours ago, @hackernoon published a review of the white paper I wrote about the overlooked risks and liabilities of AI deployed websites. AI is great. Use it. I do. But if you believe using it properly versus pushing/selling the easy button as a substitute for actual expertise, that's a difference worth voicing publicly and consistently. I'd rather be honest than opportunistic.

Stop building "vibe-coded" demos. We’re rewarding things that actually work. We are drowning in apps that look pretty but do nothing. The AI era gave us infinite demos and zero utility. Pitch decks for vaporware. MVPs that launch and vanish. Style over substance everywhere. Meanwhile, real people need real tools. The Problem: • Beautiful apps with no users. • "Alma mater clout" funding products that don’t exist. • Technical sophistication with zero adoption. The Solution: @hackernoon presents the Proof of Usefulness Hackathon. We don't care about your pitch deck. We don't care about your "vibes." We care about utility. We evaluate projects based on actual human, technical, and financial adoption. We are measuring what actually matters. What's in it for you? • $150,000+ in total prizes (Cash + Software Credits). • $20,000 in monthly cash prizes. • $1,500+ in free tool credits for every participant (Bright Data, @storyblok, @neo4j, @algolia ). • A Proof of Usefulness (PoU) Score (-100 to +1000) to validate your product's market fit. How to Enter: 1. Submit your project & generate your PoU report. 2. Document your project on @hackernoon. 3. Compete for monthly & grand prizes. The world doesn't remember what was promised. It remembers what worked. Usage is the new valuation. Ready to prove your project actually matters? 👉 Submit here: proofofusefulness.com Proof of Usefulness Hackathon is live on ProductHunt right now: producthunt.com/products/hacke… — #AI #Startup #Hackathon #SoftwareEngineering #ProofOfUsefulness #HackerNoon #BuildInPublic #Tech

As a founder, your number one job is to eat shit. You're on the call with the upset customer. You need to fire people by telling them directly. You're listening to the engineer who wants to quit due to burnout. You have to read the 40-page vendor contract, which is a nightmare to go through. Every hard, uncomfortable thing lands on your desk. That's the whole job. You're here to absorb the bad stuff so everyone else can keep moving.

HackerNoon put me in their newsletter! 💚⌚️ Theme: Pulling AI off the cloud. Running things locally, on hardware you actually control. And the example they picked was my little system monitor, one that learns YOUR machine instead of a generic threshold. Still feels slightly unreal, honestly.

@hackernoon Great, now my laptop can judge me locally without needing an internet connection. Progress is truly beautiful! 🤖💻

My new HackerNoon article reached #6 in top-read stories, with 1.7k+ reads. It shows why AI coding agents need distributed context for microservices — and how archspec provides it before implementation. hackernoon.com/why-sdd-breaks…

woke up to a retweet from @hackernoon on their article about Duel good morning indeed

"Build something worth blogging about." The best projects don't stay hidden. They get built, shared, improved, and documented. Read @DavidSmooke's reflection: