Hacker News: jcfrei

New comment by jcfrei in "Show HN: Argentic – An L402 Lightning toll booth for AI scraping agents"

jcfrei — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 14:54:46 +0000

this looks just like x402 by Coinbase which enables stablecoin payments. but instead of transacting in dollars it tries to revive the idea that btc can be used as an actual means for payment rather than just speculation.

New comment by jcfrei in "Degraded performance for multiple models"

jcfrei — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:25:20 +0000

Is anybody else experiencing this: I have multiple claude instances running on different servers - and some keep getting the 529 Overloaded error and one instance doesn't and just continues working. All are using Opus 5.

New comment by jcfrei in "Models Are Getting Dumber on Purpose"

jcfrei — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:46:35 +0000

search isnt that super hard to solve. the problem is that incentives are misaligned - which means companies who sell something have an incentive to share their index with the corporation that pays to be the default search provider. for a simple search engine that just delivers facts there's very little incentive to keep its index up-to-date: because that company wont get the apis to retrieve the content efficiently, so it needs more compute, bandwidth and storage to run.

New comment by jcfrei in "GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities"

jcfrei — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 10:06:22 +0000

A lot of the performance of these open source models might come from distilling the closed frontier models. If those can't raise the funds anymore to train newer and better models then the whole improvement cycle might slow down.

New comment by jcfrei in "Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe"

jcfrei — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 16:13:50 +0000

> Prior to Bretton Woods countries were well aware that no single country could be entrusted with the power granted in being the global reserve currency.

That's a misleading statement. First of all at the beginning of the 20th century the British pound was clearly the global currency - where a lot of the international commerce happened. Then towards the 1930s and later on the Dollar took over that role. But that role carried much less weight back then - globalization was still in its infancy and a "global reserve currency" as we understand it today simply didn't exist back then. Right now some Dutch pensioners money is invested in American, Canadian, Australian, German, etc. companies. And the parts for most consumer goods are coming from all over the world. Pre Bretton Woods basically none of this existed. This global financial system we speak of today is unprecedented and only exists since the late 70s - where most countries abandoned their currency controls (apart from the US and CH which never really had them).

New comment by jcfrei in "uBlock Origin is giving up the fight to keep ads off Facebook"

jcfrei — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 12:33:13 +0000

Once LLMs get fast enough at processing real-time images Apple (or anybody really) can just roll out a browser rendering engine that just masks all ads. It will take a few years but the browser ad-business is in it's terminal phase.

1Password Login Issues

jcfrei — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:37:01 +0000

Article URL: https://www.1password.community/1password-at-home-31/1password-for-safari-does-not-integrate-with-main-app-25259

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49269401

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by jcfrei in "Nvidia's Risky Business"

jcfrei — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 14:50:49 +0000

In many investment theses - like Nvidia's bet that demand for compute will keep growing - the first order assumption is usually correct. Yes, demand for more compute, chips, infrastructure is huge and each year some additional data centers will be built. Where such investment bets usually fail is in the second-order assumptions: Ie. the expectation of the growth of demand. This is where there's a high chance that the current expectations are likely exaggerated. So: demand is likely to persist for the foreseeable future but not increase every year. And that can upend the whole investment story. That can be enough to make these bonds a huge burden for Nvidia in the end. Not because people stopped buying more compute but because they stopped buying more every year.

New comment by jcfrei in "Learning more about Claude's mathematical capabilities"

jcfrei — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 10:07:41 +0000

That's how quickly your perception shifts when you are inside of a real, fundamental technological shift. If some similar computer program figured out the same improved bound just 6 years ago there would have been numerous blog posts, experts interviews and NYTimes, WaPo op-eds about some computer working on the Riemann hypothesis. Now that we are in the middle of it it's going to be a footnote at best.

New comment by jcfrei in "Changes at Google DeepMind: Demis Hassabis from CEO to Chair, Jeff Dean departs"

jcfrei — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:02:20 +0000

I think their move makes a lot of sense. Frontier models can probably not advance much further with the datasets we have currently available. Most of the text that goes in is online chatter, images and some scientific texts. That's great for chatbots, knowledge retrieval and programming. But with that database genuine discovery is hard to do. I think for the next step in intelligence the models need to have access to much more data: Data from physics, chemistry, biology experiments - and so on. And they need the data in much higher fidelity than you can currently access. If we just feed AI with all the knowledge we've acquired it's much harder for it to become smarter than us - it basically needs it's own eyes, ears, nose and so on.

New comment by jcfrei in "Third Drone Shot Down in Three Days in Romanian Territory"

jcfrei — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 18:23:35 +0000

People keep bringing WW3 up but I disagree. There's such a huge aversion in EU countries against any kind of war against Russia and the governments know it. They will let a LOT slide on Russia's side before any kind of retaliation (and I mean by force) is coming. Russia could probably kill several service members with a drone, claim it was an accident and the only thing coming from Europe would be a stern letter, some more sanctions and telling off the ambassador (and the Kremlin knows this too).

New comment by jcfrei in "Patreon laying off 20% of staff"

jcfrei — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:38:25 +0000

Upvoting this so more people see how cringey it's written.

Can This New Enzyme Turn Back the Clock in the Human Body?

jcfrei — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 13:27:35 +0000

Article URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/24/science/enzymes-aging-cmlase.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49035233

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

New comment by jcfrei in "AI Companies Are Trying to Hide a Staggering Amount of Debt"

jcfrei — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 11:37:38 +0000

That's an overgeneralization and haircuts for debtors are common - even when a positive equity value remains.

New comment by jcfrei in "OpenNode – Bitcoin Payment Processor"

jcfrei — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 15:58:23 +0000

lightning is a pain to set up, you have to open a channel and keep funding it - so if we are talking about small amounts these costs should definitely be added to your calculation. or you use lightning via an exchange - but that again kinda defeats the purpose of bitcoin. in fact all of this could probably be achieved much simpler by just using a stablecoin on tron, solana or one of the ether chains and forget about the whole lightning sending and bitcoin hedging. I doubt you can get lower transaction costs end-to-end staying on btc.

New comment by jcfrei in "Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence"

jcfrei — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 11:59:51 +0000

very unlikely that they are holding models back. models are very quickly depreciating in value and have internal cutoff dates. that would really not make sense from a business perspective. and doing an entire training run without commercializing it also seems like a huge waste.

New comment by jcfrei in "Germany maybe found a new source of renewable energy"

jcfrei — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:07:20 +0000

Some good answers below already. I think the anti nuclear movement already started before Chernobyl. I believe it was one of the founding ideologies of the green parties (the danger of high CO2 emissions was not yet front of mind for a lot of people back then). So the opposition to nuclear energy kind of laid the foundation for the modern (European) green parties. But these were all young people back then (in the 70s) and a they have now become the dominant generation in politics. So just like in any other country the 50+ years old are in charge and that cohort in Germany happens to have fond memories of opposing nuclear energy.

And just a little side note because I've looked it up recently: EU produces about the same amount of nuclear energy as the US - and that's despite Germany shutting down all reactors. So it's not like the US or any other region has a much higher usage.

New comment by jcfrei in "OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says"

jcfrei — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 10:04:39 +0000

If you find a more informed and up-to-date source than a market where people wagered close to $1M on I'm all ears.

New comment by jcfrei in "OpenAI's Ad Business Is on Pace to Miss Its Own Forecast by 90%, Analyst Says"

jcfrei — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 08:17:24 +0000

There's a very low chance of OpenAI doing an IPO this year: https://polymarket.com/event/openai-ipo-by. So the assumption that they "have to do an IPO" already seems questionable. The rest of the analysis also feels pretty hand-wavy. I'm not saying OpenAI is in a strong financial position, but this article doesn't make a solid enough case for why it's supposedly in such dire straits.

New comment by jcfrei in "'There Is No Going Back': The Inside Story of Europe's Rupture with America"

jcfrei — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:17:13 +0000

No to both in my opinion. The EU market is in reality still heavily fractured - especially in the services sector. A Hungarian construction company for example can't just easily build a bridge for a town in Italy. With Europe steadily getting older effective reforms become near impossible - especially those that would lead to large changes for workers. So Europe will forever stay in this semi broken / semi integrated state - and much higher trade barriers towards China and the US seem much more likely to me than a more competitive Europe.