vgeek

Updated version with more artists: https://pudding.cool/projects/vocabulary/

Hence the congruent capitalization in my post. :D

Maybe call it Yet another Bulletin Board?

Pretty sure this is Sam Altman's Worldcoin's objective?

The American Sign Museum in Cincinnati (https://www.americansignmuseum.org/) is good if you like neon and advertising. They have an on site shop where you can view repairs being performed.

The Boneyard in Las Vegas is also worth seeing. It was featured in one of the Danny DeVito scenes in Mars Attacks.

This same story made it to #1 on HN like a year ago and got featured on Forbes/CNBC type sites. I think the author created a new account to argue with people in the comments if that provides any additional context.

Spiderman pointing at Spiderman?

There are many other considerations, too. Years ago I scraped Craigslist and Autotrader, grouping cars by generation/make/model/drivetrain to be able to predict longevity based on quantity for sale versus original sales figures. If a model sold 100k per year for 10 years and only 3 were for sale in year 13, that isn't a great sign. Cheap cars will tend to have cheap owners who are more likely to skimp on maintenance, typically leading to more accrued issues and a shorter lifespan for the vehicle. Some cars are just poorly engineered, and the markets are relatively efficient in pricing resale value. The definition of "high mileage" is going to vary by who you ask. Domestics 150k, German 80k, Japanese 200k, Korean 100k. These are subjective averages (some cars like Theta engines, Darts, even late model GM 6.2s have engine failures <40k), based on when they start disappearing due to repairs being more than the vehicle is worth, but based on what I saw then and kind of observe still.

Leaning on those prior mentioned product mixes, keep in mind that Japanese manufacturers weren't in the American market 60 years ago, so market mix would be wildly different. (Multiple 400k+ mi Toyotas in my family, along with 60 year old GMs, but with aftermarket or rebuilt engines.) The cost of vehicles (and repairs) relative to prevailing wages will impact the repair vs replace balance. Trade publications like Cox/NADA/Adesa/etc. are always cited by financial blogs when mentioning consumer spending/state of economy by average age of cars on the road. Why cars get junked or totaled has shifted drastically, too. Steel bumpers were easy to replace, modern bumper covers with styrofoam backing and aluminum crumple zones, not so much. Tolerances is a vague term in that veiled PR piece on that wiki article. Machining has improved. Tech like direct injection and improved lubrication (synthetics) have done much more in terms of efficiency and longevity. In a lot of cases, manufacturers try to get more and more horsepower from the same displacement by pushing tighter engine tolerances (crank/main bearings, pistons/rings, valvetrain) and things like higher compression ratios and revs, leading to more heat and earlier failure. So while you have better initial engineering, you are closer to the point of failure. For another example, interference engines will grenade themselves if you ignore timing belt maintenance, but in the meantime, you get more horsepower by getting more air into the cylinders.

A v6 Camry or Accord is going to be have more hp, be faster,more reliable at same age, be quieter and get 3x the mpg than nearly any muscle car of the past. Unfortunately it seems that many Americans prefer giant vehicles that place more emphasis on their size (and status) than materially important factors like reliability engineering or fuel economy.

Obviously these are ancedotal examples, they can be confirmed by wasting hours reading about cars and watching mechanic review videos from people who work on them daily (I am partial to the CarCareNut on YT).

An easily visible one is air intakes. Many manufacturers have shifted to plastic. Peteo-engineering has advanced a lot, but they will still get brittle and break.

Interior wise, you can look at things like fabric durability-- lower deniers can be cheaper, but will wear sooner. Springs/foam in seats are another example, but this will vary across manufacturers, models and trims.

This isn't exclusive to financial engineering manufacturers like Stellantis or Nissan, either. Toyota has had issues with simple things like rust proofing (whether intentional or not) on 1st generation Tacomas leading to massive recalls and things like plastic timing guides prone to wearing out. Ford with the wet clutches having belts submersed in oil. German cars needing body off access for rear timing chain maintenance at 80k miles. Water cooled alternators (really, VW?). All types of "why?" if you follow cars once they are 3+ years old.

It seems like there are a lot of regressions that probably result from cost cutting, while others may exist to simply drive service revenue.

Flock (YC17)

They're even here. Lots of very suspicious comments from accounts created <90 days and many accounts created after 2024ish tend to also align similarly, but with farmed karma.

https://archive.ph/3Dmao

Gavin Belson would never suggest scrubbing negative mentions of Hooli from the internet.

The educational and informational queries were always the least valuable from a monetization standpoint. Chegg Answers could rank for these low competition (also low commercial intent) terms-- think queries like phrases from textbooks students would be querying. There is virtually 0 way (for people besides Chegg) to monetize these types of queries. Now Google can answer these queries directly, albeit with the assumption it costs them slightly more to serve these AI responses than a search query.

AI overviews are breaking the implicit "contract" for informational sites-- "we will create content to rank on Google with the expectation of monetization via display ads, mailing list growth and/or sales commissions of some sort." If these sites now lose 90% of their traffic, they simply go extinct. We have already seen the destruction of the old web era sites and the walled gardens being built. How many new sites, at the same frequency as 15 years ago, 1) get built and 2) get visibility without relying on one of the fickle walled gardens for an audience?

Google will probably figure out a way to monetize these informational queries by building better profiles of users. Or most likely, they start slipping in commercially biased responses-- either natively or disclosed, but probably based on all user conversations instead of the current one.

Top searched term is Gemini and Deepseek is also in top 10, but no GPT or Claude?

Look at where Fanduel/Draftking/Caesars type sportsbooks make their most margin-- it is parlays. Probably 95% of people wagering on these sites don't have even a tenuous grasp on basic statistics, yet alone how to derive actual probabilities of their action for simple spread/moneyline/total wagers. When you're letting them combine 5 wagers each with an EV of 90 cents on the dollar, the books are loving it. Layer on that these books simply ban winning players, it is insanely predatory.

Prediction markets, as they currently stand, are at least better with regard to having a lower take and are less predatory in their wagering products and marketing (although these points can very easily change, but the complex wagering menus will be less liquid and harder to grow). If the house cut is 1-3%, that is still drastically better than the other parimutuel wagering in America, horse racing, which is typically 20-25%.

Depends if they were using Lightning network or having to buy Solana OrangeCoin?

Users are broken into two separate buckets: industry and consumers. Industry users keep using the site, based on the number of visitors with 50+ visits coming in directly every weekday. The site also gets cited by organizations with regard to their fees and rankings within geographies. This kind of proves the utility for at least this demographic.

Consumers, for a product such as mortgage, will be fragmented and infrequent users, who will only be in-market for a mortgage for a ~3-6 month window every X years. For this audience, discoverability is what matters-- and they will simply go to a search engine and look for "cincinnati mortgages" for which Google will gladly show 8-12 ads with CPCs of $20. An objective ranking based on rates and fees is useful for the consumer, but not an ad network who would rather drive multiple clicks on paid ads. Being objective and useful isn't enough to play in the space, unfortunately.

The Modified LAR product is what you may want to look at, then. Yes, it is annual, but if you aren't against modeling data, look at the rate spread value, segment then project vs current FRED data and you'll get pretty close to actuals. You can also extract fees and derive APR in addition to having APY data.

Good idea. A few years back I built https://originationdata.com that compares mortgage lenders (both FDIC & FCUA members) using HMDA data. I modeled rates by lender, product type as well as by facets like MSA (as well as STL FRED data, too). It grew for a few years and I was ecstatic-- getting backlinks organically from some impressive sites (e.g. larger banks themselves, consumer publications) as well as positive user feedback. Then Google pushed their "Helpful Content Update" and Google search traffic absolutely tanked, so I kind of abandoned it and moved onto other projects that won't be SEO oriented, since Google's view of quality is unbeknownst to me.

Check out the floating double DIN receivers like Alpine's Halo11 or search eBay for dozens of cheap no-name ones-- not sure about their SQ, though.

The Logic of Sports Betting by Ed Miller is probably a good start.

Parimutuel vs house odds is probably a good start in seeing how odds change in different types of markets. Monte Carlo simulations will be useful in coming up with your own tissue odds. Then it is the matter of backtesting and comparing your derived odds versus the books' by looking at things like Closing Line Value, Margin of Error and Return on Investment.

For data, check out Kaggle. Learn how to scrape and circumvent platforms like PerimeterX, Recaptcha and Cloudflare. There are dozens of sites that provide historical odds data, even more basic sports statistic data.

Youtube has finally reached maturity and just like SEO for websites, you are beholden to the opaque algorithms. If you don't own the relationship with the user, it is just a matter of time until the screws get turned.

Maybe you misunderstood the scope that Google is a search advertising company first and foremost? Alphabet ignores (yes, they essentially invented transformers, etc.., but actual productive efforts likely correlate to predicted TAM or protecting status quo, answering to shareholders while waiting to acquire threats) a market that will eventually usurp their cash cow of first party search ads, because the new market isn't initially as lucrative due to market size. There is also the consideration of cannibalizing their high margin search ads market with an error prone and resource intensive tech that cannot immediately be monetized in a second price auction (both from inventory and bidder participant perspectives). A $10 billion market for Google would be under 3% of revenue, but if the market grows 10x, it is much more attractive, but now the incumbent may be trailing the nascent companies who refined their offerings (without risk of cannibalizing their own offerings) while said market was growing. We are currently at the stage where Google is incorporating Gemini responses and alienating publishers (by not sending monetizable clicks while using their content) while still focusing on monetization via their traditional ad products elsewhere on the SERPs (text search ads, shopping ads). Keep in mind, they also control 3rd party display ads via DoubleClick and Adsense-- but inventory on 3rd party sites will drop and Google will lose their 30%+ cut if users don't leave the SERPs.

Dozens of major news publications have covered the decline of Google's organic search quality decline and emphasis on monetization (ignoring incorrect infoboxes and AI generated answers). See articles such as https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/googl... and a collection even posted here on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30348460 . This has played into reasons why people have shifted away from Google. Their results are focused solely on maximizing Google's earnings per mille, as leaked (https://www.wsj.com/tech/u-s-urges-breakup-of-google-ad-busi...) where the ads team has guanxi over search quality. Once Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts left their roles, the focus on monetization over useful SERPs becomes much more evident.

We are getting to watch The Innovator's Dilemma play out, yet again. The downward trajectory of Google's utility has only been worsening over the past 10 years-- but only in the last 3-4 have mainstream audiences started to notice.

This seems to be an ecumenical matter.

Haven't there been numerous recent leaks detailing how Google has let revenue team take over from the search quality team over the past few years? [1] They can adjust auction parameters for owned properties to juice CPCs, blend ads to drive CTR and disable functionality of ad-blockers in tranches to squeeze as much growth as needed. Search quality has seemed awful for quite some time [2], but all that really matters is growth for ad ePM-- driven by CTR and CPC. The leaked documents from last year also had comments about correlations between lower search quality and higher ad click rates, so there is that, too.

Youtube also increases ad load. More ads per video, combined with organic growth, higher engagement and wider distribution (smart TVs probably have insane metrics-- plus no real ad blockers there, either) mean they'll keep having display/video ads doing extremely well, too.

[1] https://www.techspot.com/news/102765-who-prabhakar-raghavan-... [2] https://methodshop.com/why-google-search-sucks/

Flock (YC17)

They are growing and showing up everywhere, but you never hear about them in terms of real innovation, just helping build the surveillance state. Combine this with cloud based doorbell cameras and it seems like someone is always watching.

This is definitely a neat place to visit. No digital cameras are allowed past a specific point, even. I have snapshots from walking the main loop with my dog from a few years back posted here:

https://vgeek.net/gallery/index.php/category/103-green_bank_...

Who?