hlau
hlau on Hacker News
Posted by
hlau on Thursday July 03, 2025 @04:43PM
from the sohamtracker.com dept.
https://www.sohamtracker.com
Vibe coded this yesterday. Want to actually get some time series data. The data points that are surfacing don't really reflect the story being told thus far. What we do see is someone who interviews really well but their output leaves a lot to be desired according to multiple testimonials.I'd imagine a few of the readers here have some more insights so please send them along.I am also curious...
Posted by
hlau on Thursday July 06, 2023 @06:04PM
from the saturation.substack.com dept.
manigandham was a fairly active HN user.
Am I the only one who’s annoyed that the message is gated and that FB somehow needs to track everyone who has seen what I imagine amounts to a mea culpa for their clusterfuck of a week.
It’s so weird reading about Web3 and the focus presumably on digital sovereignty and privacy and to see a platform moving backwards and away from any semblance of an open internet.
Really surprised to hear that you’re not getting the relevance out of Google. Are most of your searches in a specific domain that’s somehow not covered properly by Google? And is there a search engine that does a better job for you? I’ve tried using services like DDG and find myself falling back to Google more often than not.
Posted by
hlau on Sunday January 31, 2021 @12:43PM
from the saturation.substack.com dept.
My company actually did a very extensive study on this and found that the majority of websites utilize dark patterns. Only 25% of sites are even legally compliant even after deploying consent management software. Companies are openly flouting privacy laws and we actually found some of the worst offenders in the app space where consent mechanisms don't even exist within the apps themselves.
Posted by
hlau on Tuesday January 28, 2020 @03:03PM
from the cnet.com dept.
Posted by
hlau on Wednesday July 10, 2019 @05:34PM
from the businessinsider.com dept.
If you think influencer marketing and product placement are already at capacity you have no idea how much worse it's about to get if ad blocking gets much worse. And the irony is that, by design, you won't know a good chunk of the time and other times it'll just merely be implied without being explicitly stated. Continued use of social networks, including this one, collects way more identifiable data than what the non-Google/FB/Amazon ad market collects. Ad blockers have had near 0 impact on FB's operations. Google and others have paid to ensure that their search ads still make it through most ad blockers.
Blocking ads does not drive businesses to be more "honest". They'll just spend more on PR and influencers. And given how hostile this community is to ads and perhaps even marketing overall, (how YC ever backed a marketing or ad startup is beyond me), companies already realize that getting a fawning TC article purchased thru connections and favors and PR chicanery is going to be more effective than ad campaign even though the ad campaign is more honest, upfront and transparent with its agenda.
There definitely is an either/or because blocking of one channel will naturally necessitate money/barter flowing to the other channel. One is at least transparent and regulated, the murky world of influence peddling isn't since it's hard for anyone to tell in the moment whether something is "organic" or not.
I'll be the first to admit that the existing advertising ecosystem is broken, primarily due to misaligned incentives across the board. But, given a choice, would you rather have a clearly labeled thing that you know is an ad transparently trying to influence you or a sneaky human billboard, err "influencer" coming up to you with an agenda along with tons of product placement in whatever you watch/read/listen to?
The foundational work he did was definitely impressive. But the fact that it fell to one guy also spoke to how low the stakes were at the time.
I highly doubt that most of the investors in ICOs are all that interested in the core business. They're interested in an arbitrary security loosely linked to the core business appreciating that is referred to as a token because calling it an asset/security would require more regulation.
You just need a whitepaper. And a whole lot of blockchain "experts". Because what makes a biz work is not the soundness of its ideas but the fact that it has its own coin.
Posted by
hlau on Saturday December 03, 2016 @12:09PM
from the iab.com dept.
