Being Jewish doesn't make someone Israeli.
14,922 karma · joined January 8, 2019
1. is this topic "technical" (ie. Directly related to the day job of a software engineer, electrical engineer, computer engineer, computer science). If so allow.
2. Does this topic give advice on how to drive GTM? If so allow.
Everything else I'm hard hiding so it is somewhat lossy, but I don't need to read discourse about zeitgeist about "VC" or politics from random HNers who don't know what a vintage is or what an LA does.
I could go more precise with my rules and filtering, but it's good enough for me.
I haven't thought of a solution for account filtering yet though and some accounts (a couple of whom are on this thread as well) are deeply aggravating.
I tried a call to action years ago and all Dang told me basically summed up to "become more active on HN".
At this point I think active filtering on my own is the only solution, as the guidelines around tone and conduct increasingly don't appear to be enforced anymore.
But maybe calling out some notable examples would be useful.
And India as well as much of ASEAN view coal and ONG as core stopgaps or important intermidate inputs for their own industrialization efforts (eg. Steelmaking has hard dependencies on thermal coal, roadbuilding and concrete have hard oil dependencies as intermediate parts).
Much of the overall impact from GHGs comes from the hard industrial dependencies in fertilizers, steel, pharmaceuticals, and other heavy industries that countries need to industrialize.
It isn't just cheap kotchkes being consumed by western consumers anymore.
Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, Nigerian, Brazilian, and other consumers are also able to consume much more than they were 40 years ago (which is when most HNers appear to have been born).
40 years ago you'd be hard pressed to find plastic wrapped packaged food in a village in rural China or India. Now they're available everywhere.
40 years ago the only people who could dream of buying a car let alone a motorcycle or moped in those villages would have been local politicos. Now they are well within grasp for most households.
As large countries like India, Vietnam, the rest of ASEAN, and other regions are expected to grow in the 6-8% for at least the next decade, expect carbon output to also grow - not as the same degree as before, but still significantly nonetheless.
China, India, Vietnam, Indonesia. Brazil, Nigeria, and others are continuing to build out capacity. While this capacity is much more green than past buildouts, it's still in aggregate going to have a significant downstream impact on overall GHG emissions.
It doesn't matter who deploys more renewables or less when countries like China, India, and others continue to expand coal and ONG at reduced but still significant rates.
But they can morally push back and say North America, Europe and Japan industrialized via similar externalities.
And the reality is countries don't care. This is why China is now export controlling solar technology and IP [0] at the expense of India and other large members of the global south.
The reality is most countries are going to rush as much capacity as they can until the externalities can no longer be ignored en masse (probably by 2040-45).
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-16/china-mov...
And it's very difficult in this market to justify getting relocated with expenses paid.
There's a reason most companies have a dedicated internal security team with a mix of executive security, law enforcement, and intel backgrounds.
The reality is so long as you don't divulge work information and/or aren't in a gray area (eg. cheating on a partner, explicitly trading information for monetary or sexual favors) there isn't much that can be used against you by a foreign power.
Also, these honeypots are extremely unsophisticated. The countries that tend to use these the most tend to have a much more decentralized intel gathering ethos driven by humint, as well as by enterprising individuals looking to essentially sell kompromat for opportunity in the old country.
This is actually very common in most white collar industries with a similar impact (eg. high finance, pharma, big law, etc).
It's like me complaining about not finding good biotech employment in Chicago or lack of Aerospace work in the Bay.
And traditional DefenseTech and Biotech has been conducting heavy layoffs the past few years (the former due to contract renegotiations with DoD/DoW and the latter due to the post-COVID funding crunch).
No employer or freelancer hirer is going to risk sanctions to hire a freelancer located in Russia. Any method to pay you would require breaking dollar and euro sanctions.
Your only option as a freelancer is to immigrate to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Armenia, Turkiye, Azerbaijan, etc like others in your shoes.
Are you actually up to date on your skills and in a tech hub?
Are you expecting remote first? If so you have to change your expectations - remote first is only for known entities now.
Edit: You live in Russia. No one will hire you out of risks of sanctions. Your only option is to leave like other Russians in your shoes.
Edit 2: The risk of secondary sanctions for Western and Dollar/Euro transacting businesses only began in 2024-25.
This is why I don't buy many of the "woe is I" stories on HN. Dig a little and massive red flags come up.
Edit 3: "mixmastamyk"
You're in SoCal. Not a tech hub.
Tech is now back to being clustered in the Bay, Seattle, NYC, and Austin with 2-3 days in the office being expected.
The reality is the author worked in PR and Comms in the UK.
The UK has been in a white collar recession for much of this decade.
Brexit and the rise of GCCs in the CEE and Asia means a number of professional jobs that would have been in the UK are now shifting to Warsaw, Prague, Bangalore, Manila, etc.
"I think what shook things up in my 40s was the fact that I took a career break at 43 to study for a Master of Science in Paleobiology for a year..."
Yep, that likely played a role.
They just want to monetize and scale out their hyperscalers and the associated shared services, which is what AI has become.
So it'll work to meet their needs - a decoupling of the US and the China ecosystems, along with reducing the risk that India, Vietnam, Korea, or another country tries to conduct distillation attempts on Chinese models as well.
Most ExChina organizational buyers were they to use a Chinese open-weight model would create very strict sandboxes (none of the VPC or monitoring fuck-ups that OAI and Anthropic made) and not use the Chinese cloud.
I said this was happening months ago but no one listened.
They are already fairly cost effective. A the Corporate VC arms of the major call center and BPO players like Infosys, TCS, and others have already funded a large portion of TTS startups, and in a lot of cases are training on customer calls.
There's a reason ElevenLabs, Deepgram, and others are the giants they are now.
My dad's at retirement age yet continues to work on bleeding edge harness engineering and cloud security work, yet there are plenty of 30 and 40-somethings on HN that don't know the difference between a CNI and kube-proxy let alone are bordering on unemployable due to personality and educational skill deficiencies.
And my granddad's still physically active as a farmer in the old country. And his parents were alive and active into their 90s (also as farmers).
Which is ironic because I am younger than most HNers and Substackers who espouse this opinion and find it to be a weird form of ageism.
To me, a 45 year old and a 65 year old are equally out of touch or "old", so it feels like a pot calling a kettle black.