101–110 of 292 posts
It's a talk by someone of European origin in Europe. It is not a science talk, it is meant to provoke thought and yes, entertain.
geez.
The correct answer is to never use programmatic ads. Ever. If you own a site, just curate a set of ads on your site that actually enhances your sites appeal. A fashion site should have matching fashion ads. A tech site should have matching tech ads. A local site should have matching local ads. Reach out to advertisers to get these ads. Never use an algorithm. You, as an editor, should be better than the algorithms. A…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reason the military is or isn't putting weapons in space has nothing to do with launch costs.
I guess that your opinion. The point is when you change the variables you change the outcome and it won't magically be for the better, especially since there's little precedence. It's pointless to loose karma over this on HN though when I can and regularly do talk about it with actual aerospace engineers.
From the article: > In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars. > These people are the face of our industry. It's hard to take the rest of the article seriously when the author is purposely misquoting people to make them look bad. The comment in question was said on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, when asked what the…
> If they could get away with it, they would demand that you have webcam turned on, to make sure you are human. And to track your eye movements, and your facial expression, and round and round we go. The window of acceptability needs to shift a couple of times (just a couple) before this happens. The next few years should amaze indeed.
The company I work for is going to pivot towards re-targeting (we're making recommendation engines, now). So, I've come to explore a bit this new industry, and I am under the impression that it's completely rotten to the core. The reason? I have been in meetings where no one would blinked an eye (even, sometimes, applaud the idea) when people would ask if we could turn on a laptop's webcam, and read if a visitor have…
Ugh—sounds miserable. Sorry to hear that you're going through that. Of course it's easy for me to say from here, but I'd suggest getting out as quickly as you can.
The company I work for is going to pivot towards re-targeting (we're making recommendation engines, now). So, I've come to explore a bit this new industry, and I am under the impression that it's completely rotten to the core. The reason? I have been in meetings where no one would blinked an eye (even, sometimes, applaud the idea) when people would ask if we could turn on a laptop's webcam, and read if a visitor have…
adtech is a modern example of the banality of evil: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/the-banality... . It's not secret Machiavellian billionaires running around shoving ad tracking upon us, it's ourselves just trying to get a tiny glint of social approval for out thinking everybody else without regard for consequences at scale.
It provided some useful insights (one thing that surprised me was how bad people were at recognising and operating drop downs), but we very quickly (we got the idea, pushed it out, started looking at data, decided to stop doing it within a day) recognised that we'd been too quick to jump at the "cool, we can do this" factor and that even though it was beneficial, it was way too invasive.
E.g. while we might think that "it doesn't matter, it's a form on our page so we'll see the data anyway", of course that wasn't true when we actually thought about it:
The keyboard events meant that e.g. if a user cut and pasted something by accident, we'd see it, and that might include things like passwords from other sites. Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else; explicitly withholding the original information from us. We didn't capture anything particularly private in the short amount of time it was live, but we saw enough changes (e.g. people changing contact phone numbers) that we thankfully recognised the problem before it became a real problem.
From the article: > In a television interview this week, Musk said: "I'm trying to do useful things." Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars. > These people are the face of our industry. It's hard to take the rest of the article seriously when the author is purposely misquoting people to make them look bad. The comment in question was said on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, when asked what the…
He makes the point that SF area technologists should prioritize fixing the city problems over space technology. You may disagree (I do), but it's not sufficient reason for dismissing the whole article (which is insightful IMO).
But he ignores all of that, and concentrates entirely on a single offhanded remark by the guy. That's incredibly dishonest.
And if he's that dishonest about Musk, what about the others he discusses? I don't know them well enough to say whether they're being fairly represented or not. But I do know that I can't trust the author to get it right.
However, I did a CTRL+F of both the article and these comments and don't see one mention of Acxiom.
The social pressure comparison to tobacco might be workable, but until there's significant "sin taxes" put on web ads, I don't think there's quite the same motivation for change.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just out of curiosity, how would turning on a web cam determine if a visitor saw an ad or not? I'm missing the logic.
You can very easily implement eye tracking to determine where they are looking.