Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

elenaverna.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 318 posts

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#281

Post by scarface_74 »

drdaeman wrote: post #71
vecter wrote: post #36

I've noticed that since I've started using ChatGPT, I've almost entirely stopped using Google (except for the rare case where I need a specific website but don't remember the URL). In addition to a bunch of technical questions related to my work, my ChatGPT chat log has the most mundane things like: - What is platos frios - Can you download Netflix videos to your local device - Who composed the Top Gun theme - Who ha…

The problem with this approach is that LLM gives me unreliable answers. I know this because sometimes I ask things that I used to knew but forgot and needed to refresh my memory - and sometimes the answers were incorrect. So, unfortunately, a search engine validation step is still a necessity. Asking LLM to provide a link does NOT work, as they hallucinate links just fine, and give links that are either broken or do…

You aren’t using the paid version of ChatGPT are you? It does a real time search of the web for links.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#282

Post by AznHisoka »

While AI may technically be leading to less traffic for some sites, they didn’t deserve most of that traffic in the first place. Also most haven’t lost 90% of their traffic yet, so AI, please continue your killing - you’re not done yet!

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#283

Post by 3vidence »

kibwen wrote: post #275
3vidence wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never really thought of this as a strong benefit before but this seems like a good argument for app development in 2025. Started my career as a web developer and always have a soft spot for it but from a hobby developer standpoint hosting and deploying a site feels like an uphill battle with little upside. Theres a lot to not like about app development but after you get approval for your app it's pretty hands of…

> after you get approval for your app it's pretty hands off. For about a year, after which point both Apple and Google will arbitrarily remove your app from stores for not keeping up with the platform update treadmill.

It's really a tradeoff.

Keep up with platform updates or constantly deal with the afformentioned crawlers and hugs of death.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#284

Post by smcin »

smcin wrote: post #94
ForTheKidz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quora has never, in my memory, provided any value to the internet. The answers it seems to provide to google are seemingly inaccurate and also seem completely unmoderated. Furthermore you seemingly have to pay to even ask answers to get updated.

Quora was fantastic back around 2011. It did provide value. That has been decreasing gradually as the site declined. No you don't have to pay on Quora to get answers; that's incorrect. Having said that, these days most questions languish without good, or often any, answers. The only ones that get traffic from humans are in what Quora calls Spaces, i.e. a group for Q&A around a certain topic, and/or a certain point of…

Quora 2011 = Treehouse 2020.

An invite-only community with a lot of specialist knowledge.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#285

Post by ViktorRay »

yalogin wrote: post #232
ViktorRay wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should try Perplexity too. In my experience Perplexity is far better than Google Gemini or Meta AI for searching for info and getting summaries.

This is where first mover advantage and habit play too. Chat gpt and meta ai are good enough for basic recall and summarization tasks. Google has a branding problem. They integrated Gemini into their search UI, so they just want people to continue the same landing page. However, it feels too noisy, and unnecessary. All I want is a summarization. I don't want to see a huge list of ads or slightly related links. Adds n…

I mentioned Perplexity because their service focuses pretty much only on using LLMs for searching and summarizing. It doesn’t do creative stuff like some of the other services do.

I mainly also just use AI for searching and summarizing like you seem to do as well so that’s why I recommended it.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#286

Post by immibis »

rixed wrote: post #153
immibis wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that Google's version of this was determined to be checking whether you had a 9-day-old tracking cookie. The researcher who discovered this was able to generate 60,000 "I am not a bot" cookies per day, and use them up about 15 times each in a bot before it started getting captchas. That was in 2016 though.

Couldn't the content of that cookie be used to validate its actual age? Like, just signing the date of generation?

That's probably what it was. So they accessed some page over and over, pretending to not have the cookie yet, got a bunch of cookies, and 9 days later, used them to bypass captchas.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#287

Post by DaSHacka »

TZubiri wrote: post #233
DaSHacka wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't surprise me whatsoever. All Chegg has going for it is a database of answers for homework assignments that typically use per-student randomized numbers—so students have to recalculate their specific answer manually by following the steps—and "verified tutors" that constantly give wrong answers to even highschool-level math questions. Every college student I know uses ChatGPT (and now DeepSeek) for tons of assi…

How about you don't cheat and actually study? No sympathy. Glad it's dying.

Good luck with that, academic cheating is a massive market.

No matter the crackdown, the demand is always so high that someone will inevitably find a way to market services (such as Chegg or essay-for-hire services).

The best counter against it is designing courses so that cheaters get minimal benefit while students that study get rewarded (such as closed note exams and lowering the value of homework assignments).

Otherwise, whether it's ChatGPT, Chegg, or paying a friend who took the course last semester for their homework solutions, there's no real stopping it.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#288

Post by radium3d »

dougb5 wrote: post #269
radium3d wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blocking AI content bots is the name of the game. Luckily most of the big hitters stick with a unique user agent string and/or IP.

When you say "big hitters", I guess you mean the well-known corporate crawlers like GPTBot (one of OpenAI's). Yes, these do tend to identify themselves --and they tend to respect robots.txt, too -- but they're a small part of the problem, from my perspective. Because there's also a long tail of anonymous twerps training models using botnets of various kinds, and these folks do not identify themselves, and in fact the…

Actually, it's the Korean and Chinese bots that hit pretty hard without much (or any) throttling.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#289

Post by greazy »

arp242 wrote: post #223
joelthelion wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The experience I have with SO 99%+ of the time is that I google my question, get a result on SO which has a correct and decent quality answer, and I'm back to work. You and I are talking about different things. Before these great questions and answers ended up in your search result, someone asked them, and someone else provided a good answer. I used to be one of these people. I got 50k+ SO karma, mostly by asking g…

> SO moderators don't even read your questions anymore before closing them for a random reason Note that most of these are just regular people with close-to-vote powers, not elected or appointed moderators with special powers. I think one major problem is that there is an entire class of people who rarely or never ask or answer questions, or even comment, and all they do is "moderate" the site by closing questions. L…

My specific work community has a Slack with a few thousand people and a few active hundred people. We've come to the conclusion that slacks 90day retention message policy is a good thing. It allows new and old to reask and reiscussion topics.

SO should do something similar. Throw out all the mods, all the questions and start fresh every X number of years. No idea if it will work but tossing out the current mods to bring in new ones would change the flow.

Re: AI is killing some companies, yet others are thriving – let's look at the data

#290

Post by yalogin »

apwell23 wrote: post #279
yalogin wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, why do people use WebMd? Is it used by medical professionals? I thought its for regular people diagnosing their problem for fun. All of that information they can get from their doctor. For really specific information like symptoms for a disease, I cannot imagine there be a hallucinations. Even if it did today, it will only get better over time. I don't see it as a problem with this specific use case. I am one o…

you are using chatgpt for medical info today because it might get better tomorrow? your comment wasn't what you plan to do it in future with it, you claimed you are doing all those things today. Now you are talking something about future hypothetical.

You missed the nuance in my statement. May be I will try rephrase it for you

I am saying the use of webmd is all for non medical purposes, just people reading symptoms that they should be getting from their doctor anyway.

Now for the nuance, for the purpose of meaningless consumption it doesn’t matter if there are hallucinations, people are not supposed to take medication based on webmd. Given the really established nature of diseases and symptoms, I find it hard to believe there will be hallucinations, even if there are, it will become better. All of this doesn’t impact me one bit because I don’t do anything medical based off webmd of chat gpt, I go to a doctor

Post reply on HN