51–60 of 104 posts
Then there's something even older: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJX0txJc6M
Shouldn't marketers try the exact opposite approach? In this paper about "Nigerian" mail fraud http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf researchers argue that it's very efficient for attackers to appear fraudulent, because this helps select the most gullible victims (true positives) while weeding out "false positives": people who respond at first, but are not scammed in the end. From the abstract:…
The Nigerian-mail-fraud-scammer needs to get the gullible person to respond. If that's 1 out of 100,000 people, they need to do what they can just to get that 1 to respond. If 100 out of 100,000 respond, they have to sift through the "noise" of not-so-gullible people to find the true gullible one.
In this case, they just want to get you to open the letter and read the sales pitch (the goal isn't to find gullible people).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hating on "marketing people" isn't just an HN thing, I think. I'm fairly sure most people hate marketers, particularly because it's their job to try and part you from your money. In fact, on HN we are probably more lenient because we are some of the people that are interested in separating people from their cash.
I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying to get rid of it. {EDIT: whenever you buy anything you're trying to get rid of that bit of money. This is true for poor people as well.} The hate for (some) marketers comes from the fact that some of them are fucking scum with bizarre feelings of entitlement. "When those other companies do it then yes I guess it is spam but trust us you re…
You can give it to me.
But seriously, what a wonderful "problem" to have.
Other than the company is getting better at mimicing humans though I didn't get a whole lot out of it.
Shouldn't marketers try the exact opposite approach? In this paper about "Nigerian" mail fraud http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf researchers argue that it's very efficient for attackers to appear fraudulent, because this helps select the most gullible victims (true positives) while weeding out "false positives": people who respond at first, but are not scammed in the end. From the abstract:…
It's unlikely that mortgage companies are deluged with bad leads because people thought the handwriting was legit. Weeding out false positives is only an issue if you have a false positive problem.
And if they'd have thrown it away, how likely is it they'll change their mind after having been tricked into opening it because it appeared to have been sent by a human?
The point of junk mail is not to be read, it's to generate valuable/actionable leads; I don't see how handwriting helps -- maybe it does, but we would need to see ultimate conversion rates (not just rates of initial inquiries for example).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying to get rid of it. {EDIT: whenever you buy anything you're trying to get rid of that bit of money. This is true for poor people as well.} The hate for (some) marketers comes from the fact that some of them are fucking scum with bizarre feelings of entitlement. "When those other companies do it then yes I guess it is spam but trust us you re…
> I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying to get rid of it. You can give it to me. But seriously, what a wonderful "problem" to have.
This type of research is also pretty amazing for speech synthesis.
If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven’t got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people. That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that…
Would you be offended if you found out that a hand-written note you received was actually written by someone's secretary? Because that's pretty standard stuff most people wouldn't consider an ethical breach.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about when you get an email from a website you just signed up for that opens with "Hi, Anigbrowl! I saw that you signed up for my site..." and is "signed" by the CEO. If you found out that was an automated email and that the CEO didn't really type it up personally, would you be equally upset?
I have the opposite issue, I'm constantly sending out personal emails asking to help people with getting setup (it's for Heroku SSL stuff and people often misconfigure things) and can't get a response from them.