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alephnerd

14,871 karma · joined January 8, 2019

Recovering Policy Wonk. Former SWE, SE, PM. Now VC.
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alephnerd··on Rural Village in Spain Is Welcoming Digital Nomads with Open Arms
> One thing that stood out to me was how many of them were not really doing that well financially. The stereotype is someone with a $100K per year job living like a king in a place where the median wages are 1/10th of that

The thing is, having a Western passport and earning $10k-20k a year (untaxed) in countries where the median household incomes (ie. 2 working adults) are at best comparable to that is living like a king comparatively speaking.

There's a reason western expats are looked down on derisively by locals across ASEAN and the only ASEAN state with a semi-functional democracy (Malaysia) is also one of the least budget tourist friendly - the middle class and above look at tay ba lo with disgust as losers, and the lower class only look up to them for the opportunity to get a more powerful visa. The high rate of "passport bros" also doesn't help.

It's like that scene from Futurama when they all accidently age backwards: "Oh, so this is the famous Fry. What is he, like, the biggest loser on the surface, so he has to hang out in the sewer?

Fry: They're on to me!"

The reality is, most kinds of tourism only lead to the development of extractive economic institutions at the expense of human capital development and higher value economic sectors that would benefit from that.

And in the case of this specific village and town in Andalusia, this will only exacerbate anti-tourism politics which has helped both Vox and Podemos because rural Andalusia is absolutely not equipped to support a sudden influx of transitory high income outsiders.

alephnerd··on Erik Brynjolfsson says an AI "job apocalypse" is unlikely
As I've mentioned ad nauseum on HN for years yet no one listened - much of the time we as corporates in the tech industry used "AI" as an excuse for layoffs was for the same reason we used "COVID" as an explanation for layoffs before GPT4 was GAed.

The reality is, hiring severely overshot in 2021-22 with a degradation in quality. And 2-3 years of remote first showed that you can offshore with little-to-no operational impact.

Dario's messaging made sense as the underdog - which Anthropic was until a year ago. Their moat used to be FedRAMP until Emil Michael called their bluff.

alephnerd··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
A couple of my buddies and I tried that in HS - it didn't go well. Halliday Resnick and Mir publishers was the way to go for USAPhO.
alephnerd··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
Depends on your teachers and your school. I've been lucky to have really good teachers despite attending public schools from K-12 (except Spanish - my Spanish teachers sucked. Turns out being fluent Spanish first speakers doesn't make someone a good teacher).
alephnerd··on I like 'em thick: an apology to my English teachers
I feel like it depends on how the classics are introduced.

Being forced to read classics in their original form, while illuminating is unneccesary at the K-12 level where classics, humanities, and arts are meant to spark curiosity and an openness to synthesis.

Using abridged adaptations (eg. Illustrated abridged classics, wishbone) aren't a bad way to impart much of the ethos of those works.

alephnerd··on Could Four Billion People Die at 3°C?
> Aren't we looking at more like ~2036 for 2C

Probably. I'm seeing 2C being baked into capex planning for infra projects that are expected to finish by 2036-2040.

alephnerd··on Could Four Billion People Die at 3°C?
We need better models.

The reality is we are on track to break 2C by 2050, and there is nothing that can be done about it. 3C is a real risk later in the century.

Tens to hundreds of millions will be impacted so a realistic range needs to be calculated such that risk mitigation can begin.

alephnerd··on India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions
> Want to buy some cigarettes while you take a stroll in the evening

Why would you go buy a beedi from the local paan-wala?

> Want a tuktuk to take you a mile across the beautifully walkable road infrastructure

Why would you call an auto or e-rickshaw when you could call and pay for via Uber (which also does autorickshaw pairing)

> 90% of life doesn't exist inside the corpo "work hotel sleep" bubble

OP was talking about "business travel".

> You'd be surprised at how many hotels completely forget that not all customers are Indian+Aadhaar+UPI

They aren't forgetting. They just don't care about a foreign traveler. It's the same when I travelled to China outside of the foreigner bubble on multiple occasions

----

At the end of the day, foreigner who can afford India1 but is consuming like India3 is a waste. Doesn't matter if it's a backpacker or a kanjusi NRI.

alephnerd··on India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions
> Not being able to pay for things is a pretty fundamental problem even for a business traveler to Bangalore

In what situation were you as a foreign traveler where you needed to pay UPI?

Convenience stores and hypermarts like Reliance SMART/Digital and DMart or QuickCommerce platforms like Blinkit accept Visa and AmEx credit cards. Transit via Uber, Ola, and co accept Visa and AmEx credit cards. And most restaurants and bars targeted at outsiders accept Visa and AmEx credit cards. And Hotels accept Visa and AmEx credit cards or can be booked via platforms that accept them like AirBnB.

So transit, residence, restaurants, and convenience stores (all of which will be reimbursed by your employer) are all doable via credit card.

Fundamentally, UPI was built for India3, as were other peers across Asia, not foreigners.

But my SO and I never understood the tay ba lo mindset. Catering to them is what kept Thailand and the Dominican Republic stuck in tourism-induced Dutch disease because it incentivizes extractive and low productivity economic sectors like real estate and low skill services at the expense of human capital development and investing in high productivity industries.

alephnerd··on The oldest bar in every state
Knickerbocker Saloon (and Lafayette and Purdue, or as my sibling calls it - Purdon't) slaps.

Midwestern college towns are great.

alephnerd··on India has paved the way for charging merchants a fee on UPI transactions
> it's been an absolute nightmare for a tourist to play along. The only route for a tourist to use UPI is via third party apps

An NRI account with PhonePe is good enough as someone with OCI, but even in my ancestral town and village Visa and AmEx adoption by payment processors has been high despite no real diaspora or tourism.

And there's no real point in optimizing for the kind of tourist who's going to go visit a slum like Paharganj or go to Kasol to partake in drugs.

That said, I guess it also depends on where an NRI or PIO is from as some states have better payment processor penetration than others.

But tbf, when my SO and I go to VN to visit family, it's the same story there (Momo/Zalo and cash rule Vietnam outside the tourist bubble of D1/D3/Thao Dien/Da Lat/Da Nang/Hanoi and we resort to her Vietcombank account).

alephnerd··on A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
> I also feel it's topic-based. On general systems engineering, think databases, OS, architecture, webtech, the SNR on this site is generally amazing. But these days those articles are fewer than before. For example, 2 years back when every other article was about sqlite and postgres, while it was a very unidimensional few months, you could learn a lot from here

I agree. The thing is, a lot of us moved to Lobsters [0] because of the higher SNR. That is probably the closest to what would be heard amongst engineers in the Bay.

[0] - https://lobste.rs/

alephnerd··on Mexico crackdown on coastal development
> And majority of Asia is simply 'WILL'

Nope. It's also "should/oughta" as well - even in developed Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan where bribery in development tenders is treated as the cost of doing business.

GAN Integrity [0] and the Yeun Yuen Ang's unbundled corruption matrix [1] is the best way to think about corruption and compliance risk.

To quote the 2016 remake of The Tick:

"Goat: I'm going to speed-dial the police.

Arthur: You pay organized crime weekly to protect your store and you say nothing.

Goat: At least the organized crime is organized."

LatAm isn't that different from much of Asia or Eastern Europe (or much of Southern Europe 15-20 years ago) - the only difference is the bulk of FDI that would have gone to LatAm shifted to Asia in the 1990s-2000s because of stronger linkages thanks to Japanese and Taiwanese financial partners. And European FDI in LatAm shifted to the CEE, Balkans, and Turkiye thanks to the EU expansion and the Eurozone crisis overimpacting LatAm oriented countries like Portugal, Spain, Italy, and France.

One of my acquaintances at the HKS who's the goto researcher on anti-corruption (eg. Worked directly with national governments in Asia, the UNODC, and the OECD on corruption and compliance standards) has themselves argued that LatAm (especially Brazil) got overly penalized following Lava Jato due to the lack of intermediaries. For example, American FDI into Asia is usually done in conjunction with Singaporean, Japanese, Korean, and Taiwanese partners who take the legal and operational burden which acts as a liability firewall but American and European FDI into LatAm is direct, which increases liability and compliance risk.

[0] - https://www.ganintegrity.com/country-profiles/

[1] - https://oecd-development-matters.org/2020/06/25/unbundling-c...

alephnerd··on Is Europe safer than America?
This roughly tracks. There are different categories of crime which aren't directly linked with each other, and different cities in the US have entirely different policing methods. And it's the same story in Europe.

Making broad generalizations of either America or Europe is dumb. You can't compare a continent sized country with countries within a continent.

alephnerd··on Is Europe safer than America?
Not for me.
alephnerd··on A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
This is a good example of someone who is out of the loop.

Luma was always a public events app optimized for discovery. Partiful on the other hand was meant to be a a replacement for FB private events when hosting a house party or private gathering. Basically, Luma was always designed for M-F and Partiful was always meant for Sat/Sun.

alephnerd··on A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
> How would you say the "IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene" diverge from HN

For starters, most Bay Area residents are not active on HN on a sunny Sunday afternoon during peak brunch time, a Giants v Rockies game, a social race in the Marina, during the weekend right before college move-in begins for a number of UCs, and the first weekend after the K-12 school year started.

Secondly, the technical conversations on this HN are somewhat divorced from those which are common now. Firstly, no one cares about system cards or micro-level model changes and performance anymore - the name of the game now is eval, harness development, RL/reward engineering, and model-agnostic development.

Thirdly, the vibe change around layoffs the job market is completely different. While there have been plenty of layoffs (and friends and acquaintances of mine have been impacted), most have been able to land jobs within weeks with a similar base/bonus/equity structure.

Furthermore, the Ivy-versus-nonIvy division and rhetoric is nonexistent in the Bay. Everyone here knows a UCLA grad has the exact same opportunties right out of college as a Stanford grad. Most high value careers like startups, PE/VC, big tech, etc recruit from a mix of 20-30 public and private schools that I have listed multiple times on here. And to add to that - "MBAs" as a moniker is nonexistent as most of us who are in decisonmaking roles here in VC, Corporate leadership, and mid-level management are engineers who never did MBAs or any kind of grad school (except our Chinese/Indian peers because of the F1 OPT).

Additonally, most people are levelheaded about AI - they don't deride it as useless but they also don't think it's going to destroy all jobs. On HN you get very black-and-white and highly polarized thinking that AI is only going to lead to X or Y.

And finally, I notice a degree of European anti-Americanism and American anti-Europeanism that is nonexistent in the real world. I have co-hosted events with EU consulates, helped direct European startups to get American funding, and vice versa, and had pretty personal and unfiltered conversations over drinks with pretty high level Europeans and Americans, and the kind of acrimony you see on here is nonexistent IRL.

Not a single mention of pickleball, hyrox, Kdramas, Yemeni coffee, women's basketball, and other stuff currently in the zeitgeist in the Bay is very telling.

alephnerd··on A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
> I honestly do not get this at all. HN remains very US-centric to me, and apart from some takes on tech rights, does not really remind me of my experience in DACH.

The majority of HN's usership, posting, and comment activity occurs during peak EU work hours (3am-9am), stylistic patterns that are common for German-, French, and Polish-native speakers are increasingly prominent (eg. periods and spaces instead of commas in numbers, spacing between quotation marks and words, failing to use context clues to infer timezone), and the fact that IRL conversation topics in the Bay Area tech scene are entirely different from those on HN shows a massive divergence in userbase.

HN "Who wants to get hired" threads are a good example of that as well.

I'd recommend deep diving in the HN scrape dataset on HuggingFace [0]. The site has diverged heavily compared to 2018 or 2012.

[0] - https://huggingface.co/datasets/open-index/hacker-news

alephnerd··on A third world engineer responds to “RISC-V: They should have known better”
> it's a breath of fresh air compared to the usual bay area centric takes...

HN hasn't been Bay Area centric in years. Honestly, most comments and usership on the platform seems to now align with SWE culture in DACH and CEE.

Presumed RISC-V hate is a perfect example of that - the UCs and CSUs have been using RISC-V in their curriculum since the 2010s becuase Patterson is faculty at Cal and most CompArch courses in both systems have been using RISC-V as a result because 61a/b/c are often used as the benchmark curricula wise. An entire generation of Californian computer engineers have been RISC-V fluent as a result.

The hivemind assumption that HN's user base is "venture capital", "tech bro", "founders", and "Silicon Valley" is around 5 years out of date.

Anecdotally, the vast majority of younger (below 30) founders, engineers, VCs, and builders in the Bay have either not heard of HN or quit it within weeks due to toxicity.

alephnerd··on A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
It's not something that's in the US's hands now.

Much of the bleeding edge research around mirror life is occuring at Westlake University in Hangzhou.

alephnerd··on A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
The danger is that (to quote Jurassic Park) "life always finds a way", and the risks are massive.

A good example of the risks of mirror chirality is thalidomide - thalidomide has two enantiomers (one that provides sedative and anti-nausea effects and another that causes the infamous thalidomide birth defects) which the human body naturally flip-flops when administered.

The risk to reward ratio is negatively misaligned (edited) when factoring the catastrophic risks and how easy it would be to weaponize (either on purpose or inadvertently).

alephnerd··on Why tech bosses keep sharing their manifestos about AI
What incorrect reporting did you find with Reuters? The beats I have personal knowledge about have been correct.
alephnerd··on Why tech bosses keep sharing their manifestos about AI
No prob. Luckily BBC's digital platform is garbage so ad blockers or browsers like Firefox and Brave are fairly successful at blocking them so the only visible aspect is sponsored content and listicles (which all use the same BBC UI outside the UK).
alephnerd··on Why tech bosses keep sharing their manifestos about AI
> Was the BBC always this bad

No.

The BBC severely degraded over the past decade after multiple budget cuts forced it to take the clickbait approach especially for non-British reporting because BBC's ad-free mandate is only for UK residents and reporting.

Also, an news org is only as good as it's reporters, and those reporters with the right Rolodex are no longer associated with the BBC, CNN, CBS, and other traditional heavyweights.

If you're in SF you'll often bump into the tech correspondents of most news organizations at parties, on dates, while bar-hopping Marina, or during hobbies, and you don't see the CNN, BBC, or Fox tech news correspondent invited to the right events nor cultivating the right sources. Oftentimes they tend to be much younger (late 20s to 30s) taking a cushy break after being stressed out working as a DC or Bruxelles or Whitehall correspondent or straight out of college who will eventually become a lower-to-mid rung Strategic Comms employee at a random company writing PRs and managing a small team of video-editors.

> Who reads this crap and actually believes it? Is the brainrot really this bad? They set up all these lame thought traps to make people argue about the wrong things, and they actually fucking worked?

You did and made an impression. That's how clickbait works.

If you want more actionable reporting, you need to read reporting done either by News Agencies (eg. Reuters, AP, AFP) as they are written opinion-free such that other news broadcasters can purchase articles and edit them as needed or read news directly tied to decisonmaking (eg. Bloomberg due to the Bloomberg terminal, Politico and it's history as the goto broadsheet on the hill, Axios and financial and political decisionmakers, etc).

alephnerd··on OpenAI talent exodus raises 'huge red flag' ahead of IPO
Also, if you have the option to hire Dali Radjic (Wiz, Zscaler, AppDynamics) for a CRO position you take it.

Denise and Fidji's backgrounds are in productivity SaaS (Slack) and B2C+B2B2C (Instacart) respectively, which require a different GTM and sales motion from an infra play which is what foundation model vendors have become.

Same with Brad Lightcap, who doesn't have experience managing an org at OpenAI's scale and size, as before OpenAI he was part of YC's investing team and did standard CorpFinance and IB work.

What OpenAI is signaling is that they are making a hard shift away from productivity tooling and B2C towards concentrating on being an Platform, Infra, and Enterprise SaaS play - which honestly is the right move because foundation models have become the new hyperscalers and datalakes.

alephnerd··on China's renewable boom masks a quiet Coal-to-Liquids expansion
> Intellectual property in making green steel is not the big competitive advantage of European steelmakers

It is for ThyssenKrupp (Germany), LKAB (Sweden), HYBRIT (Sweden), and Voestalpine (Austria). Chinese, India, Vietnamese, Saudi, and other steelmakers cannot export their steel and steel products competitively to Europe and their European operations were about to get hit by CBAM related violations (until the EU backed down on carbon emissions regulations a couple weeks ago), which made the EU-27 a captive market for those 4.

> steelmakers in Europe are concentrating on low carbon emissions

Only German, Swedish, and Austrian steelmakers can. Dutch, French, Luxembourgish, and Italian steelmakers (who are all now owned by Asian steelmakers) cannot.

---

And this is why nothing will happen with regards to climate change - sovereign corporate interests will always trump global interests.

alephnerd··on China's renewable boom masks a quiet Coal-to-Liquids expansion
> If Asia and US are not willing to decrease their CO2 emissions, Europe should also decrease it's efforts in CO2 emission reductions...

Already happening [0].

India (Tata, AccelorMittal, JSW Group) also lobbied for this with Netherlands (Tata), Luxembourg (AccelorMittal), France (AccelorMittal), Italy (JSW Steel Piombino), and Czechia (TŽ) as their steel manufacturers don't have access to green steel IP and German and Swedish manufacturers are uninterested in losing their competitive advantage - especially after the JSW Group (India) and ThyssenKrupp Steel deal collapsed because Germany wouldn't allow layoffs [3].

> I'm in favor of world wide CO2 emission tax

But Asia, the Middle East, LatAm, and Africa isn't because they want to industrialize as much as they can over the next 10-15 years.

> Coupling PV to electrolyzers and efficient hydrogen production using solar energy is still open research problem

India has already started doing this (hence the Solar PV overproduction [1] and preferential financing for electrolyzers [2]) but most electrolyzer manufacturing projects won't be completed until 2030.

And other countries will then inevitably put tariffs on India for this expansion, just like how India has tariffed Chinese expansion and China has tariffed Indian expansion.

Like I mentioned, every country knows that there is a 10-15 year window left to expand where possible, and every national and subnational climate plan or infra project now assumes 2C-2.4C by 2050 as a given.

> I found only that in 2026 grey ammonia costs about 250–400 USD/tonne (key cost drivers: Natural gas price), green ammonia (India solar) 600–900 USD/tonne (key cost drivers: electrolyser CAPEX, renewable electricity).

Here's a good overview of India's current grey and green ammonia market by India's primary GreenTech and CleanTech advisory firm [4].

[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/c3c33e7b-8faf-4f06-b281-112117aee...

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-17/india-s-s...

[2] - https://www.spglobal.com/energy/en/news-research/latest-news...

[3] - https://www.reuters.com/business/thyssenkrupp-jindal-agree-p...

[4] - https://jmkresearch.com/green-ammonia-is-only-10-costlier-th...

alephnerd··on China's renewable boom masks a quiet Coal-to-Liquids expansion
> The difference between China and India,Indonesia,Australia,Vietnam,Brazil,South Africa is the scale of Coal-to-Liquids expansion

China began their buildout in 2008-09 following the oil shock due to the Iraq Civil War. India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and others are now starting the same kind of buildout at a similar scale over the next decade.

> Ammonia based fertilizers don't have carbon dependency, they have hydrogen dependency. Steel can be manufactured from iron oxide by reducing with carbon or hydrogen

Grey Ammonia remains 2x as expensive as Green Ammonia. This is changing (eg. as I mentioned elsewhere, India the price difference is only 10% now), but at global scale green hydrogen buildouts that will make it significantly cost competitive won't be finished until 2035 to 2040 depending on the country.

The IP for Green Steel (ie. Low carbon steel) as scale is tightly held by 3-4 Western European steelmakers, and India and the ASEAN countries I listed are all dramatically expand their steel production capacity.

And those European steelmakers and their customers like Volkswagen, Saab, and Volvo are uninterested in transferring their IP as it would destroy their CBAM advantage within the European market and Asia is not interested in using European steel as it would make infrastructure buildouts unneccesarily expensive.

This is why China [0][1], India [1], Saudi Arabia [1], and ASEAN states like Vietnam [2] are all treating CBAM as a discriminatory tariff and pushing back.

> Regarding "fatalistic or doomerism", in Europe we hear from many politicians, that we need to invest more in renewables and phase out coal, oil and gas. When asked for reason why we need to do this investment, the usual answer is "to save the climate". So on hand we have Europe decreasing it's CO2 emissions and mostly Asia increasing it's CO2 emissions, so that Europe's decreases are canceled out.

Yep. And frankly, the EU-27 is not in a position to pressure Asia. Much of the steel, grey ammonia, and other industrial products being manufactured with heavy carbon intensity is not intended for export to the EU-27 or the products manufactured using them are easily financed by the EU's carbon credit scheme or domestic export tax credits made to alleviate the CBAM tariff.

We modeled this standoff back in the late 2000s and early 2010s and it's happening exactly to the dot.

[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-01/china-cal...

[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/5675563c-b1d5-47b5-858b-69653248e...

[2] - https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/03/06/vietnams-carbon-market-...

alephnerd··on China's renewable boom masks a quiet Coal-to-Liquids expansion
The IP is tightly held by a handful of European steelmakers who aren't interested in transferring it abroad as it would remove their CBAM advantage against Asian exporters and completely destroy them and Germany (ThyssenKrupp), Sweden (LKAB, HYBRIT), and Austria (Voestalpine) would lose their temporary competitive advantage.

And all the Asian countries I listed (excluding Australia - who is Asia's Chile) are planning on dramatically expanding domestic steel production over the next decade to help with their infrastructure buildouts, so are primarily using domestic non-alloy steel and cement.

The Asian steelmakers will eventually figure and scale it out, but that will take an additional decade because they also won't transfer IP to their competitors. By that point it will be the late 2030s and in some cases the 2040s.

alephnerd··on Nine PBS sues Iron Mountain over blocked access to archival data
I have - this is my throwaway account, and my primary account has been alive since a little after YC moved from Boston.

I hate HN and how it has gotten worse and worse as the years go by. There are a couple basic changes that the mod team could do to help alleviate the degradation but they aren't doing it.

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