Hacker News: ahnick

New comment by ahnick in "Andreessen Horowitz is investing billions into a bleak future"

ahnick — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 16:22:20 +0000

You do understand the genesis of Firefox and Javascript, yes?

New comment by ahnick in "People are worried about America's solvency"

ahnick — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 01:15:41 +0000

Incorrect. It's always been a problem. Go back and look what has happened to the purchasing power of the dollar throughout the 1900s. If the dollar is losing purchasing power you can hedge that loss by buying Gold, commodities or cryptocurrencies. (Basically anything scarce) Also, there are no loans being taken out against the future wealth generation in crypto. That is entirely a fiat phenomenon. Call your Senator.

New comment by ahnick in "People are worried about America's solvency"

ahnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 15:15:32 +0000

This is what cryptocurrencies do, but remove the need for an intermediary and codify the rules in software, so it is much harder (near impossible?) for politicians to manipulate the money supply.

New comment by ahnick in "People are worried about America's solvency"

ahnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 14:53:29 +0000

cryptocurrencies solved the double-spend problem for digital currencies. There is no ongoing search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-spending

New comment by ahnick in "People are worried about America's solvency"

ahnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:40:04 +0000

It will likely be a cryptocurrency or perhaps a basket of cryptocurrencies. You essentially want a way to store wealth directly on the Internet as it is the fastest and easiest way to reassign ownership of money or collateral. The nice benefit too, then is the U.S. (and no other country as well) is subject to the Triffin Dilemma.

New comment by ahnick in "People are worried about America's solvency"

ahnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:57:59 +0000

The US is not going to go bankrupt, but the purchasing power of the dollar will continue to go down and down and down.

New comment by ahnick in "People are worried about America's solvency"

ahnick — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 12:51:04 +0000

I'll tell you what is going to happen, b/c it is happening as we speak. The U.S. Government is soft-defaulting on the debt by devaluing the currency. (The debasement rate is somewhere in the 7%-8% range)

There will never be a real default, but it is likely that the USD will lose reserve currency status. The U.S. Government has $114+ Trillion in total debt. (Something like $325,000 per person in the US) We are never paying that off. The only way we can do anything about it is to grow the economy and devalue the debt via inflation.

New comment by ahnick in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

ahnick — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:58:51 +0000

This societal view that you are a powerless NPC slave to ones desires/addictions is highly toxic. It is not in fact binary for most people and people do have free will to make different choices. To absolve the individual of accountability is to undermine the very fabric of society. The way individuals typically overcome addiction is through reliance on close family & friends. Those family & friends can "take the phone away" or "uninstall the app" if there is really an issue. Laws are a blunt instrument and should be used sparingly.

New comment by ahnick in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

ahnick — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 13:48:35 +0000

Alternatively: As a society we don't think ALL minors have sufficient executive function to make those decisions, so we let parents who do make that decision.

New comment by ahnick in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

ahnick — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:20:51 +0000

The EU Council are some of the worst offenders when it comes to annoying cookie banners. All regulation and compliance do is make things more burdensome for new entrants, which inevitably allows big companies to build moats that don't have competition. The side effect of passing such legislation was easily foreseeable and yet the EU did it anyway. There are legitimate reasons for companies to track and if you felt that the tracking was malicious, then don't do business with the company. The regulation was never needed.

New comment by ahnick in "The infinite scroll may become endangered if controversial Calif. law passes"

ahnick — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 02:10:44 +0000

What's very obviously unnecessary is the need for a law to police this. You can just not use things you don't like. This need to project one's own morality upon others will be the source of endless conflict.

New comment by ahnick in "Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation falls to lowest in 50 years"

ahnick — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 21:36:42 +0000

Been remote since 2013 and can confirm Monday afternoon shopping is the alpha. ;-)

New comment by ahnick in "Wolfram Language and Mathematica Version 15, AI Assistant, Symbolic Music, More"

ahnick — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 02:11:10 +0000

what do you or others use instead?

New comment by ahnick in "Notes from the Mistral AI Now Summit in Paris"

ahnick — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:25:28 +0000

I thought distillation meant small models don't have to compete with the big models and can always eventually achieve close parity, but it's just a matter of time to do the distillation? (i.e. how much lag do you want to live with) Am I oversimplifying?

New comment by ahnick in "AI has a multiplying effect on existing technical skills"

ahnick — Fri, 22 May 2026 15:12:08 +0000

The reason why you will never get software engineers (in companies) to accept the man behind the curtain is liability. If a human software engineer is still responsible for what happens when the AI developed code has a catastrophic bug or security vulnerability, then the only way for the human to know if there is a problem is to be able to read through the code or run it through some that guarantees zero issues.

I think we eventually end up at the tool approach via vendors providing the tools to other companies, but it still feels like there's a long road ahead to get there.

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)