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DoD spent $1.43 trillion in FY2026

Around ~1 million homeless in US

Let’s say it costs $10K/month/person so $120K/yr/person. Probably a big overestimate but gotta include healthcare and help people with long term stability.

That’s 120,000 x 1,000,000 = 120,000,000,000 or $120 billion USD.

Idk what the Nth order effects would be but yea I think what you’re saying tracks in the numbers

konaraddion Nasdaq's Shame

There’s a lot to address here but in short: VFIAX is an index fund, it tracks the S&P500 index, it’s not actively managed, SpaceX will likely be in the S&P500, so my comment around VT applies to VFIAX (as far as the question of exposure is concerned) but to a greater extent than VT (see VT’s composition vs VFIAX’s composition).

Obligatory not financial advice, I’m not an expert, don’t make any financial decisions based on hacker news comments, etc

konaraddion Nasdaq's Shame

I think it’d be a rinse and repeat of the line of thinking for VT but more exposure than VT.

From VIFAX fund’s description on vanguard:

> The fund offers exposure to 500 of the largest U.S. companies

konaraddion Nasdaq's Shame

QQQ rebalances on a schedule. Existing holders are affected because the fund’s underlying composition will change.

konaraddion Nasdaq's Shame

My understanding: It depends on what index the fund is tracking. QQQ tracks the Nasdaq-100 so QQQ is vulnerable. VT tracks the FTSE Global All Cap Index so VT is not directly affected by Nasdaq’s choices but is still exposed to some extent because spacex is likely going to be in the aforementioned FTSE index, Nasdaq’s actions impact spacex’s market cap, and thus Nasdaq’s actions impact spacex’s position in the aforementioned FTSE index which in turn affects VT’s composition (to a smaller extent than QQQ’s).

EDIT: to be clear the above are just examples with two funds (QQQ and VT)

konaraddion Ask HN: How is AI-assisted coding going for you professionally?

I work at aws and generally use Claude Opus 4.6 1M with Kiro (aws’s public competitor to Claude Code). My experience is positive. Kiro writes most of my code. My complaints:

1. Degraded quality over longer context window usage. I have to think about managing context and agents instead of focusing solely on the task.

2. It’s slow (when it’s “thinking”). Especially when it’s tasked with something simple (e.g., I could ask Claude Opus to commit code and submit for review but it’s just faster if I run the commands myself and I don’t want to have to think about conditionally switching to Haiku / faster models mid task execution).

3. It often requires a lot of upfront planning and feedback loop set up to the extent that sometimes I wonder if it would’ve been faster if I did it myself.

A smarter model would be great but there are bigger productivity gains to be had with a good set up, a faster model, and abstracting away the need to think about agents or context usage. I’m still figuring out a good set up. Something with the speed of Haiku with the reasoning of Opus without the overhead of having to think about the management of agents or context would be sweet.

konaraddion UBI as a productivity dividend

> We've effectively had that here with the ACA, where the government has decided that it will cover the first $800 or so dollars of your health insurance. What happened? Magically, the cost of health insurance increased by $800.

I don’t think that’s an accurate description of ACA [1], it didn’t lead to a dollar to dollar increase in premiums (share a citation if otherwise), and it’s a bit misleading to say it led to an increase in premiums because plans pre-ACA were effectively inaccessible to and lacking in benefits for impoverished people or people with pre-existing conditions.

[1] Here’s a brief description of ACA from Wikipedia:

> The act largely retained the existing structure of Medicare, Medicaid, and the employer market, but individual markets were radically overhauled.[1][11] Insurers were made to accept all applicants without charging based on pre-existing conditions or demographic status (except age). To combat the resultant adverse selection, the act mandated that individuals buy insurance (or pay a monetary penalty) and that insurers cover a list of "essential health benefits". Young people were allowed to stay on their parents' insurance plans until they were 26 years old.

konaraddion $3 ChromeOS Flex stick will revive old and outdated computers

I booted chromeos flex on a >12 year old laptop earlier this year and had a good experience with it. I wrote a bit about it here https://konaraddi.com/writing/2026-01-01-chromeos-flex/ (tl;dr tried to use fedora at first but no luck with WiFi out of the box then I used chromeos flex and it worked out of the box)

konaraddion Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 [video]

Speaking for myself : it's a bit creepy and unsettling. Using brain cells is probably inching closer to consciousness than today's silicon is, and consciousness isn't well understood so I'd fear this line of research could eventually lead to the "I have no mouth and I must scream" the other commenter referenced. Many decades from now we might be wondering how much of a human brain needs to be grown in a lab before it's considered unethical.

konaraddion Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (March 2026)

https://odap.knrdd.com/

A site for anti patterns in online discourse.

Example: https://odap.knrdd.com/patterns/strawman-disclaimer

Need to gather more patterns then create tooling around making it easier to use.

The goal is to raise the quality of comments/posts in forums where the intent is productive discussion or persuasion.

konaraddion Show HN: Respectify – A comment moderator that teaches people to argue better

I think that’s an awesome idea and I like that it proactively gets ahead of the problem instead of the retroactive approach like moderation today. I’m interested in a very similar goal; I’ve been working on a guide on anti patterns in internet discourses at https://odap.konaraddi.com in hopes of it being used to make discourse on the internet more productive and pleasant (the guide is a work in progress).

konaraddion Claude Code Remote Control

I think a significant distinction between your approach and Claude’s approach is that your approach requires allowing your machine to accept inbound connections but Claude’s approach does not. Claude probably went with the latter to avoid a whole class of security issues and mitigate risk of users having their machines compromised. I’m not familiar with what the new vectors of attack are with Claude’s approach though.

konaraddion Cell Service for the Fairly Paranoid

I hope this succeeds and isn’t backdoored

konaraddion How Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?

Imagine a Framework* laptop with these kinds of chips that could be swapped out as models get better over time

*Framework sells laptops and parts such that in theory users can own a ~~ship~~ laptop of Theseus over time without having to buy a whole new laptop when something breaks or needs upgrade.

konaraddion The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec)

> Taalas’ silicon Llama achieves 17K tokens/sec per user, nearly 10X faster than the current state of the art, while costing 20X less to build, and consuming 10X less power.

Insane gains, makes me excited for the future. Imagine Opus-like responses in <1 second.

I suspect power efficiency will be nearly entirely offset by increased usage but it’s more bang for watt.

konaraddion Palantir partnership is at heart of Anthropic, Pentagon rift

Good on Anthropic for having backbone and sticking to their values in face of political opposition and large sums of money at stake.

konaraddion Palantir vs. the "Republik": US analytics firm takes magazine to court

The reporting in question is a few articles on palantir here:

https://www.republik.ch/suche?q=Palantir

Unusually difficult to find the site, maybe because it’s a small Swiss magazine written in German and I’m in the US doing a search on google. Interestingly, Palantir has a website called Republic that beats Republik in SEO for “Republik”.

konaraddion How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?

Loosely related - Weezer’s lead singer writes code regularly https://github.com/riverscuomo

konaraddion Ex-GitHub CEO launches a new developer platform for AI agents

100% agree because there’s a lot of value in understanding how and why past code was written. It can be used to make better decisions faster around code to write in the future.

E.g., if you’ve ever wondered why code was written in a particular way X instead of Y then you’ll have the context to understand whether X is still relevant or if Y can be adopted.

E.g., easier to prompt AI to write the next commit when it knows all the context behind the current/previous commit’s development process.

konaraddion Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

https://odap.konaraddi.com

Started working on a site to document anti patterns in online discourse. Not quite logical fallacies but more so unproductive expressions that aren’t conducive to pleasant, productive, and focused discussion. The site is a bit rough right now and a work in progress.

I want the internet to be a better place for discourse and I think a reference or guide on anti patterns in replies could help make a dent in the right direction.

konaraddion Ask HN: What are you working on? (February 2026)

Cool idea, I think graphs (what you’re doing) are a better way of modeling arguments because it captures nuance often lost in 1 v 1 model of debate

konaraddion How Katie Herzog drank her way to sobriety

The title is misleading imo, the tldr is using the Sinclair method to retrain the brain to associate pleasure with other desired activities but the discussion is interesting nonetheless.

I think this falls within the more broad category of “elimination via substitution” techniques in breaking personal patterns.

konaraddion Show HN: An interactive guide to how browsers work

HPBN is really well written, chapter 4 helped me understand TLS enough to debug a high latency issue at a previous job. There was an issue where a particularly incomplete TLS frame received and no subsequent bits for it led to a server waiting 30 min for the rest of the bits to arrive. HPBN was a huge help. I haven’t finished reading it but I remember there’s part of it that goes over the trade offs of increasing vs decreasing TLS frame sizes which is a low level knob I now know exists because of HPBN. Not sure if I’ll ever use it but it’s fascinating.

konaraddion The unbearable joy of sitting alone in a café

Probably first extended time in a while. Everyone has a little box in their pocket that pumps out dopamine on demand, couple that with the hustle and bustle culture and I think it’s great the author is exercising more agency and presence over the inertial path. Kudos to them.

konaraddion Slop Is Slop

Oh that’s good to know, I’ll edit my comment

konaraddion Slop Is Slop

Isnt it an intentional choice? The show Pluribus has a not-so-subtle analogy to an LLM that has access to the world’s knowledge, doing its best to give whatever we ask it for, and not being the brightest tool in the shed. I think the artist accomplished what they wanted to in the context of the show.

EDIT: I stand corrected, the show’s analogy to AI is coincidental.

konaraddion Reddit Has Become the Internet's Strip Mall

There isn’t one “they”, each subreddit does its own moderation

konaraddion I'm a laptop weirdo and that's why I like my new Framework 13

I think the author is the target customer for Framework. A customer looking for a ship of Theseus laptop that the seller stands by.

I’ve looked at framework as a potential next laptop but it’s expensive, some of parts are expensive, and the other parts I’m not sure I’ve ever had issues with in past laptops. I think I’m better off buying multiple used thinkpads over the course of my life, or even a used MBP (refurbished m4 MBP goes for ~$1.3K from Apple, base configuration w/ 16GB ram for framework 13 is ~1.2K), than a Framework; the thinkpads would be cheaper and more eco friendly with good build quality. I’m not looking for a ship of Theseus laptop, I’m just looking for something that works a long time, is good enough, and I want to keep my lifetime expenditure on hardware on the lower side. I look at my laptop cost as upfront cost divided by number of years I expect to use it for and I have a spreadsheet with past laptops (and phones) tracking historical usage and costs to better inform my next purchase. Framework looks attractive but the costs don’t seem to align with my goal.

konaraddion All it takes is for one to work out

> looking back over the past two decades basically all of the successful entrepreneurs and business owners I know didn’t come from families with a lot of resources and didn’t have much of a safety net

There’s probably some truthyness to this but it doesn’t account for survivorship bias. And there’s a baseline amount of resources necessary to take a risk and be able to try again (e.g., good luck taking a risk when preoccupied by [lack of] health, housing, food).