Hacker News: jgeada

New comment by jgeada in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

jgeada — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:38:32 +0000

Maybe the problem is structural: there is an absurd amount of power to be gained by seniority in both houses. To a voter there is a significant advantage to choosing an incumbent as their power increase with seniority.

New comment by jgeada in "The Old Guard: Confronting America's Gerontocratic Crisis"

jgeada — Thu, 07 May 2026 23:33:44 +0000

What is the justification? Why can someone vote for a future they're not likely have to endure?

We don't allow under 18s to vote, so clearly some age restrictions are legitimate.

New comment by jgeada in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

jgeada — Tue, 05 May 2026 19:02:06 +0000

That is exactly the point: this burden should be placed on the software and its controls, not on the humans.

Aviation learned this the hard way, that automation should be adapted to how humans actually work and not on how we wish we worked.

New comment by jgeada in "Three Inverse Laws of AI"

jgeada — Tue, 05 May 2026 18:26:14 +0000

Any set of rules that makes humans responsible and starts with "don't anthropomorphize " is a broken set of rules.

Humans will anthropomorphize anything and everything. Dolls, soccer balls with a crude drawing of a face on it, rocks, craters on the moon, …

As a species, we're unable to not anthropomorphize things we interact with, it is just how're we're made.

New comment by jgeada in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

jgeada — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 19:01:00 +0000

Except in this case the middleman added thousands of dollars to the cost without adding anything of value: not curation, not discovery, nothing. Without this middleman acquiring an expired domain would have been whatever the nominal registrar cost (somewhere between $10 to $100 or so per year for a domain)

Useful middlemen do serve a role and add value. A parasitic middleman just extracts value without adding any value anything in return.

New comment by jgeada in "I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it"

jgeada — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 17:40:14 +0000

What risk? They contributed nothing, they have performed no function. Their only claim on it is having been first on the dictionary attack and laid claim to a bunch of useful letter combinations without providing any value or service.

If they didn't do any of this that combination of letters doesn't disappear, it just goes back to being available from the primary registrars.

The squatters are just vacuuming up some of the profit off people that would/could use that combination of letters to actually provide a service.

I don't view middle man parasitic behavior as valuable, and see no market value performed here other than extraction.

New comment by jgeada in "'Hairdryer used to trick weather sensor' to win Polymarket bet"

jgeada — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:11:46 +0000

Prediction markets and all the market manipulation are the symptom, not the cause. Our society used to have real consequences for breaching public trust, but with our mere decades old "money is speech" legal system, there have not been any consequences for moneyed interest in quite a while. And as long as there are no consequences, they keep trying more and more egregious violations of public trust to establish where the new red line (if any) actually are.

New comment by jgeada in "I'm never buying another Kindle"

jgeada — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 18:00:42 +0000

Don't think I've ever read a properly produced ebook. Page breaks fall wherever and formatting is dictated more by my size/border/etc choices than by whomever "produced" then book.

Nevertheless automatic typesetting and formatting have existed for decades! TeX and LaTeX are ancient and produce better looking results than any book I've ever read on any of my ereaders, and those aren't the only tools in this space.

Whatever people are paying for such "production" seems wasted.

New comment by jgeada in "I'm never buying another Kindle"

jgeada — Mon, 20 Apr 2026 17:35:36 +0000

If that is true, of which I remain highly skeptical, then it implies that books are wildly inefficient to produce.

What on earth are all the middlemen between book being authored and it being sold to a customer that add so much overhead that the cost of printing and logistics disappears in the noise???

New comment by jgeada in "This year’s insane timeline of hacks"

jgeada — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:03:18 +0000

The issue is also one of agency: the public has absolutely no agency in this. There is nothing an ordinary member of the public can do to avoid having their data exposed, there is nothing they can do to cause corporations to have more robust security models nor to cause actual consequences for all the executives that chose profit over security at every possible decision point.

To the public this becomes like the risk of being hit by lightning or being in a car accident, just background noise we avoid thinking about as much as possible. It is just the cost of living in this economy.

New comment by jgeada in "An unsolicited guide to being a researcher [pdf]"

jgeada — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 17:29:50 +0000

There are presentations that you actually present to an audience, to which this point is valid.

But lots of presentations, including this one I think, are merely used as a means of conveying information (yeah, not my favorite way of doing so, but being a contrarian doesn't do anybody's career any good), and those are indeed intended to be read and need to have explicitly all the information that you otherwise would be speaking and addressing.

New comment by jgeada in "What's driving rising business costs?"

jgeada — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 04:01:08 +0000

If you have a fixed profit margin, the way to make more absolute money is to allow your costs to increase. Insurance companies have zero reason to negotiate prices down.

New comment by jgeada in "Assistant to the Regional Manager"

jgeada — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:59:06 +0000

Inflation has made prices higher, but people's purchasing power has been decreasing all this time. Salaries, benefits etc have all not been keeping up with inflation for decades. It is why young people are marrying later, not able to afford to buy property etc. All the gains the economy has made over the past handful of decades have been captured by a small percentage of the population.

New comment by jgeada in "Poor Deming never stood a chance"

jgeada — Tue, 17 Feb 2026 13:33:25 +0000

| - Have leaders skilled in whatever their direct reports are doing. Use them as coaches normally and as spare workers in times of high demand.

I think this is the biggest hurdle for US style management produced from the MBA cookie factories. Their only skill sets are MBA speak, assigning blame, taking credit and granting themselves the largest bonuses possible while telling all the actual workers generating value that "due to current financial conditions, your raise is limited to 2%"

New comment by jgeada in "Rice Theory: Why Eastern Cultures Are More Cooperative (2014)"

jgeada — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:37:36 +0000

Not the "West", obsessive single minded individualism is a US characteristic. All other western nations (read: Europe) realize that there is significant value to society and that to achieve things we need to work as a group.

New comment by jgeada in "Frontier AI agents violate ethical constraints 30–50% of time, pressured by KPIs"

jgeada — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 14:27:11 +0000

Well, those committed the only crime that matters in the US: they stole from the rich.

New comment by jgeada in "The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers"

jgeada — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 03:34:23 +0000

And don't forget retroactive claw backs on any profits taken; otherwise they'd make sure the assets to be seized are of absolutely no value (and canonically, negative value: all the environmental disaster and other collateral damage is offloaded to the public)

New comment by jgeada in "The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers"

jgeada — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 03:29:30 +0000

I think their problem is that very few countries have refinery capacity to deal with crude oil, which is what these ships contain. So the crew have limited choices. It is a "someone else's problem", to quote the Hitchhiker's Guide.

New comment by jgeada in "The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers"

jgeada — Tue, 10 Feb 2026 02:02:46 +0000

This seems like one of those problems that arise when we let rich people and corporations arbitrage for the lowest possible legal consequences, in this case flags of convenience that have no standards.

There is always some poor or corrupt country willing to ignore consequences as long as they can make a buck. The profits are private, but costs and consequences always laid onto the public. Miserable way to run things.

New comment by jgeada in "Nvidia shares are down after report that its OpenAI investment stalled"

jgeada — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 22:22:43 +0000

Big scale fraud like this always has its origin and motive force in the executive suite and board.

However, the consequences are always applied to everyone but the executives and board.