Hacker News: eucyclos

New comment by eucyclos in "Turn your best AI prompts into one-click tools in Chrome"

eucyclos — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 05:36:52 +0000

This touches on something I've been thinking about. I'm making an ad blocker that tries to replace native ads with ads that actually add value to the viewer's life. In the public version, I'd like to offer some of the profits to the web hosts even if they haven't heard of it. Do you have any thoughts on how it would be best to go about that?

New comment by eucyclos in "X Randomly Banning Users for "Inauthentic Behavior""

eucyclos — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 07:23:36 +0000

I've been saying that about a lot of algorithms for a while now, but I think the issue is more that they're smart algorithms optimized for the wrong thing

New comment by eucyclos in "The peril of laziness lost"

eucyclos — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:00:15 +0000

The reference to 'literature by the pound ' made me think of an apocryphal story about a pottery teacher who at the end of the year would grade his students on either the quality of a single piece or the weight of all finished pieces. With very few exceptions, the best piece of the year would be one of the ones where a student went for volume.

Which is plausible if you need to touch each piece- more repetitions lead to more improvement if you're already motivated to improve anyway - but if the output is coming from an llm, I'm not sure ..

New comment by eucyclos in "The peril of laziness lost"

eucyclos — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:40:38 +0000

I think this heuristic used to be more useful before it became widely known. Laziness is a fine quality if diligence is publicly rewarded, but once people game the metrics to look more lazy than they really are, things break

New comment by eucyclos in "The peril of laziness lost"

eucyclos — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 02:18:05 +0000

I forget who said it, but I heard the idea floated that if your work can be measured in terms of productivity at all, it can and probably should be done by software. Not sure how that applies here since as you point out, a 10x programmer probably doesn't produce 10x the code.

New comment by eucyclos in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (April 2026)"

eucyclos — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:25:45 +0000

An alternate ad network (tied to an ad blocker) that optimizes for the most useful ads instead of the most immediately profitable ones. https://github.com/Chrisjayhenningsen/Eudaimonia

New comment by eucyclos in "Google removes "Doki Doki Literature Club" from Google Play"

eucyclos — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 23:08:14 +0000

(spoiler) The conspiracy seeking part of my brain is fascinated by the fact a company whose decisions are increasingly ai made or moderated doesn't want people to play a game that requires deleting a psychotic stalker off your hard drive...

New comment by eucyclos in "Oil at $150 will trigger global recession, says boss of financial BlackRock"

eucyclos — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 12:42:54 +0000

Most of those cables are already in place and powered up for the existing power grid.

New comment by eucyclos in "Oil at $150 will trigger global recession, says boss of financial BlackRock"

eucyclos — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:42:01 +0000

Infrastructure for ev charging is a lot easier to add than gas stations though.

New comment by eucyclos in "Oil at $150 will trigger global recession, says boss of financial BlackRock"

eucyclos — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 03:40:32 +0000

Europe, particularly Germany, has quite a will. Maybe a little faster than that given there are lessons to be gleaned from it.

New comment by eucyclos in "Pompeii's battle scars linked to an ancient 'machine gun'"

eucyclos — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 04:59:57 +0000

Maybe it's harder to deal with ten projectiles in a minute followed by a nine minute reload than one a minute for ten minutes?

New comment by eucyclos in "I built an AI receptionist for a mechanic shop"

eucyclos — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:56:57 +0000

Couldn't an ai take down the details and pass it to a mechanic or trained service rep?

New comment by eucyclos in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

eucyclos — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 08:41:54 +0000

Definitely. Unlike asking the right questions or having good taste though, it's possible to know how successful you are at business so the dynamics are definitely different.

New comment by eucyclos in "They’re vibe-coding spam now"

eucyclos — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:34:06 +0000

You've clearly never deliberately wasted a scammer's time. This is their livelihood, and I'm pretty sure most are commission only.

New comment by eucyclos in "You are not your job"

eucyclos — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:46:44 +0000

Whoever said anything about middle class? Ubi is the poverty level, it could never be anything else.

As for people not being occupied, the theory is that since ubi doesn't stop if you find employment, it would lead to less idleness than the current means-tested social safety nets. In test cases though it seems to depend a lot on culture, Finnish communities saw no difference in employment while Indian rates of business formation tripled.

New comment by eucyclos in "They’re vibe-coding spam now"

eucyclos — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 05:32:42 +0000

The reason you'd want to filter for idiots is that a smarter person would waste the scammer's time when they figure out it's a scam after some human interaction. If the ai can take you all the way to the close, there's no reason to filter any more.

New comment by eucyclos in "What young workers are doing to AI-proof themselves"

eucyclos — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 02:40:30 +0000

>What should kids be aiming for according to you?

If it's my kid? Starting their own Enterprise. Between 'good enough' knowledge work getting cheaper and the bureaucracy that made entrepreneurship less attractive over the last decades being either trimmed or automatable, we may be looking at a golden age of new business formation. There's an old saying, "genius is one percent inspiration and ninety nine percent perspiration". If ai shifts that to just 2 and 98, it'll unlock massive demand for a certain kind of mind.

How to teach that I'm still pondering. One idea that occurs to me, is that a human will always be needed to ask the right questions and have good taste, but I don't know how to teach those. They can probably only be educated, which in my mind is distinct from teaching. A different idea I have is that an entrepreneur needs three skills: they need to identify a problem, implement a solution, and get paid for it. Those skills probably can be taught, so I'd try to ensure they get early reps in all three.

If I knew how to connect those two ideas I think I'd have a decent curriculum. Anyone have suggestions for that?

New comment by eucyclos in "Show HN: Atomic – Self-hosted, semantically-connected personal knowledge base"

eucyclos — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 06:16:13 +0000

My first thought is that this would be a great place to find new topics of interest at the "overlap" regions.

New comment by eucyclos in "4Chan mocks £520k fine for UK online safety breaches"

eucyclos — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:33:43 +0000

Do you mean the International Atomic Energy Agency?

New comment by eucyclos in "How the Turner twins are mythbusting modern technical apparel"

eucyclos — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:29:04 +0000

Well, obviously there's an upper limit to that game, but I would bet Princeton's issue wasn't that they were failing to fill classrooms at the higher price point.