Hacker News: thinkingkong

New comment by thinkingkong in "Who will buy your services if you fire us all?"

thinkingkong — Mon, 18 May 2026 22:32:40 +0000

We already have abundance in some areas and very little of it results in a higher standard of living.

We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.

New comment by thinkingkong in "404 Deno CEO not found"

thinkingkong — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 17:02:03 +0000

It's easy to be critical in hindsight but honestly when Deno first came out it was pretty incredible. Even the whole idea about URL based imports makes lots of sense but it was incompatible with any of the existing toolchains that were wildly popular. At the same time, companies like Vercel launched a new kind of framework and leveraged that into a hosting business with I would say great success. They captured developers where they were at _today_, including acknowledging the demographics, the tools, the culture, etc.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Oracle may slash up to 30k jobs to fund AI data-centers as US banks retreat"

thinkingkong — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:14:47 +0000

This article is over a month old. Why is it being shared now? Its also posted on reddit where it has some lift.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Components will kill pages"

thinkingkong — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:24:44 +0000

Theres probably a middle ground where we allow an app to augment / enhance itself using deterministic behaviour but a user based soft request. If I as a user can ask for a feature, and have it work just for me, thats pretty cool.

Instead of progressive enhancement it can be progressive evolution.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Something Big Is Happening"

thinkingkong — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 12:40:17 +0000

Management is going to quickly start bisecting human engineers along lines of maximalists and minimalists. The minimalists will all be let go. A few bad things will happen. A few systems will strain under the pressure but itll be “worth it” in the same way that its cheaper to pay lawsuits than do a recall of a plane.

We arent innovating in other areas that might soften the blow. We dont have good support systems, social security, healthcare, or even demands in other areas. How many engineers are going to be plumbers and construction workers?

Cognitive Terminal Velocity

thinkingkong — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 15:52:15 +0000

Article URL: https://trevoro.net/posts/2026-01-02-software-cognitive-terminal-velocity

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46935353

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by thinkingkong in "Why I Joined OpenAI"

thinkingkong — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 02:12:52 +0000

Brendan can do whatever he wants. Hes that good. If anybody seriously needed to interview him 20+ times to figure it out, then the burden is now on them to not fuck it up.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Y Combinator will let founders receive funds in stablecoins"

thinkingkong — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 04:52:53 +0000

Feels like step 1 to providing liqudity further down the toad. Also opening investment to “unqualified” investors. It never made sense that you could buy crypto, buy multiple homes, but sinking 10k into a friends startup was somehow regulated.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Data centers in space makes no sense"

thinkingkong — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:22:55 +0000

You definitely _can_ the question is, can you do it by enough for a reasonable amount of money. There are a few techniques to this but at the end of the day you need to radiate away, the heat otherwise it will just keep growing. You cannot keep pumping energy into the satellite without distributing the same amount back out again.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Ask HN: Can systems function correctly without memory?"

thinkingkong — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 02:53:25 +0000

Well… if you look at pure functions without ant state then thats a whole class of computing you can refer to. The problem is that its not efficient to calculate state from arguments for everything. We end up saving to disk, writing packets over the network, etc. In a purely theoretical environment you could avoid state, but the real world imposes constraints that you need to operate within or between.

Additionally, depending how deep down you go, theres state stored somewhere to calculate against. Vues are stored in some kind of register and theyre passed into operations with a target register as an additional argument.

Agentic AI Foundation

thinkingkong — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 20:00:39 +0000

Article URL: https://block.xyz/inside/block-anthropic-and-openai-launch-the-agentic-ai-foundation

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46209846

Points: 129

# Comments: 28

New comment by thinkingkong in "Canada loses its measles-free status, with US on track to follow"

thinkingkong — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 16:19:49 +0000

The vaccination rates in some parts of Alberta are less than 30%. Per capita, Alberta has the highest incident rate. The rhetoric around vaccinations, social media, a perhaps complacency towards distant threats have all contributed to this situation.

The challenge is that solving this is easier but only if people are willing to get vaccinated.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant"

thinkingkong — Wed, 08 Oct 2025 06:28:23 +0000

Agree that its not the most effective. What would you suggest? What works better?

New comment by thinkingkong in "Canadian bill would strip internet access from 'specified persons', no warrant"

thinkingkong — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 20:50:33 +0000

The argument made here seems to be that the power to prevent unlawful access or threats is somehow required to keep us all safe. But if someone was an actual threat, do we really think they’d be using the internet with their own identity? Like if someone is willing to hack into a power station or some other critical infrastructure, they’ll be simultaneously stupid enough to use their own credit card?

Illegal things are already illegal. Safety and security mechanisms already exist. We dont need additional, punitive, and opaque laws that can be abused.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Starship's Tenth Flight Test"

thinkingkong — Sun, 24 Aug 2025 22:04:59 +0000

The shuttle itself was reusable but the two solid rocket boosters and the external fuel tank were all disposable components.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Fast (2019)"

thinkingkong — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 16:10:54 +0000

We’re good at moving fast when we do things for the first time or the externalities / consequences of speed are either underrepresented or hidden.

As soon as something is done a few times, the barrier of entry goes up. We get the ability to measure and evaluate consequences. We have regulations based on safety or environmental isues. We have additional groups of people with specific concerns that must be consulted. Other nations may participate and we coerce then into increasing or decreasing their involvement. Its a wild big dynamic system.

To me this doesnt mean we shouldnt be able to move quickly. Just that the innovation requires tools that can navigate between these other constraints - or - that we only innovate in areas that have never been done before and we do so at a blistering pace.

New comment by thinkingkong in "SSH Keys Don't Scale. SSH Certificates Do"

thinkingkong — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 14:28:51 +0000

If you need easy distributed key management, modern SSH makes this fairly straightforward with some config values. It supports executing a program to get the SSH key at login time, dynamically. This way you can still maintain local certificates for fallback, and you can plug into anything. For example in the past I wrote a simple golang based app that loaded all of the SSH pubkeys from my organizations github, for users in a specific team.

New comment by thinkingkong in "The F-35 as a Subscription Service"

thinkingkong — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 19:33:14 +0000

The part I thought was interesting was how Israel “secured rights to modify” their F35 deliveries. Like… what kind of airplane that costs 100s of millions requires additional contracts for “replace component” rights? How insane is this contract? Its so unreasonable to assume that the value of the fighter to the manifacturers is only in the maintenance. Its like the BMW heater subscription, only for national defence.

New comment by thinkingkong in "For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids"

thinkingkong — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 16:02:43 +0000

Youre also forgetting another component which is that the instrastructure gets torn down or stolen because it has market value. The replacement, maintenance, and security of wired grids is likely higher.

New comment by thinkingkong in "Brain Hyperconnectivity in Children with Autism and Its Links to Social Deficits (2013)"

thinkingkong — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 06:20:38 +0000

The fitness function that would govern that evolution would be new though. We’d be intentionally optimizing for brains that work that way with some new social or technical construct. Like if we said “autism is the new exposed ankles” and suddenly had many more babies who also demonstrated that trait. Or if we had access to technology that would select for that outcome, gattaca style.