Hacker News: greg_V

New comment by greg_V in "School cell phone bans and student achievement"

greg_V — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 13:35:38 +0000

We were promised a borderless world and instead got one without boundaries.

Nvidia's 'I'm Not Enron' memo has people asking a lot of questions

greg_V — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 09:42:16 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/business/828047/nvidia-enron-conspiracy-accounting

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46044126

Points: 8

# Comments: 4

New comment by greg_V in "EuroLLM: LLM made in Europe built to support all 24 official EU languages"

greg_V — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 17:09:25 +0000

Tbh, a lot of EU protectionism vs. US tech seems not to keep the competition out. In fact, with the amount of free press US startups get and the size of their coffers, they can simply roll over the local competition in EU markets most of the time.

What it's terribly good at is adding burdens that the US giants don't face early on, slowing down the early growth between 28 fragmented markets. I don't know specifically about how China works, but the question is proving product-market fit, and for that, you need a lot of users fast.

In the EU, it's a different battle country to country as the media environment, the markets, the regulation etc. are all fractured.

The glaring security risks with AI browser agents

greg_V — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 16:41:07 +0000

Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/25/the-glaring-security-risks-with-ai-browser-agents/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45723108

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

New comment by greg_V in "Airbus A320 Poised to Overtake Boeing 737 as Most-Delivered Commercial Airliner"

greg_V — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 10:43:24 +0000

Google is already killing itself. The search experience has been getting steadily worse and worse on one end, but on the other, they're slowly strangling the incentives that were offered to publishers (ranking, traffic & monetization) to develop content for the "open web as dominated by Google".

Now, everyone who's running a website for a living is doing platform-native content for traffic and pairing it up with a newsletter-backed website or straight up investing in brand advertising campaigns to have access to their own audiences still, without relying on Google to deliver them.

My guess is that we're in for the second wave of Big Aggregators, but it's tough to say what the technological twist behind it will be, so it's not just a reddit 2.0.

New comment by greg_V in "Silence Is a Commons by Ivan Illich (1983)"

greg_V — Sat, 19 Jul 2025 13:26:03 +0000

Also his criticism is very specific. Most of contemporary anti-capitalist or marxist thought that gets published is very, very abstract and hence toothless. It's easy to entertain radical ideas as long as they don't pit you against your employer.

New comment by greg_V in "What happens when people don't understand how AI works"

greg_V — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 11:58:15 +0000

> Another thing that I hear from time to time is an argument along the line of "it just predicts the next word, it doesn't actually understand it". Rather than an argument against AI being intelligent, isn't this also telling us what "understanding" is? Before we all had computers, how did people judge whether another person understood something? Well, they would ask the person something and the person would respond. One word at a time. If the words were satisfactory, the interviewer would conclude that you understood the topic and call you Doctor.

You call a Doctor 'Doctor' because they're wearing a white coat and are sitting in a doctor's office. The words they say might make vague sense to you, but since you are not a medical professional, you actually have no empirical grounds to judge whether or not they're bullshitting you, hence you have the option to get a second or third opinion. But otherwise, you're just trusting the process that produces doctors, which involves earlier generations of doctors asking this fellow a series of questions with the ability to discern right from wrong, and grading them accordingly.

When someone can't tell if something just sounds about right or is in fact bullshit, they're called a layman in the field at best or gullible at worst. And it's telling that the most hype around AI is to be found in middle management, where bullshit is the coin of the realm.

Welcome to the Semantic Apocalypse

greg_V — Fri, 28 Mar 2025 10:20:12 +0000

Article URL: https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/welcome-to-the-semantic-apocalypse

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503574

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

New comment by greg_V in "Status as a Service (2019)"

greg_V — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 11:52:48 +0000

The tech anti-intellectualism is different though. Like you see these kinds of posts that approach the subject as if no one ever has seriously studied it, and the tell is always that there's barely a scholarly work cited, but there's plenty of metaphors to describe how say, sociological phenomena work by way of "it's just like XY tech or business model."

Like I get the acclaim, if you're raised in this environment, the business tech vocab will feel more familiar. Is it a good / better way to describe the world than the established scientific field? No.

But reading the "Peasant and his body" by Bourdieu instead would not have the same... social coinage in tech as reading the influencer of the realm.

New comment by greg_V in "11x has been claiming customers it doesn't have"

greg_V — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 09:58:56 +0000

Tried to conduct a survey last autumn to learn about people's experiences with using AI SDR products. We pretty heavily promoted it in sales spaces, and got a jack total of less than 20 fills, with an overwhelmingly negative sentiment, echoing the comments you'd see about this space on reddit / linkedin etc.

Vaporware the whole lot of them, with spoofed ARR numbers to trigger investor FOMO.

New comment by greg_V in "Finland's National Allergy Program Successfully Reduces Allergic Diseases"

greg_V — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 13:13:00 +0000

Anecdotal backup: as a child I had a horrendous dust allergy that led to multiple hospital visits. To mitigate the problem, my mom became a clean freak, trying to keep our apartment dust-free. The allergy persisted until I grew up and moved out on my own without having a vacuum cleaner. Living in a messier environment led to the allergy basically disappearing.

New comment by greg_V in "Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg"

greg_V — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 13:08:00 +0000

I mean if you're publishing a book, especially a tell-all one, you'd go and talk to sources familiar with the matter who can independently verify whether the statements are true or not to shield you against defamation lawsuits.

Publishing anything dodgy about the biggest tech executives on the planet without that would lead your company getting nuked from orbit

New comment by greg_V in "Show HN: Seven39, a social media app that is only open for 3 hours every evening"

greg_V — Tue, 11 Mar 2025 12:26:40 +0000

you could have the same site, but running different servers to serve different timezones / locales. kind of like old-school video game servers

We Lost the Flow

greg_V — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:29:21 +0000

Article URL: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-we-lost-the-flow

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43158752

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by greg_V in "They hijacked our flow state"

greg_V — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:28:44 +0000

Spammy rewrite of a Ted Gioia post from last week: https://www.honest-broker.com/p/how-we-lost-the-flow

Qwen2.5-Max: The Next Leap in AI Innovation

greg_V — Wed, 29 Jan 2025 11:22:34 +0000

Article URL: https://medium.com/@ashinno43/qwen2-5-max-the-next-leap-in-ai-innovation-476749c0b4ff

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42863749

Points: 17

# Comments: 4

New comment by greg_V in "Brood War Korean Translations"

greg_V — Sat, 18 Jan 2025 11:54:32 +0000

The number is not the amount of buildings, but the amount of drones you have when you build the building

New comment by greg_V in "I made $100K from a dick joke"

greg_V — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 09:13:11 +0000

That's a fairly accurate assessment of marketing theory. Rory Sutherland's Alchemy talks about this in more depth.

The Stupidity of Google's Site Reputation Abuse Policy

greg_V — Thu, 07 Nov 2024 17:06:40 +0000

Article URL: https://larslofgren.com/site-reputation-abuse/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42078537

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

The Billion-Dollar World of Parasite SEO: How to Cash In

greg_V — Thu, 24 Oct 2024 11:46:15 +0000

Article URL: https://larslofgren.com/parasite-seo/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41934592

Points: 4

# Comments: 1