Hacker News: flokie

New comment by flokie in "Ferrari Luce – Designed with Jony Ive"

flokie — Mon, 25 May 2026 21:21:54 +0000

love the interior, not sure how i feel about that front end however. "The lowest drag coefficient in Ferrari history" is not what i would have guessed just seeing the picture alone, so props to them on making this possible!

New comment by flokie in "Chatbots are replacing Google's search, devastating traffic for some publishers"

flokie — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 01:21:18 +0000

In the US (to start) there's now a flavor of Gemini 2.5 to power Search experiences like AI Mode and AI Overviews. Should be sufficiently good at this point.

source: https://blog.google/products/search/google-search-ai-mode-up...

New comment by flokie in "Spotted hyena found in Egypt for the first time in 5k years"

flokie — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 17:59:19 +0000

Dumb question, but how do they know it's not an escaped (or abandoned) pet? There are sadly many exotic pets on display on social media, particularly in this area of the world.

New comment by flokie in "I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps"

flokie — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 20:35:32 +0000

What about just plain old query() SQL i usually find the easiest vs. mucking around with pivot tables.

New comment by flokie in "Airfoil"

flokie — Tue, 27 Feb 2024 17:14:46 +0000

His work is always a good reminder the open web is still an amazing place!

New comment by flokie in "Shopify files lawsuit over DMCA abuse"

flokie — Mon, 23 Oct 2023 16:52:20 +0000

requiring a telephone contact (SMS verification or code from robocall) would provide enough sufficiency in scaring the perps to probably solve 90%+ of these.

New comment by flokie in "We spent $20k on Google Play pre-registration ads"

flokie — Thu, 13 Jul 2023 17:41:46 +0000

It seems pretty clear that's what you get when you use the campaign? https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answ...

"After you make an app or game available for pre-registration, users can visit your store listing to learn about and pre-register for your new app or game.

Then, when you publish your app or game later, all pre-registered users will receive a push notification from Google Play to install it.

Eligible devices will also have the app or game auto installed on the day it launches. (more details on this in documentation)

New comment by flokie in "Google does little to reduce advertisers' costs"

flokie — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 02:41:54 +0000

The challenge with that approach is the variation in both (a) queries and (b) other players. (a) There are a small % of queries that are knowable for you to target on exact, or you are required to update and prune infinitely over time. [https://twitter.com/Google/status/1493681643290300425?lang=e...]. (b) A mix is better than a fixed CPA at a set price, up to to the player to pick the acceptable range. At a fixed price and many players competing for the same 100 10$ conversions, the price would quickly rise for those same conversions anyways. You're replicating the work the computer is doing, but doing so with the illusion of control.

New comment by flokie in "Human Or Not: Guess if you're chatting with an AI or a Human"

flokie — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 01:54:08 +0000

My partner made a lot of spelling mistakes, instant human tell :)

New comment by flokie in "Google does little to reduce advertisers' costs"

flokie — Wed, 28 Jun 2023 01:50:30 +0000

Would respectfully disagree. Matching a consumers query to an ad, and optimizing that outcome at a given return on investment threshold is a task best left to a computer to optimize. It is a perfect use case for reinforcement learning, and a computer can work 24 hours a day and you need to sleep. In my experience, 100/100 times the machine beats the confident manual optimizer. We (humans) don't have a great track record in beating computers at these kinds of problems, certainly not a game as simple as optimizing for a high score (driving results from an ad).

New comment by flokie in "What Neeva's quiet exit tells us about the future of AI startups"

flokie — Fri, 26 May 2023 22:55:48 +0000

yes but "{person name} memo" is not the same as "Google Memo" (published and endorsed by the company)

New comment by flokie in "Ask HN: Will we be able to replace corporate middle management with AI?"

flokie — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 02:46:30 +0000

I would agree with this, SWE is actually the easier role to replace with AI given the literal binary nature of the work. Dealing with humans is much more complicated, given they do not directly follow logic.

New comment by flokie in "GPT3 Powered Movie Recommendations"

flokie — Sun, 01 Jan 2023 23:28:18 +0000

Doesn't work very well - asked for dramas shot in Hawaii and got a bunch of good comedies

New comment by flokie in "Downtown S.F. on the brink: It’s worse than it looks"

flokie — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 03:16:58 +0000

> Cause of death: https://twitter.com/bettersoma

Why would any business set up shop in these conditions. Remote or not, plenty of safer & cleaner spots in America to do business.

New comment by flokie in "Google's most ridiculous trick to force users into adding phone number"

flokie — Tue, 03 May 2022 20:56:53 +0000

+1..get a yubikey or similar device, problem solved.

New comment by flokie in "Web3 and crypto skepticism is growing and people are finally starting to listen"

flokie — Mon, 24 Jan 2022 16:15:30 +0000

this. the incentives are bound by the underlying tech.

New comment by flokie in "Google is capping Meet’s group video calls to an hour for free accounts"

flokie — Wed, 14 Jul 2021 14:33:26 +0000

good one :)

New comment by flokie in "Google is now telling users its apps are out of date. No updates are available"

flokie — Thu, 11 Feb 2021 14:29:18 +0000

blog post Jan 27 mentions how they're prepping iOS apps: https://www.blog.google/products/ads-commerce/preparing-deve...

New comment by flokie in "Google Images Restored"

flokie — Sat, 16 Jan 2021 22:29:47 +0000

This including no results from Pinterest is a great combo

New comment by flokie in "Canada's 350-year-old department store Hudson's Bay locked out by landlords"

flokie — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 03:48:36 +0000

exactly the void Shopify fills