Hacker News: ahnick

New comment by ahnick in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

ahnick — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 17:53:22 +0000

For sure Freud and modern therapy as practiced today are very different. Freud influenced the language, structure, and goals of talk therapy more than the exact methods most therapists use now. Modern therapy kept many of his clinical observations about inner conflict and relationships, but dropped or revised a lot of his more speculative theory.

Since mental illness or other trauma is entirely contained to the brain, you can in fact say that the problem is entirely biological. We are starting to see the tech industry make real inroads to biology. Neuralink, gene therapies, AI designed drugs, etc. All of these innovations will decrease the need for therapy, which at best you can say helps people learn to live with conditions, but never permanently fixes the problem.

New comment by ahnick in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

ahnick — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:43:01 +0000

People have been doing self-examination for a long time, but Freud's use of psychoanalysis is a fairly modern phenomenon and it's benefits are dubious. Modern therapy looks increasingly like pseudoscience. I expect biotech/AI advancements to make much of modern therapy irrelevant over time, as we obtain fine-grained control over the actual processes in the brain causing various afflictions.

New comment by ahnick in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

ahnick — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:36:53 +0000

Introspection is the conscious examination of one’s own mental, emotional, and cognitive processes to improve self-awareness. I think Marc's critique here is a lot of what can be learned about past mistakes is outside of an individual's own failings.

I was recently reading a post about how the Claude Code leak and Boris Cherny had the following to say..

"Mistakes happen. As a team, the important thing is to recognize it’s never an individuals’s fault — it’s the process, the culture, or the infra.

In this case, there was a manual deploy step that should have been better automated. Our team has made a few improvements to the automation for next time, a couple more on the way."

When complex systems fail often there is more than one thing that went wrong. Uncovering what those things are is important, so that you can address them and prevent them from happening again. Once fixed, it is on to the next task and no need to dwell on the past.

New comment by ahnick in "Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection"

ahnick — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 16:07:08 +0000

This blog post and all the comments in response feel very tautological. I think Marc has a fairly simple point here, which is don't spend time dwelling on the past. Learn from the past, take away information about how things can be improved, but then make a plan (for whatever it is that you are building/doing) and move forward with that plan.

In the podcast, he basically lays out that the A16Z thesis is that there is not enough technology, information, and intelligence in the world, so they are going out and investing in companies/ideas that can make an impact in these areas. That requires learning from the past, but not dwelling on it. Seems like a very sensible and positive approach to me.

New comment by ahnick in "Machine Payments Protocol (MPP)"

ahnick — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:36:32 +0000

The best Visa/Mastercard of crypto already exists and is called Flexa. (https://flexa.co/payments#pricing)

New comment by ahnick in "Life as an OnlyFans 'chatter'"

ahnick — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 19:55:31 +0000

> laws are only as good as we have systems in place that are willing and ABLE to enforce them.

The 'able' part is the critical insight. Laws are too often passed that really have no ability to be enforced, but end up adding bureaucratic processes that law abiding companies have to follow. This also implies that governments need to actively clean up existing laws, which almost never happens unless there is enough support to pass a new law to actively supplant the old one.

New comment by ahnick in "Show HN: Channel Surfer – Watch YouTube like it’s cable TV"

ahnick — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 22:24:36 +0000

Classic incentive misalignment for us plebs. The platforms want(need?) their advertising revenue.

New comment by ahnick in "A decade of Docker containers"

ahnick — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:44:01 +0000

Okay, so what's the best solution? What's even just a better solution than Docker? I mean really truly lay out all the details here or link to a blog post that describes in excruciating detail how they shipped a web application and maintained it for years and was less work than Docker containers. Just saying "a far far simpler solution is to just link statically or ship dependencies adjacent to the binary" is ignoring huge swaths of the SDLC. Anyone can cast stones, very few can actually implement a better solution. Bring the receipts.

New comment by ahnick in "The only moat left is money?"

ahnick — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:04:23 +0000

Wrongheaded strategies that net you bad results, often result in lessons and ideas that can be further pursued on their own merits.

New comment by ahnick in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

ahnick — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:51:37 +0000

Yet here you are.

New comment by ahnick in "The risk of a hothouse Earth trajectory"

ahnick — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:49:51 +0000

We know there is a real problem, awareness is not the issue. (I've been aware of it since the mid 90's) It is ignored by large industries and governments. The incessant pounding of the useless drum of individual action continues to go absolutely nowhere. We need government and industry to take action not individuals. I will no longer placate this idea that individual action is at all useful.

New comment by ahnick in "Nobody knows how the whole system works"

ahnick — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 08:33:00 +0000

Yes, exactly my point as well. It cuts both ways.

New comment by ahnick in "Nobody knows how the whole system works"

ahnick — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 08:31:54 +0000

That is short hand. The problem exists of course, but it is improbable that it will actually occur in our lifetimes. An asteroid could slam into the earth or a gamma ray burst could sanitize the planet of all life. We could also experience nuclear war. These are problems that exist, yet we all just blissfully go on about our lives, b/c there is basically nothing that can be done to stop these things if they do happen and they likely won't. Basically we should only worry about these problems in so much as we as a species are able to actually do something about them.

New comment by ahnick in "Nobody knows how the whole system works"

ahnick — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:40:48 +0000

This happens even today. If a knowledgeable person leaves a company and no KT (or more likely, poor KT) takes place, then there will be no one left to understand how certain systems work. This means the company will have to have a new developer go in and study the code and then deduce how it works. In our new LLM world, the developer could even have an LLM construct an overview for him/her to come up to speed more quickly.

New comment by ahnick in "Nobody knows how the whole system works"

ahnick — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 07:36:13 +0000

Most people have no idea how to hunt, make a fire, or grow food. If all grocery stores and restaurants run out of food for a long enough time people will starve. This isn't a problem in practice though, because there are so many grocery stores and restaurants and supply chains source from multiple areas that the redundant and decentralized nature makes it not a problem. Thus it is the same with making your own food. Eventually if you have enough robots or food replicators around knowing how to make food becomes irrelevant, because you always will be able to find one even if yours is broken. (Note: we are not there yet)

New comment by ahnick in "Lessons learned shipping 500 units of my first hardware product"

ahnick — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 02:07:13 +0000

Exactly. How many times have we seen politics adapt to the new realities of the day? Everything is really downstream of technology.

A few examples:

- The Printing Press

- The Steam Engine

- Factories

- The Internal Combustion Engine

- The Internet

- "Smart" Phones

- Social Networks

- Bitcoin (the orange site loves this one)

New comment by ahnick in "De-dollarization: Is the US dollar losing its dominance? (2025)"

ahnick — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 17:47:58 +0000

Literally cryptocurrencies are the single greatest alternative ever made. Opt out of the system where the government can just print money into thin air and old guys drawing dots on a plot set interest rates in closed meetings. If you want to hedge USD exposure just buy a Bitcoin ETF or if you really can't stomach cryptocurrencies b/c you don't want to be ostracized from the orange site, buy Gold. We are not going back to the way the world was and if you have all your money in USD realize you are on a leaking boat.

It is entirely possible to manage funds in crypto for growth and move some amount into more liquid USD denominated assets or MMFs when you need liquidity.

New comment by ahnick in "I Built a 1 Petabyte Server from Scratch [video]"

ahnick — Fri, 16 Jan 2026 09:37:55 +0000

Chia farming.

New comment by ahnick in "Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites"

ahnick — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 19:43:34 +0000

There were laws requiring disclosure before GDPR and there were already tools to disable or prevent trackers built into browsers or adding on with plugins. (organic market developments) You also had alternatives to services that used the lack of tracking as a reason to choose a particular service offering over another. GDPR ended up just making these disclosures more in your face. Text like "It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent" is so vague as to be useless, which is why there are so many disagreeing opinions are whether companies with their current implementations are complying or not. GDPR is a bad law and in general the EU hasn't learned it doesn't get to enforce its laws in countries outside of its jurisdiction.

New comment by ahnick in "Internet's biggest annoyance: Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites"

ahnick — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 19:30:53 +0000

> Yes, that is precisely the problem with GDPR, too. Enforcement is supposed to be carried out by national Data Protection Authorities but they just don't investigate. I've reported some clear cut violations and they never followed up on anything.

No, it's not the problem with GDPR. As explained earlier it has to do with jurisdictional overreach.

> It doesn't matter. It's irrelevant to the general enforcement issue. Most DPAs seem to be failing to enforce even the simplest of cases. Let's chat about the edge cases and jurisdiction when the clear cut cases are being taken care of reliably.

Edge cases and jurisdiction are at the heart of this issue and exactly why it is a bad law. This is exactly the baggage that bad laws create!