41–50 of 209 posts
Well, it looks like it's a lot harder than I thought. You still need the right software and hardware but you also need the right person to do it.
Most of what I read was above my understanding but it was good reading anyhow. Good job on the recovery and good job writing about it.
This may be the plutonic ideal of a Hacker News story. It's also sort of a Travis McGee story but the salvage consultant is a cryptographer.
The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…
I'm starting to consider any company whose revenue primarily comes from ads to be immoral. It's the business of hijacking people's minds. Part of this means stimulating the worst aspects of thinking: addiction, fear, pain, all that ads seek to satisfy.
It's not immoral in specializing on how to advertise. It's immoral to overstep some boundaries when doing it.
Disclosure: I worked in a company whose primary revenue was selling tools to create ads.
The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…
I'm starting to consider any company whose revenue primarily comes from ads to be immoral. It's the business of hijacking people's minds. Part of this means stimulating the worst aspects of thinking: addiction, fear, pain, all that ads seek to satisfy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm starting to consider any company whose revenue primarily comes from ads to be immoral. It's the business of hijacking people's minds. Part of this means stimulating the worst aspects of thinking: addiction, fear, pain, all that ads seek to satisfy.
You open a business. You sell something or offer a service. Day one is "let people know that I exist". Pretty much every form this take is advertising. No business live without making its customers aware of it. It's not immoral in specializing on how to advertise. It's immoral to overstep some boundaries when doing it. Disclosure: I worked in a company whose primary revenue was selling tools to create ads.
Painting the advertising industry as "humble startup putting up a sign in the downtown square" is also disingenuous. Most advertisements you see are done by big corporations. What's the excuse of Coca-Cola or McDonalds to plaster the streets with psychologically-crafted pictures of their unhealthy products, then?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hahaha, thanks!
> If you’ve got interesting technical analysis... FYI, not sure if english is your first language or not but this should be "If you have interesting technical analysis..."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You open a business. You sell something or offer a service. Day one is "let people know that I exist". Pretty much every form this take is advertising. No business live without making its customers aware of it. It's not immoral in specializing on how to advertise. It's immoral to overstep some boundaries when doing it. Disclosure: I worked in a company whose primary revenue was selling tools to create ads.
Discovery is a problem that can be solved in a million other methods. If (hypothetically, somehow) ads were outlawed from existence tomorrow, a thriving industry of independent reviewers would instantly pop up to serve the need of product discovery. Painting the advertising industry as "humble startup putting up a sign in the downtown square" is also disingenuous. Most advertisements you see are done by big corporati…
Hardly. You buy a domain name, put something on it and then what, wait for an independent reviewer to monitor the registrars? And that review would be discovered how?
> Painting the advertising industry as "humble startup putting up a sign in the downtown square" is also disingenuous. Most advertisements you see are done by big corporations. What's the excuse of Coca-Cola or McDonalds to plaster the streets with psychologically-crafted pictures of their unhealthy products, then?
I have no idea how did you reach that conclusion from what I wrote.
The author is a very talented applied cryptographer with a very impressive resume (he is looking for new projects). The following CV line stands out however: Google: Software Engineer, Ads Review. June 2014– March 2016. Angular / Java developer on the internal tool used by contractors to review Google ads for policy violations. How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? I am not blaming the author…
> How did that saying about "brightest minds working on ads" go? The sentiment is a bit older than ads. It goes: " I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters a…
I've always wondered what the development process looks like for these type of algorithms. If you have to run the program for a year to know if it will work, how can you have any confidence that what you've written is going to do the trick?
It brings interesting trade-offs for program design. You can write the code one way which may be 10x faster but harder to reason about, or another way which is more straightforward but takes an extra 5 days go execute. How confident are you in your code or debugging ability? How many iterations will you need? I'm assuming this was written in CUDA based on the block/thread ID mix-up.
What was interesting, is that implementing the brute force solution and running it probably saved me time in the long run, because it managed to turn off a part of my brain that worries about wasted time. As long as I knew the brute force was potentially making progress, I didn't care if I ended up with false starts, or took a long time trying to understand the math, so it was easier to focus on the smarter solution.