Hacker News: pbrum

New comment by pbrum in "U of T researchers demonstrate AI worm could target any online device"

pbrum — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 13:41:10 +0000

You cannot possibly be a full-time academic and your last name be "Papernot"!

New comment by pbrum in "Blue Origin's New Glenn blows up during static fire test"

pbrum — Fri, 29 May 2026 13:59:05 +0000

I was going to say this too. And since we're at it: does anyone know how many launch pads the Chinese private space companies have, combined?

New comment by pbrum in "Epic Games to cut more than 1k jobs as Fortnite usage falls"

pbrum — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 20:26:03 +0000

Not long ago I was looking at my favorite games of decades past. Unreal Tournament figured very prominently, made of course by Epic. So I wondered: why did they stop making Unreal games? I looked at their game chronology. On one hand, they made Gears of War, an Xbox exclusive that never interested me. And the other one? Oh, right: Fortnite. That's where Unreal Tournament went. They made tons of money for sure. But no company, including Epic, has made a competitive FPS + CTF game as solid as UT, UT2003, or UT2004 since that era

New comment by pbrum in "Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]"

pbrum — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 00:30:48 +0000

Update: Microsoft has taken the page down. But posterity being what it is...

https://archive.is/D9vEN

New comment by pbrum in "30 Year Anniversary of WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness"

pbrum — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 19:17:59 +0000

Loved the anecdote, very nicely CRAFTED

New comment by pbrum in "Japan's gamble to turn island of Hokkaido into global chip hub"

pbrum — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 22:42:41 +0000

I resolutely approve of this comment. Bravo.

New comment by pbrum in "Anthropic’s paper smells like bullshit"

pbrum — Sun, 16 Nov 2025 19:23:16 +0000

This is key

New comment by pbrum in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)"

pbrum — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 03:28:35 +0000

We are close to landing our first customer - an enterprise-level one at that! We're Geneva Business Messaging, a tool to centralize, persist, and if necessary escalate critical interactions between large companies and their partners. For actual collaborative cross-company work in fields like engineering, logistics, or security - not spam, marketing, sales, or the other frequent purposes of B2B apps.

We're at genevabm.com if you want to check it out!

New comment by pbrum in "Benefits of choosing email over messaging"

pbrum — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 03:14:44 +0000

Got a little something to say here because my startup is all about this. Worked at 2 $100b market cap enterprises and saw a lot of friction specifically in B2B. For internal collaboration Slack/Teams is pretty much consolidated, but for critical B2B interactions everybody falls back to email (and only secondarily to things like LinkedIn DMs or WhatsApp messages). And here's where the problems with email pile up:

No read receipts Need to know exact address to write to Trees/branches problem discussed by others (CCd late in the game? Good luck making sense of things and no chance to grab attachments) Highly vulnerable to phishing and social engineering (anyone can email you) Grab bag: important messages and unimportant newsletters or notifications are all mixed together Emails with precious/sensitive data can be forwarded to anyone (and everyone) in the planet with two clicks

I could continue but you get the picture. As an early Internet user I still have a soft spot for email but specifically for B2B work I think there's a lot of work to be done, similar to what Slack did for internal collab. My startup is genevabm.com for those who are interested, go check us out!

New comment by pbrum in "Grief gets an expiration date, just like us"

pbrum — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 01:02:54 +0000

I found your comment very moving. Thank you for sharing that remarkable portrait of your father

New comment by pbrum in "How well does the money laundering control system work?"

pbrum — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 03:39:12 +0000

I've always wondered about those grimy palm reading or fortune telling shops you'll find across major streets in Manhattan or New York. How are they making rent, even during the retail apocalypse?

New comment by pbrum in "Meta's Vision for Superintelligence"

pbrum — Thu, 31 Jul 2025 05:26:12 +0000

What if superintelligence isn't even a thing? I was watching an interview with a Chinese-American specialist the other day (I'm sure it's been shared here on HN at some point) and she explained in the Chinese AI community they don't operate under the assumption that something such as AGI or superintelligence exists, and therefore don't work toward that goal. I'm sure people in this community can comment to a much more informed extent on this than I though

New comment by pbrum in "Wish you could escape the planet? Too bad life in space would suck (2024)"

pbrum — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 23:22:03 +0000

Seconded

New comment by pbrum in "Wish you could escape the planet? Too bad life in space would suck (2024)"

pbrum — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 23:21:45 +0000

Great comment - it reminded me of Seveneves

New comment by pbrum in "I've launched 37 products in 5 years and not doing that again"

pbrum — Wed, 23 Jul 2025 04:00:01 +0000

This stuff is hard. Today was the first time my little startup started sending out little videos of demo features to the group of about 20+ people (all friends/family/close colleagues) I'd interviewed in round 1 of customer work. How did it go? Ok, but not great. The disappointment in there is not from any negative reactions, but rather to the large amount of non-reactions (simple things like "oh cool" and nothing else from someone who knows full well how important this is to me).

But that's ok! I know maybe they'll have more time later. If not, I will nudge them. And I have other people to ping and later will move on to cold pitching anyway. And I've read in countless founder books, testimonials, etc about how hard and laborious this is. Keep a firm mindset, be systematic about going through all the steps, never skip a day of work, meet your own deadlines, have a bulletproof work ethic. Rome wasn't built in a day!

New comment by pbrum in "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)"

pbrum — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 16:38:03 +0000

My team and I are building a web app that enables any business to chat with any other business in any language. Details:

It's B2B only - can't register with a free email provider, gotta own a real domain -Therefore identities are collective - companies, not company employees --Therefore all interactions are persisted at the org level rather than assigned to individual inboxes

-It allows you not just to talk but also to work together on contracts. We built a contract parser that turns contract clauses into smart, plain language objects

We're calling it Geneva and doing a friends/family/acquaintances exploratory release as I type this.

http://genevabm.com http://x.com/genevab2b https://www.linkedin.com/company/genevabm/

New comment by pbrum in "I created Perfect Wiki and reached $250k in annual revenue without investors"

pbrum — Thu, 01 May 2025 03:12:31 +0000

My company is building something in the messaging/comms space, but focused on B2B rather than internal team chat like Slack/Teams. Seeing all the dislike for those two makes me wonder if we should enable intra-team messaging as a (free?) bonus feature.

As for PerfectWiki: fantastic hyper-targeted product and writeup. Congrats to Ilia

New comment by pbrum in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025)"

pbrum — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 04:34:46 +0000

A tool to address friction in B2B interactions (mostly between large companies) I've seen in my career. Main innovations are in comms and contract management. Leaning in on some hardcore dev talent in the team for the stack: there's Rust and Gemini in the mix. I'd say we're past the halfway point of MVP development

New comment by pbrum in "My startup journey with BYBE"

pbrum — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 23:56:35 +0000

Very valuable, thanks for posting. The author understandably leaves out the dollar figures (even approximations) for what that exist looked like, but the tone suggests it's above decent. The concrete advice for startups requiring cold pitching and network effects was particularly good.

New comment by pbrum in "Half-Life"

pbrum — Sun, 23 Feb 2025 23:01:48 +0000

Thank you (and the whole team of course) for creating something so amazing