Big Whale Hunting Hit the Top of Hacker News

Published: 2026-11-01

The highlight of this week was seeing Big Whale Hunting's new employees page reach number one on Hacker News. Galazon's mobile version also got its second warehouse and cloud saves, and Your News Headlines now posts its biggest stories to Bluesky.

Big Whale Hunting: number one on Hacker News

I posted last week's employees page from Big Whale Hunting, the one that fills each company's market cap bubble with stick figures, to Hacker News as "Show HN: I put employees inside S&P 500 market-cap bubbles". It went to the top of the front page, and so far it has 178 points and nearly 50 comments. It also brought about 24,000 visitors to the site. I certainly wasn't expecting it to reach number one, and watching the traffic come in was quite something.

To go with it, I wrote a blog post, The S&P 500 has 29 million employees. It looks at some of the standout companies: Nvidia, with about $124 million of market value for every employee; Welltower, with even more; Accenture, which employs 814,000 people but is only 84th by market cap; and McDonald's, whose franchise model keeps most of the people who work under its name off its own books. The post also lists every company the chart leaves out and why, so you can check what's missing.

Galazon: Warehouse 2 comes to mobile

The mobile version of Galazon got its biggest update in a while. I added a completely new warehouse, Warehouse 2. It has a narrower floor, loading bays on both sides and smaller trucks, so it's a lot more frantic than the first. I also fixed some minor bugs that were easier to spot in the new warehouse.

Your progress now syncs to your Google account through Google Play Games, so your save, settings and run history follow you to a new phone. The Performance Reviews and Settings screens now have the same green retro computer terminal look as the PC version, and your run history is split by warehouse. The new version is out on Google Play.

Your News Headlines: now on Bluesky

Your News Headlines now has a Bluesky account. When at least four news sources report the same story, it's posted there automatically with a link card and a photo. I also fixed the site's own link preview, which showed up as a solid black box on Bluesky. And the site now spots the BBC's red "BREAKING" placeholder by looking at the picture itself, so it uses a real news photo instead.

What I've been reading: The Fund

I finished The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend by Rob Copeland, and I really liked it. It tells the story of the world's biggest hedge fund, where meetings were recorded, staff rated each other constantly and the founder's "Principles" ruled everything. It's a real-life corporate dystopia, and in many ways it's worse than the one I made up for Galazon.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading.