MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by salawat | 2025-07-30 16:27:47+00:00
Given this: >The goal of Herd Ethics is not utopia - it’s continuity. Survival first. Stability before ideology.

The below:

>So the system doesn’t promise that every agent survives - but it provides a grounded, agent-neutral way to navigate collapse risks. It answers the question: What preserves the herd that preserves the agents that preserve the herd?

Creates 2 Herds. The Herd of agents that will survive, and the acceptable sacrifices. If your Herd ethics are to remain robust, they must be able to survive beyond the application in a single herd. You maintain meta-stability as long as your acceptable sacrifice group are all ready and willing to be sacrificed. What happens when that isn't the case? Is there a way back to meta stability? What does it look like? Are we willing to accept what that may look like?

I, for one, can see your Herd Ethics spawning cycles of violence that only damp out once enough herd population is culled to create an environmental/resource equilibrium. I think that might make your herd ethics formulation descriptive of behavior we already see, but I don't think it necessarily gets... well, at least me, to ground we haven't tread, or reveals any avenues to avoid retreading ground we know of, but would prefer to avoid retreading.

>How could I, or should I, better lay out Herd Ethics in papers like the one I posted? See, that's the issue - and I don't mean it to be. I have created an ethical framework, which took a book to lay-out.

I haven't read your book sadly. You are l, however treading ground I'm keenly interested in exploring. Admittedly, I'll have to do some reading of your work to get beyond the analysis and feedback I've offered from a state of naive contemplation.

EDIT Addendum: How do your Ethics project over the continuums of either individual/collective ownership? What's the minimum bar/boundary for an entity? Example: Me as biologic, MAT 0.0, vs. Me+cyber aspects MAT 0.5 accounting for Smartphone, laptops, and data/agents in cyberspace?

In a capitalist economy, I may not fully own in actuality those cyberized portions of my self in the same way as (at one time) we assumed we had sovereignty of our own body. My messages over phone networks owned and operated by others may be eavesdropped on. My records are subpoena-able. My data is used for "system improvement" by other entities that, while offering me extension into their entity, practice a level of sovereignty over it that exceeds even my own.

In a way, it feels like, you've stumbled not into the problem space of What if AI&Human are us, but rather What if we is I?
by carleverett | 2025-07-30 16:28:21+00:00
If it's a fraud, then it's one with a working product.

In 2022 when confidence in stablecoins plummeted after the Terra collapse, $20 billion in Tether was liquidated in a month - $10 billion of that in a single day: https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/tether

Through that black swan event Tether did its job, processing redemptions for collateral dollar for dollar.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-30 16:28:26+00:00
I think it could even be perceived in simpler terms: All website authors have a goal. They can choose whatever approach they want in trying to achieve that goal.

Inside that idea are all the nuances of what's your goal? Who is your audience? What do they care about? What do they want? What do they tolerate? Etc. If you achieve your goal and reach your audience, but a different audience hates that you're using JavaScript or React or whatever, do you really care?
by IgorVolkov_ | 2025-07-30 16:28:30+00:00
In language as luminous as its vision, Liberation Economy is both diagnosis and design—an argument for restoring beauty, dignity, and coherence to the world of things. Against the churn of planned obsolescence and digital dispossession, it imagines an economy of constancy: where goods are stable, ownership is real, and craftsmanship returns to the center of life. With the cadence of philosophy and the clarity of a blueprint, this book lays out a future grounded not in austerity, but abundance—measured not in units sold, but in years endured.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-30 16:28:57+00:00
Some of that is easily explainable as just the ancient corporate mistake of seeing and paying recruiters as a commission-based sales force. They have vacations to pay for and sales quotas to meet and the easiest way to do that is volume over substance.

But yeah, anecdotally, I also came away with the impression that FAANG/GAFAM/whatever has certainly had some incredible years where their recruiters went above and beyond "this seems like a volume play in their personal rolodex" to "this company seems thirsty for headcount with no real idea what it needs the headcount for and no time to get to know the actual skills of the person being recruited".
by 1718627440 | 2025-07-30 16:29:28+00:00
(As a preface, I like the discussion. I've known about moral relativism, but I've never heard the positions you are defending here.)

> What about the area that isn't part of the circle, is that a property of the universe?

Yeah a circle as an abstract concept about the shape of a boundary. The outer area is as much defining the circle as the inner.

> What about when I drop crumbs on a table and they scatter, is there something special about their location?

Yes, if you compare them to the original location, you maybe get some information about the speed, or about the size of gravitational force or the material of the table or the material of the crumbs.

> what shape is that property? What color is it?

I don't get that part, why should it be?

> If I give you a microscope, can you point me to the property?

If you give me an electron microscope I can show you the "shape" of an atom. A single atom is also a property of the universe, but that is not the kind of property we are talking about. But it is strange that they all look alike, isn't it? And that the shape is somehow similar to what the behaviour of the universe is, if you breath into soap water. That's what a circle is. It is a property about the universe. It exists also in the universe, but it is not a single thing.

> You have an almost religious view

What makes that religious?

It seams like you conclude from the fact that there are a lot of (not sure if infinite) properties of the universe, that none is really important? I don't agree with that. Also some properties are more truthy than others, not because they are somehow better or anything, but because you can infer all the others from them, because others are rehashes and combinations of them.
by dagmx | 2025-07-30 16:29:46+00:00
How do you know if the phone doesn’t have an appropriate focal length if the image isn’t marked?

Secondly, none of the points in the article are about optical distortion across the lens they’re all about perspective distortion. Corrective elements aren’t going to change that. None of the examples highlight barrel/pincushion distortion or the like as an offender.
by probably_wrong | 2025-07-30 16:30:06+00:00
This article feels to me less like a proposal and more like a capitulation - "we are being overwhelmed by garbage so we might as well embrace the garbage".

I have no objection to the "writing with LLMs" part - if you want to use fancy auto-correct, go with it. But the reviewing part feels just wrong: we've seen over and over evidence that people use AI as a shortcut for thinking, and yet the proposal argues that not using AI will "produce worst outcomes" because the reviewers will somehow hold themselves to the high standards they are (allegedly) currently not following.

The author then argues that the ideal application of AI is to answer questions like "Does the reasoning hold? Are the proofs correct? Are claims consistent with artifacts?" which he himself admits "as of yet they cannot offer strong guarantees about correctness", but that's okay because it's followed by the well-known AI mantra "I believe this will change in the future".

Final score: 2.5 - I'd rather not see it in the current conference.

Disclaimer: This comment was not written with the help of AI.
Show HN: Beginner's Guide to Answer Engine Optimization – The Future of Search?
by sukhmani1303 | 2025-07-30 16:31:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I recently did a small research project exploring Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) — a rising field that focuses on helping content appear as the answer inside AI platforms like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and Perplexity.

With 70% of searches expected to be zero-click by 2025, traditional SEO strategies are starting to fall short. AEO shifts the focus from driving clicks to being the cited source.

This PDF guide is written for marketers, founders, and creators who want to understand:

How AEO differs from SEO

Why schema, E-E-A-T, and structured content matter more now

Examples and metrics from real case studies

Where the business opportunities are in this emerging space

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/15-5VOBDMLqIfEzLgIytw57cvS7k...]

Would love feedback—especially from anyone working on AI search, generative UX, or visibility tools. Curious how others see this affecting content, ranking, or even product design going forward.
by davidw | 2025-07-30 16:31:28+00:00
More than anything, I miss hacking on cool stuff without quite so much "corporate" involved.

I grew up with the open source culture of the 90ies, when people were going to change the world. And they did! Things like Linux are ubiquitous. There were certainly problems with that era: misogyny ran rampant and people could be dicks, but we were still also kind of off in our little world without the spotlight that the web and lots of huge companies built on it brought to things.

I'm no RMS and I enjoy making good money, but I'm fine with 'good' money and don't need crazy money, and miss that kind of happier, more curious era with no 6 month performance review cycle kinds of shit.

That doesn't mean ignoring business goals; I was very happy when I worked for a company doing fundus cameras in Italy just 10 years ago - that was such a smart group of people, and very oriented towards making the product the best that it could be. But there were a lot of cool things to hack on and not much to get in the way of doing that.
by dietr1ch | 2025-07-30 16:31:29+00:00
Google's 2023 layoffs was pure for stock market as Google was pressured to do what everyone else was doing (like, no one got fired for buying IBM). After the layoffs the stock went up, and I remember people compiled data to try figure out the reasoning behind it without much success. It broke trust in the company and desire to work there, what for if the shareholders would be better off with the news of a new layoff? My manager who was doing a great job and took my team about 8mo to hire was laid off.
by beala | 2025-07-30 16:31:31+00:00
A bit of a tangent, but BT is also great for getting rid of tomato hornworms. The bacteria is harmless to humans, but fatal to the hornworms. A single application saved my tomato plants last year.

That said, the more I garden, the more I find the entire process a bit horrifying. Waging biological warfare on the critters is not what I thought I was signing up for.
by shayway | 2025-07-30 16:31:32+00:00
I've noticed a bit of a divide in the small web, between those who:

A. Want to get back to the web's roots as a document network, keeping a clear structure and a focus on content,

B. Want to use the web's flexible presentation itself as a medium for expression through styling, interactive content and so on

The Gemini protocol is a good example of A taken to its extreme, while e.g. Neocities leans more toward the latter. The web is by its nature fractured - the independent web even moreso - but sometimes it seems the gap between the two philosophies is the biggest obstacle to more widespread adoption of small web practices, or at least more unified tools for discovery and networking.

It also seems like developers tend to favor type A, which has led to robust infrastructure and projects around it - like Gemini, or the site linked here. But I think a lot of people looking to make a break from big tech are doing so because of the limitations, and going from one set of awkward restrictions to another doesn't look like an upgrade.

Just my two cents. I'd be sad to miss out on the wacky creative sites people build, whether it's because they're stuck in big social media, or because they took the pledge from the linked page:

> make a simple, honest website with the proper use of HTML, the use of CSS only where essential, and the use of JavaScript only where it’s absolutely necessary.
by mmh0000 | 2025-07-30 16:31:33+00:00
I live in an area with a large number of mosquitoes. After a lot of trial-and-error, here's what I've found works.

Don't use a bug zapper. The zapper does kill things, but... the zapper also attracts bugs from far away into your area. If you have a large property, a zapper placed far away at the boundary can pull bugs away from the living area.

You can pay a company to come spray your yard frequently, but it gets expensive over time. I bought a gas-powered fogger (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0746S92WW) and the chemicals: Insecticide and Insect Growth Regulator (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00RW197XG and https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005CT9IDO)

Spray everything once a week initially, then you can try dropping down to every other week. Very few mosquitoes remain.

Further, look into repellents: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bug-repellen...

Mosquitoes are weak flyers; if you want to defend a static area, like a picnic table, a large fan can be used to keep a breeze up over the area and keep mosquitoes out.
by gishglish | 2025-07-30 16:32:05+00:00
> Did you read the post I wrote initially? I give the breakdown of how much of the money I pay to the union goes to the worker on his paycheck (55%) with the rest going to insurance, taxes, union dues, pension, etc (fringe benefits, which are 45%)

I misread that intitially.

At the end of the day, anytime this topic comes up, there’s an oddly large discrepancy between the anecdotes and the BLS data.

Even half of that $100 puts these electricians in the 90th quartile for hourly wages in that MSA. So they’re either sending there most expensive guys or I’m misreading misinterpreting the BLS data.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-30 16:32:07+00:00
I'm sure some do.

I've seen someone build furniture from literal trees and wooden tools. I guess they didn't smelt their own metal, but they're not using power tools. Is that a viable business? probably for a very small bespoke traditional furniture audience. Most furniture these days is built using layers upon layers of technology. (and just like with the Web, people, including myself, have strong opinions on furniture quality and source)
by fauverism | 2025-07-30 16:32:19+00:00
I used to love... - https://shift.jp.org/ - https://dhky.com - https://praystation.com - https://burodestruct.net/ - https://www.netbabyworld.com/

I feel good about the future when I see... https://os.ryo.lu/ https://neal.fun/

Somewhere on a zip are my IE 5.5 bookmarks. I'll stumble upon them again one day and remember how excited I was to surf the web on my 233mhz G3.
by at-fates-hands | 2025-07-30 16:32:23+00:00
I'm not buying the idea that "corporate greed" led to over hiring to control the labor market. In fact, if the companies were really greedy, they would only hire the LEAST amount of developers and actually increase their bottom line and ergo, more profit for their shareholders. Which makes far more sense then expanding your overhead which actually reduces the amount of money your company profits.
by munksbeer | 2025-07-30 16:32:27+00:00
> LLM's cannot "assume". There is no thinking involved. It sees that the prompt looks like the monty hall problem and it just goes full steam ahead.

I think the poster's point was that many humans would do the same thing.

Try a completely different problem, one you invented yourself and see where you get? I'd be very interested to hear the response back here.
by rkomorn | 2025-07-30 16:32:36+00:00
> I think doggie day care is a sign of a society in ethical decline.

If anything, it's a sign of the opposite. Before, people would just leave their dog at home all day regardless of the impact to the dog.

The fact that more people are now willing to spend money (and time to get the dog to daycare) so that their dog isn't left home alone is unarguably more ethical.
by ColinEberhardt | 2025-07-30 16:33:05+00:00
I had a car from the same era, the Boomerang, similar in style but 4WD:

https://randomcompetitions.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/...

Absolutely loved that car, used it for hours and hours every week. The best 'toy' I ever had (other than my Amiga A500!).
by rtpg | 2025-07-30 16:33:34+00:00
Back when my salary was shitty I cared about the money a lot.

I still like the money and the number going up. But now that it’s above a certain multiple of what I consider a “comfortable” life, I’m not worrying as much.

Would for change your job for an extra 500k a year? Surely right? An extra 50k? An extra 5k? An extra 500 dollars a year?

Theres some mental calculus that includes everything. Some people will just take “offer with most money” every time. Hell of a lot of people don’t.

I do think that C suite folks might not have the right vision of what “normal/comfortable” is for employees though. So they might offer a low number thinking it’s actually a “comfortable to live with at this stage of life” number and then get confused why they can’t recruit good talent and think people are obsessed with money.

First offer has gotta be within the ballpark of the right number if you don’t want your interviewee to immediately come back to you with a much higher number!
by exasperaited | 2025-07-30 16:34:16+00:00
There’s no simple language that has generics, operator overloading and a type system because these are not simple concepts.

That’s OK, surely?

There are older languages that are simple, typed and powerful like Ada and Modula-2, but these have fallen out of favour because the world wants operator overloading and complex type definition languages and generics.

(The lack of a Modula-2 sort of language is IMO ably addressed by Go)
by alisonatwork | 2025-07-30 16:34:33+00:00
I was surprised when it happened to me too, but it seems to be an anti-feature that has been rolling out for some time now[0]. The ability to use a password has vanished completely.

The thing that makes it particularly egregious is that Booking.com is literally designed to be used on the road, from any location anywhere, on any weird device you might have access to at the time. There's no guarantee that whatever janky airport wifi allows IMAP, or that your phone can receive SMS in whatever country you're in. Forcing 2FA - or now apparently just the "1FA" of magic link/OTP - has made the service useless for its primary purpose.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Bookingcom/comments/1hl055b/cannot_...
by kccqzy | 2025-07-30 16:34:42+00:00
I'm not sure what's the insight in this article here. All the things mentioned seem pretty straightforward. But I'll comment on a few:

> Really any finite set can be a "dimension".

This is absolutely true and yet typical programming languages don't do a good job of unleashing this. When is the last time you wish you could define an array where the indices are from a custom finite set, perhaps a range 100 to 200, perhaps an enum? I only know of two languages, Pascal and Haskell, that are sufficiently flexible. All other languages insist that indices for arrays must be integers either starting from 0 or 1. Haskell has a mechanism to let you control what is an array index: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/base-4.18.1.0/docs/Data-... The lack of this ability makes programmers use more general hash maps by default and therefore leave performance on the table.

> We can also transform Row -> PowerSet(Col) into Row -> Col -> Bool, aka a boolean matrix.

I mean sure. Does the author know type signatures and their operations like this are isomorphic to algebraic operations on size of the possibly infinite sets? The function A -> B has exactly |B|^|A| implementations so that's why Col -> Bool is in this sense "same" as PowerSet(Col). And the function operator associates to the right so adding Row -> doesn't change anything. Wait till you learn why sum types are called sum types and why product types are called product types. Here's another thing that might be mind-blowing: arrays of an unknown length can be thought of as the infinite union of arrays of lengths of all natural numbers: Array<T, 0> | Array<T, 1> | … so using the above notation the cardinality is 1 + |T| + |T|^2 + …; but they can also be represented as a standard linked list List<T>=Nil|(T, List<T>) and using the above notation we have |List<T>|=1+|T|*|List<T>| which simplifies to |List<T>|=1/(1-|T|). And guess what, the Taylor expansion of that is just the earlier 1 + |T| + |T|^2 + … precisely.
by fluidcruft | 2025-07-30 16:35:29+00:00
That's nothing new. Pensions are for Boomers. You're talking about Baby Boomer myths that GenX knew were lies eons ago. The Silent/GenX/GenY bloodline is always dealing with bullshit from the Greatest/Boomer/Millennial bloodline. Millennials are not GenY's allies.

I generally agree that GenX who don't understand that Boomers will never leave and that they're going to pass everything to their own kids (Millennials) are clueless. Most of GenX generally has known this since before Millennials could walk.
by hurtbadly | 2025-07-30 16:35:34+00:00
No other reasoning model other than Gemini-2.5 Pro? The pricing tiers on the website list only 3 models, one being Gemini and other 2 being GPT-4 artifacts, Perhaps, one can highlight there that one can bring their own API key?, if thats the case. Also, does it support Clade-Opus 4?
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-07-30 16:35:36+00:00
Yeah it's disappointing to see photographers getting this wrong. Most of them know better.

It's the _distance_ that causes distortion, not the _lens_. You can prove this by doodling light rays on a sheet of paper. There is no lens that will get you a good photo at 1 meter from a person. They stand back 2 or 3 or more and then say "ho ho fish eye lens". I'm so sick of it

Someone agrees: https://petapixel.com/2021/08/02/lenses-dont-cause-perspecti...
by schiffern | 2025-07-30 16:35:39+00:00
After checking the obvious like old tires or stagnant ditches or tire tracks, the more hidden breeding sites include house gutters, French drains (under the gravel), buried yard drains, and garage floor drains.

The general rule is that mosquitos need a pool of water the size of a bottle cap, and it needs to be there for at least a week. Good luck, and good hunting.
by carlmcqueen | 2025-07-30 16:35:50+00:00
For awhile I was working on Monte Carlo sims in my job in finance in my early career. Just re-building a existing archaic excel monster in python to be more flexible to new investment models and implement and allow for more levers. Since I was already working with them daily I begin applying Monte Carlo models to a lot more problems I was thinking about. It truly is a fun tool to play with, especially when you're in the thick of designing them.
by pama | 2025-07-30 16:35:51+00:00
I think that a powerful application of AI is the breaking of apps. Vibe breaking rather than vibe coding. AI can help immitate nasty users, find edge cases, hack systems, and break them under load. If you have a non-graphical intermediate layer the setup for attempting such attacks with a typical AI is easy; using a GUI with LLMs is possible though harder, so better think of how to make such extreme attacks by AI easy when you start to vibe code.