Hacker News: HardlyCognizant

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "A Man Who Reads Books for a Living"

HardlyCognizant — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 15:45:26 +0000

I'd imagine you have to read for a particular framework to assess viability. Translating from a literary medium to a visual one is very challenging. Much of the detail in the former will be lost in the latter, like inner monologue, narrative time compression, etc.

There is a reason most underlying film stories are so short, or feel tenuously connected from major scene to scene. There just isn't room to express much complexity through imagery and dialogue in 120ish minutes, unless you are also overtly narrating or exposition dumping. And a core rule of modern fiction is "show, don't tell" no matter the medium.

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds"

HardlyCognizant — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:54:29 +0000

It's the prisoner's dilemma. I believe any self-preservation optimized intelligence is going to suffer from these problems until those behaviors are countered in interaction by design (e.g. process, societal/cultural pressures, etc.) or removed from the baseline (i.e. evolved out.)

Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at some scale is going to fail to them. Unfortunately, the problems we face as a species are increasingly at larger and larger scales.

I'm not sure if we can remain what we would recognize as "human," and solve for this without surrendering some level of executive function to an entity not afflicted by it. Government and regulation are already expressions of this, while retaining our intrinsic nature, but history has demonstrated this is inherently unstable.

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "Soft launch of open-source code platform for government"

HardlyCognizant — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 20:23:25 +0000

That just means the forms of lobbying being permitted are antithetical to democracy, and is just bribery in a different form. The problem is with the lobbying, not the accountability.

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "It's cool to care (2025)"

HardlyCognizant — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 13:16:54 +0000

No, you are using it ironically. The connotation of a word is entirely contextual.

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "FDA approves first medication to reduce allergic reactions to multiple foods"

HardlyCognizant — Mon, 26 Feb 2024 14:41:05 +0000

Not even gluten, one of the peptides it is composed of. Prolamins like gliadin, horadin, etc. depending on the grain. This is why gluten denaturing proteases aren't sufficient to protect a celiac, and thus some technically GF foods aren't necessarily safe.

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "You have to be educated to be educated (1997)"

HardlyCognizant — Wed, 15 Nov 2023 18:46:58 +0000

I feel the greatest difference is that in science, you are to assume the negative. You are to prove yourself wrong, not right. Being right is a matter of accomplishment by exclusion. It is the pursuit of facts/truth, but with the understanding that you are cutting away the incorrect or irrelevant to leave a predictive remnant, not starting with an answer.

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "Unity’s new pricing: A wake-up call on the importance of open source"

HardlyCognizant — Fri, 15 Sep 2023 14:47:00 +0000

They are liable and there is precedent, as I understand it.

eBay v Newmark

https://h2o.law.harvard.edu/cases/3472

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/basr.12108

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "Theory X and Theory Y management"

HardlyCognizant — Mon, 03 Jul 2023 14:26:07 +0000

As I understand it C2 (command and control) is technically separate, and traditionally resembles Theory X , though current thinking seems to have aspirations towards Theory Y for various roles and scenarios in Mission Command.

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "Ask HN: How to do that you need to do but not motivated at all?"

HardlyCognizant — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 15:39:25 +0000

Others have have covered most of these, but I'll chime in to agree:

1. Break down required activities into emotionally manageable tasks. (Sometimes this necessitates rendering it down to a level where it seems trivial.)

2. Cut deals with yourself. Permit yourself to procrastinate on one thing, but only if you work on this other priority task. (This works well within a task even, if you have done #1.)

3. Build momentum by completiing easier things first. (This is especially effective if you find satisfaction in checking items off a todo list.)

New comment by HardlyCognizant in "Ask HN: Why are today's consumers not discerning what is ad and what is not?"

HardlyCognizant — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 15:26:04 +0000

Unfortunately, with the advent of things like Badge Engineering, brand has now become a prisoner's dilemma problem. Eventually, the brand will sell out and people will fall victim to the switch. There are obviously exceptions, but it happens frequently enough these days that trusting a brand anymore is unreliable.