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What Happens Next Will Amaze You

idlewords.com

753 pointssynacksynack281 comments

Ok, this is a fantastic piece that says a lot of useful and thoughtful things, some of them critical about the priorities of the SF startup scene. And what are a nontrivial portion of the HN comments doing? Complaining that he was unfair to Elon freaking Musk!!

This is exactly the sort of techno-douchebaggery that the author is writing about, so way to prove his point, nimrods.

The one redeeming quality of such comments is that they fall into the category of "HN comments that are best read in Comic Book Guy voice", and when read that way they're good for a chuckle.

It's easier to call out the author on a nitpick than to thoughtfully refute his arguments for the sake of racking up more imaginary internet points.

And the imaginary internet points incentive system HN uses implicitly incentivizes those posts.

One way to stop this would be to have people who post low-value high-expected-karma-yield posts get randomly banned. This would function as a variable punishment and should be quite effective at training HN users.

Ehhh I think HN already directs too much of the discourse. I understand the intent of minimum karma downvoting, for example, but I think that encourages elitism, because if you have to be validated with 500 karma before you can downvote, then the implication is that you're in a class of people that's better than others and you don't feel you have to explain yourself.

EDIT: like how this comment is being silently downvoted now. I would like to think that the HN community has a wicked sense of humor.

Digg started off well but went downhill very rapidly without that "elitism".

Downvoting of this comment only makes sense to me if someone disagrees with you. And on that note, is that what downvoting on HN is for? Other link aggregators typically say downvoting isn't for disagreements; that's what commenting is for.

I've only downvoted someone once, and that was for a snarky, 5-word top-level comment that did nothing to expand the conversation - the kind of downvote that is exempt from explanation.

But then there are people who silently disagree via downvote. To that I ask what the purpose must be. "I think you're wrong" - How? Why? Is it my tone? Lack of evidence? To me, downvoting without explaining is just a smug way to feel less insecure about one's own opinions without having to stand up for anything.

I find that downvotes generally account for well below 10% of my voting, and I use them mostly to denote needed correction in tone or presentation, or repeated endorsement of a "fact" without reference after it's been asked for. Even then, I'll only do so after leaving a comment or confirming someone else has a comment that covers my reasoning for downvoting. Without some explanation, it's far to easy to assume downvotes are due to disagreement on what is all to often a subjective item, which doesn't really help the discussion at all.

A Poll on people's downvoting behavior would be interesting, but as it would be self-reporting and subjective, the results would be next to meaningless if mundane.

"Worst. HN. Suggestion. Ever."

This is a perfect example of a comment that should have maybe a 1/100 chance of getting someone banned.

1. It contributes nothing.

2. It's a pop culture reference.

3. It comes from an HN brand that can be reliably expected to farm karma basically anywhere via name recognition alone.

Punishing people for gaming the system as it's intended to be gamed would be counterproductive, because the karma system itself is based on flawed assumptions. The expectation here is that high karma indicates high intellectual quality, but that's demonstrably false. It doesn't do what it's intended to do and even detracts from the value of discussion in some places.

A better way to improve content quality would be to stop using karma altogether, but I understand that's deeply baked into the culture, and probably not likely. Removing the visibility of karma scores might be an adequate compromise. Upvoting, downvoting and sorting would work perfectly fine without the temptation of a score.

Hacker News has enough passive aggressive attempts at operant conditioning as it is - the fading of text posts to discourage "blogging" is one egregious example. If you don't want people to farm karma, get rid of karma. If you want to expect more quality and better engagement from users, treat them like people and not like mice in a Skinner box.

Karma is the worst known proxy to expectations of reasonable behavior, except for all other proxies that have been tried.

It's basically a linear prediction model: someone who behaved reasonably in the past is expected to continue doing so. This is not always true, of course, but I beg anyone suggest a more precise model that can be realistically implemented.

Another purpose of karma is preventing a bot from registering 1000 accounts and using them immediatley for insistent mass downvoting. Of course, one can build rings of bot accounts that upvote each other to gain karma before operation, but this takes much more determination and skill than an internet hooligan usually possesses.

When I was new to HN I thought downvoting just didn't exist here, and I actually preferred that. Arguments that are liked get bubbled up, while inflammatory comments get ignored or slapped down by reasonable people.

> Of course, one can build rings of bot accounts that upvote each other to gain karma before operation, but this takes much more determination and skill than an internet hooligan usually possesses.

Also, ISTR mentions that HN employs voting ring detectors, and punishes detected voting rings to avoid exactly this phenomenon. So, its not just the passive difficulty that is an issue with this approach, there is active opposition.

A better and more accurate model of user behavior is probably in the comment history itself. It might take longer to read than an integer, but it does carry actual context, while a karma score doesn't.

If you have to have karma, you could attach it to comments (so indirectly, rather than directly, to accounts) and get a better overview of a user's behavior from the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. If it's necessary to have privileges like moderation be subject to some kind of test, surely some number of ok comments would be be better as an indicator than than an arbitrary karma limit?

Although given that Hacker News has literally no guidelines for voting, even that might not be a great predictor.

Those posts can serve as a jumping-off point for thoughtful discussion.

Research says that infrequent and severe punishment results in an increase of the punishable behavior; it's quick, clear and consistent, but not severe, punishment that actually curbs the punishable behavior.

I wish downvotes here could be only cast with a comment explaining the reason, to improve clarity.

I'm in huge agreement. Even if it's a drop-down to select off topic, abusive, etc, it would be so much better than the smug silence of an unexplained downvote.

That's certainly true for criminology, but I'm talking about operant conditioning. What we want is the opposite of a slot machine.

" in confrontation with entities that we encounter for the first time or do not have enough appreciation of their complexity, we approach from the most accessible angle we can understand. "

http://byterot.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/rule-of-most-accessibl...

> And what are a nontrivial portion of the HN comments doing? Complaining that he was unfair to Elon freaking Musk!!

Only if "nontrivial" means "two out of a freakin' lot". Also complains are perfectly warranted. While 'idlewords has (as usual) a lot of good points in his text, that Musk quote was straight dishonest.

Thanks, your comment led me to spend one of my two-article-limit on this and I'm glad, this once, I didn't trust the comments.

It's like some people scanned the article, paused at the picture of Elon Musk, then read the last two sentences. It's a very deep essay.

Scan the comments then, too. GP's assertion is false and it's sad that it stays as a top post right now.

You do realise that your own comment is worse than those you're complaining about? Be civil, be constructive; if you feel like particular comments are unhelpful, suggest improvements or downvote them. Don't just call them names.

Wow.... ONE, that's right ONE top level comment calls out this fact. I'll fully admit it's the one thing that annoyed me about this, I agree with the rest but they are taking that quote completely out of context and it more of a joke than anything on a late night TV show....

So I'm not sure where 1 == nontrivial portion of HN comments....

I agree with all of the author's points and quite enjoyed the read-through. The ONLY thing I took issue with was the Musk comment and even then it was just annoying, it's not like I'm going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I'm getting really annoyed by these top-rated comments saying some BS like "Everyone is complaining about X" then I look for those complaints and there are 1-2....

Because he is unfair to the the people he singles out, just to make a point. The tone shifts at that point from "get your shit together, prove you can fix some problems at a smaller level before moving to world issues" to caricaturing other people trying to do good in the world for not following his specific desired future, as if everyone needs to be focused on the same thing.

Musk is working towards something he believes has the capability to mitigate human extinction events. Whether you think that's likely or not, reducing that to "he plans detonate nuclear weapons on Mars" just so you can call it out is not exactly an above-board argument.

Maris wants to keep people alive longer, possibly indefinitely. By implying only billionaires will be able to do this, he's immediately separated Maris' goals from your own (unless you are a billionaire), and set this up as useless investment that won't help you. Let's not discount that his goal is actually to save lives.

I generally love the different talks by Maciej Cegłowski, but this one has an unneeded negative turn at the end. To put this in perspective, we can use the same tactics against this talk.

In 2012 38 million people died of noncommunicable diseases, and another almost 13 million died of communicable diseases[1], and this guy is worried about seeing shit on the streets of San Francisco? Seriously?

Is that fair to his argument? I don't think so, but it's exactly what he did to others in his talk.

1: http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs310/en/index2.ht...

True and sometimes the value of a piece is the fact that you can get something of value and learn from it even if you vehemently disagree with points made or conclusions.

Nietsche's point in the beginning of the "use and Abuse of History": “Moreover, I hate everything that only instructs me without increasing or immediately stimulating my own activity.” These words of Goethe's, a boldly expressed ceterum censeo, provide an appropriate beginning for our observations on the worth and worthlessness of history.

The great thing about a presentation like this is that it burst one of the may filter bubbles I walk around in... Oh and also it is n't Powerpoint.

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. Ads are supposed to be useful to your audience, instead of being annoying. People buy fashion magazines - filled with 600 pages of ads- and Sunday newspapers BECAUSE of the ads. They should want to visit your website as well because of your ads.

The worst thing you can do for your site is to place out-of-context ads in the middle of your site. Can you imaging if Vogue.com decided to place Flash SSD ads on their site? This is how you destroy an audience, and as a publisher, your number one concern should be to grow your audience.

Once you curate a set of ads for your site, you'll find that click-through rates and conversion are far higher than random programmatic ads. You should know your audience, and the kind of ads that would appeal to them. Mark ads as content in your CMS. This avoids ad-blockers.

Curating ads is how advertising has always worked, and will continue to work, after all these programmatic garbage goes away.

This was actually my plan (sort of) for my online sci-fi strategy game Neptune's Pride when I ditched AdSense.

I was going to hand select things on Amazon that my players would be interested in. Science Fiction books, dvd box sets, that kind of thing. Then present them to the players with my affiliate code where I would normally show a google ad.

I didn't fully implement the idea because I think the affiliate rewards are so small I was worried the math didn't make it worthwhile. But I'd still like to try one day.

This method is not really for product affiliate ads (unless you have a whole shopping section of your site devoted for that...). Amazon links are for penny-chasers anyways.

You're really supposed to curate display ads. But, this means you'll have to make the call to your local advertisers to actually sell the ads. ("Hey do you want to place an ad on our site for 6 months for $500? I'll take you out for pizza & beer if you're interested so we can talk details.") You're not going to sell display ads to Amazon, but you might for your local gaming shop.

Selling all your inventory this way is incredibly unrealistic for most people.

Then focus on developing an audience. Don't even bother chasing pennies for programmatic ads.

Once you have your audience, it becomes easier to sell ads this way.

Depends on your product/service category. There are sole operators making $x0k/mo from Amazon's affiliate program because they picked an overlooked category and promoted big ticket items. 5% of a $15 book is a pittance, but 5% of something that's $x00 is a different story.

My company's blog does this for related products that we don't personally sell in our online shop. It's good to the tune for $10k/year without trying much, but you have to get good at writing the copy into real blog posts, not just random spam. It works pretty well. Conversion rate post-click of about 8.5% this month.

If you don't mind, please drop a link to your company blog. It's good to see examples.

How about more intelligent programs?

That would work for an independently wealthy individual blogger. Otherwise for a blog with a sales team with aspirational dreams, when the Flash SSD advertiser expresses interest in advertising, he'll go for the deal to make his commission. As the owner of the blog, you block enough such deals, and you'll have yourself a never ending sales exodus

If your salesmen are suggesting SSD ads for your high-production-value female-fashion-and-lifestyle site, you need to pay more for better salesmen

If you're a content farm then rock on

My current setup blocks almost all ads by simply blocking trackers. It's ridiculous, really, since there is no targeted adblocking going on.

The only ads I see are native ones like you describe, and they're usually actually useful.

What blocker are you using, and what config?

Set Ghostery to block everything and opt-out of info sharing. Almost all ads magically disappear.

Basically yes. I also have httpsEverywhere and a newly added Privacy Badger, but they don't seem to change anything.

That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands.

Ad networks work by letting you select categories, but not much more. Obviously that's because they want to keep control and maximize short-term revenues.

>> "That would be an idea for an alternate ad network. Simply let website owners select ads, every week, to be displayed. Or in order to scale better, create pre-agreements for some brands."

Unfortunately, you have just reinvented publisher-direct deals, a mainstay of many ad networks for the past decade.

>The correct answer is to never

Ah sweet, it's that one commenter who can prescribe the absolute correct answer to very complex situations with a couple of simple platitudes! Since you seem to be in a mood to drop the correct answer, maybe you can help me with some difficult decisions I'm facing:

what programming language should I use?

what should the next move of my business be?

is she really the one, or should I move on?

Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.

I won't speak to the sarcasm-as-argument response, but I will say that there is a sentiment behind it that I do agree with.

I say - with differing commentary after the first 4-5 sentences - in every class I teach:

"I don't like the phrase 'best practice'. I won't use it. It's presumptuous and condescending. What's best for me might suck for you. Who am I to know your business requirements? There is only one true 'best practice', in my view, and that is simply to have practices that you and your team follow that serve to further your business goals and meet your business requirements. SharePoint isn't a best practice, but a system to support a corporate culture of collaboration or information sharing is a practice that many businesses can agree with. jQuery isn't a best practice, but using a framework that improves your team's productivity and helps it to meet your business' requirements - that's a good practice to follow."

We need a new phrase that gets the point across without the cognitive burden of being condescending and presumptuous. Consensus practice? Common practice? Popular practice? I don't know. But I know that "best" is a superlative that is too often used to disguise a marketing goal or to dazzle the listener/reader into accepting the superiority of the person using it.

Depending on how it's used, I find "idiomatic" to be useful. Built into the meaning is that it may not translate to other areas, and most people understand that while it is a useful shorthand to making something succinct and expressive, you fall back to other things when it doesn't match well.

Traditionally (at least I've first heard these phrases in a business context) "best practice" describes what very successful businesses do and "common practice" describes what the average business does.

I ignore this distinction and have just replaced "best practice" with "common practice" since I pretty much always want to say something along the lines of "this is how a lot of people do it, there's good reasons for it (list of reasons) but everything depends on context so critically reflect if it makes sense to follow these practices or not on an individual basis"

Not the comment parent, but I can also prescribe absolutely correct answers to complex situations via simple platitudes. There's a Udacity course on it, I highly advise taking it, but since it takes so little time I'll just answer these questions for you.

>what programming language should I use?

Haskell.

>what should the next move of my business be?

If you're not in a Series C, growth hack; if you've done your Series C, look into the Caymans.

>is she really the one, or should I move on?

Have a divorce attorney on retainer, be ready to delete your Facebook account at a moment's notice, and ideally start going to the gym now, but with those preparations in mind pursue her as if she's the one.

>Regardless of how good your advice is, proscribing a thing for every possible complex situation with the wave of a hand is disingenuous at best and dangerous at worst.

This isn't a question and I don't understand how to respond to it.

I know you're joking but this is on balance pretty solid advice.

I never joke.

That's true, but I think in general if we had someone else making our decisions for us (obviously this is completely undesirable) they'd mostly be correct. Emotion plays a huge role in what we do, many times a negative role.

Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right. You're asking sites to remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users.

Not all publishers subscribe to the low quality Google AdExchange. In fact, they typically have a variety of ad bids, and the highest bidding ads are chosen for placement programmatically.

Edit: I just visited vogue.com. Guess who served me my ad? doubleclick. It was relevant and I bet it was programmatic. Programmatic does not mean random. Ad placement programs have a lot more data to work with than any individual at the publisher. There's a lot more sense to it than manual prediction

> remove sources of income that people find relevant in exchange for ads that some higher up in marketing thinks relates to its users.

Yes, that's a move toward integrity and away from endangerment and excess income.

If "some higher up in marketing" doesn't understand their users, the problem is they're out-of-touch and that should be corrected, as opposed to endangering user's privacy.

Currently, my tiny site operates this way, with hand-chosen Amazon ads and no google Adwords.

>excess income

I don't think this a problem most small publishers have.

They need to realize that eventually the market will drive their users elsewhere. Content is king and there is more content elsewhere.

If you provide a worse user experience with the same content as another, then income will dwindle altogether.

Innovate, move forward.

If you have an interest in the 3rd party web, you should have an interest in a functional ad technology industry. The market might just drive small publishers out of business. Or drive them and their customers to walled-gardens, so we'll be reading their content on Facebook, being served Facebook ads.

And I'm not a fan of going back to AOL. But the ad tech industry and the "small publishing" industry is lazy and greedy. And I won't support them if they treat me like a product. If they don't I will support them.

I'd like to see Netflix for written content and I'd pay for it.

There are lots of automatic ways to make money like this, even more so on the cost side of a business. They are always going to look great on a spreadsheet but what you're missing is the opportunity cost of all the people that are turned off by the experience. They will fade away in a manner that's harder to measure than CTR.

I suppose that the decrease in daily / weekly / monthly audience is easily detectable.

Probably it's not very realistic to hand-pick individual ads, unless you run a very niche site. Probably it's still realistic to hand-pick the automatic ad streams you'd agree to show. I suspect the major ad networks allow you to be quite specific.

Does this become less true the more niche the website is? People who read my math blog should be served ads for technical things (math books, online courses, etc), regardless of recent search history.

In reality, I have a math blog with ads for Cap'n Crunch cereal and strange new yogurts which seem very distracting and poorly-targeted when compared to, say, ads for O'Reilly math/CS books or a MOOC on probability and statistics.

>I have a math blog with ads for Cap'n Crunch cereal and strange new yogurts

Seems like to me the algorithm gods decided that your site was better suited to advertise to parents of toddlers.

Podcasts do this very thing and it's lucrative enough for the lot of them to stay afloat while providing great content. The only thing I'd say sucks about it is the price for curated ads are probably prohibitively high compared to highly targeted, algorithmically picked ones.

> Intent-driven ads are far more relevant to a site's audience than hand-picked, static ones. They have much higher CTR and conversion rates, when done right.

Not in my experience. My hand-picked ads are alway at a higher CTR than programmatic. Intent-driven programmatic gives me a 2x CTR over random static ads. Hand tuned gives me about 10x more CTR.

You may be able to optimize down a set of hand-picked ads programmatically, but you still need that manual curation in the process.

More important is losing your audience to a bad user experience via programmatic ads when they visit your site.

Also, I'm pretty sure Vogue or the advertisers use DoubleClick as just the ad hosting network for analytic purposes. They are likely sold on a display basis in Vogue.

Good point. A combination of handpicked optimization and programmatic, intent-driven placement is likely optimal.

In my understading the author doesn´t have any problems with programmatic ads. He has a problem with tech companies using the same tech like programmatic ads, ignoring the laws and the right of users, helping goverments to bypass the laws and the right of users, camping billions abroad to avoid paying taxes but at the same time investing in important projects solving burning issues like the search for immortality or nuking other planets.

Why would Vogue show you an SSD ad unless they've got data suggesting you want to see it?

Why would Vogue show an SSD ad at all? What does Vogue know about SSDs? Nothing. Why would I think that an ad for SSDs on Vogue tells me anything about the quality of the SSD they're hocking? It's non-information and communicates nothing about the product beyond the fact that it exists. Anyone who knows what an SSD is knows where they can buy an SSD - what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy and an SSD ad on Vogue doesn't give me any information in that regard.

Your complaints have nothing to do with Vogue, but with the uselessness of an ad in general. Even if a site were talking about SSDs, you wouldn't need an ad to tell you about them, would you?

Ad networks at the moment seem to mostly provide the service of showing me pictures of things I have bought, just in case I forgot that I already own them.

> what I really want to know is which SSD should I buy

In that case you need reviews, not ads.

Ads can also communicate something about the quality of a branch/product based on how much the ad cost to run and which publication chose to run the ad. This is no substitute for a review, but if I see a non-targeted ad for an SSD in a tech publication that chooses ads based on what it thinks is good (I'm describing The Deck basically) it at least assures me that this SSD is not a hunk of garbage. Again this is not a lot, but a targeted ad tells me nothing.

On the flip side of this, if Vogue let any old crap run as advertising in their magazine this would be a form of reputation mining - trading their good name (earned after years of operation) for some short-term profit, but no-one bats an eye when the same thing happens online even though it's subtly devaluing online properties that do the same.

I think that's precisely his point; even if Vogue has an ad network with highly accurate data that points you being interested in SSDs, Vogue is probably not the right place to put that ad. It's kind of a philosophical question - do you want to see ads that are relevant to your primary interests at ALL TIMES, or do you want to see ads that are relevant to the interests of where you are. There are, let's simplistically say, three classes of ads:

1. Old Internet - Pages curate and/or sell whatever ads they can possibly get. They are generally statically hosted assets. 2. Original Ad Networks - They don't know anything about you, but it removes the need for pages to individually make ad contracts. You'll get whatever ads are in the queue, possibly sorted by rough groupings; "technology" ads, etc. 3. Current Situation - Everywhere you go you are presented with ads relevant to your interests, regardless of your current site. Vogue might try to show SSD ads or car parts ads, even though that's not the kind of content you would go to Vogue to consume.

I think there's an interesting case to be made that clickthrough decreases can be at least partially attributed to the fact that as tracking increases the probability that the ad represents the content of the site decreases and becomes an even more unwelcome distraction. Sponsored content is a way to defeat this, and ad blocking, by making the advertising appear more in line with the content of the site (or is it making the content of the site more in line with the advertising?).

I would love to do this on my personal blog, but how? I'm just a guy with a niche Wordpress blog who doesn't have the time to negotiate and search for ad deals.

What I really want is a service that can match me with advertising firms based on the content of my site, and do the negotiations for me. And give me a means with which to contest ads if I find they're not appropriate, or the matching itself if I discover my matched company is doing something immoral.

There are a few minor, but significant differences between this and programmatic ads. Do those differences make it good, or at least neutral? Does such a company exist?

Maybe I can crowdsource some help from here then - My SO has a food blog [1] which it would be nice if it were self sustaining (so ~$30USD/month for domains/hosting). She's just put up Amazon affiliate links on select articles and is still working on building traffic.

Should I stay away from AdSense? Where am I going to find the ads to "hand-pick"?

[1]: http://thecinnamonscrolls.com

A wise thing to do with sites like these is to procure the cheapest hosting you can (for a static or wordpress site, think $2 a month) and similarly cheap domain provision (although the prices don't vary so much for these). With the right provider the users will not think that the site is noticeably slower and you won't need such high monetisation targets to break even. Then, as the site gains traffic, simply scale the level of hosting accordingly.

I hope this is of use! Sam

$30/month is high monetisation?

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 seen ads or not. If internet needs tighter regulatory control, please, let's begin with advertisers.

I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.

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.

Thanks, given how things worsen I might be gone before christmas :)

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.

There probably wasn't any logic to it. It was probably the equivilant of when a PM or not technical person asks a developer, "Can't we just put in an IF statement?"

this skit is very apropos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

You can very easily implement eye tracking to determine where they are looking.

Possibly, but that doesn't seem like it would produce very reliable data though.

It wouldn't, but one can sense some logic behind that question in this context. Additionally, advertisers are very familiar with dealing with heaps of unreliable information.

The last thing advertisers want is reliable data-- that would just prove how useless the advertising was!

> 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.

Well, at a rough cut, it could verify that there was a client system with a person in front of it.

With more work you could maybe use eye-tracking, reflections, etc., to get a more reliable indication of whether the ad was visible to the user.

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.

And it's so easy. At a past company we once decided we'd test some assumptions about one of our forms by capturing keyboard events. As in, we added a handler for keypresses that'd call back to the server, so we could capture and play back exactly how users interacted with the form.

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.

Or they might write something, change their mind and enter something else

Facebook explicitly does that (log every field input even if never "submitted") and uses unsubmitted thoughts to build more detailed models of you.

The "trace-per-character" behavior terrified me when Google Suggest first launched. It's a neat tech example, but there's no way people can understand "everything I type, live, as I type, will be recorded forever." Then they made it default Chrome bar and default google search behavior. Average users (heck, even technical users) have little idea how much data internet services capture about them though non-explicit interactions.

At least with live suggestions, people explicitly see that their keypresses are acted on, whether or not all of them understand that this means it is transmitted somewhere.

With a form with a submit button and no feedback indicating what's going on, it's a lot more insidious.

Oh, this is so ripe for being gamed. How long before some enterprising person implements a simple Javascript bookmarklet that populates the field with random words and phrases, then erases it all before you type your actual comment?

> I don't think I can withstand working with that kind of people in the long term, this is really soul-destroying.

Why are you working with them now?

I realized before I was even in industry that I didn't ever want to work for a company that received their income from advertising, and I haven't worked for one in my entire career. It hasn't always been easy to find jobs, but the jobs I did find actually tended to be a bit higher-paying.

Ads are sucking up a lot of the intelligence in our society and the only people who can stop them from doing that are intelligent people. If we refuse to work with advertisers they will suffer from the incompetence of the people they do hire.

Let me start by saying I love idlewords writing and largely agree with his proposed rules (even if he did demonize something like 1/3 of my working life with 1 sentence).

> Ban on Third-Party Ad Tracking

My experience in finance makes me skeptical that this will play out the way that he hopes. Most of the financial regulation in the world started with laws "average people can understand". Things like Banks should have enough risk free capital to cover outstanding deposits and banks shouldn't make "speculative investments". But it turns out that the devil is in the details with these sorts of things. What is a "speculative investment" etc? And there are dramatic financial mismatches between the people trying to work around the laws and the people trying to enforce them.

So when I hear "information the site has about the visitor" being the only thing a publisher can share with the ad network, I have to wonder

a) can publishers share data with each other? If not how does that impact things like open ids, publisher networks etc.

b) doesn't this rule simply give even more of a stranglehold to giant companies like facebook and google? How does having a couple of giant extra-governmental tracking agencies make our lives better than having a huge network of them? If advertisers can only serve the ads they want on facebook/google, won't that mean that publishers will be levered into only using those sources for publishing? How do you break out of that cycle?

I think this is a very trenchant criticism of what I said, and I appreciate you not taking offense at me!

For a) I imagine data sharing is fine, except that you can't share behavioral data about users, and you can't use any of the shared data for advertising. That said, I know very little about how publisher networks work and would appreciate pushback.

b) is unfortunately quite right. If you're sufficiently pessimistic, one thing that makes having giant tracking agencies better is that they're more likely to not get hacked or leak your data. But I agree that this is a real problem and one that my proposals from this talk will exacerbate.

I wish I believed that giant corporations were immune from hacking.

I'm still a bit confused about how right-to-download helps non-nerds. I think I have a minor allergic reaction to things that are (a) so hard to implement that they raise barriers to newcomers and (b) only help the nerd class.

Some ways I can think of that help non-nerds:

- lets you make backups you physically control

- prevents vendor lock-in

- lets you spot and correct mistakes in things like your user profile

- lets you verify that things you deleted were actually deleted

- promotes competition by making it easier to take your data and go elsewhere

- protects your privacy by forcing vendors to keep better track internally of what user data they're storing

You don't think these are things that mostly just nerds care about?

I think the argument is that while the basic features are nerd only, they enable a better overall ecosystem.

Much like rules around financial disclosures are largely only cared about by finance nerds, but the halo allows everyone to have a better finance ecosystem.

The most clarifying moment for this was Google's comprehensive data download, which the FB Growth team found out about and actively, scalably encouraged people to use, at which point Google got institutionally offended and pulled it. It later got restored under a scary This Is Actually An Advanced Techy Thing; Pay No Attention To The Data Behind The Curtain warning.

I think we are already seeing a shift to b.), one that is only being exacerbated by ad-blocking (on mobile) - and it makes me think about what will come of the "open" web.

I have no insider knowledge, but I'm starting to think Apple is placing a huge bet on the fact that ad-blocking will 1.) eventually make the web unprofitable then 2.) shepherd users onto platforms like iOS and Facebook where they can be monetized better. This, to me, is starting as an experiment with Apple Music vs Spotify (ad enabled) to test whether their platform has enough clout to get people to pay $9.99 for their platform and is now eventually moving to News where Apple is now starting with exclusive news but may move to a pay model where you also pay $9.99 for news.

If this model "works", you may see sites move inside Apple's wall garden in order to keep the lights on, and create a barrier for new sites to ever build up an audience without relying on Apple's/Facebook's walled garden.

All this stems from the fact of my fear that while everyone seems to be gung-ho about the proliferation of ad-blockers, no one, except Apple (Music, News for now) and Facebook (News), is providing any real alternative solutions to publishers for a source of revenue.

Thank you for this talk.

Especially the part about fighting against the tobacco industry. It really made me realize that this is a fight that can be won. I honestly thought this was a lost battle.

It will, however, be a more subtle battle as the advertising industry (Big Ads ?) cannot be linked to something as clearly detremental as lung cancer and will be quick to point out that the technology developped can help fight terrorism (a winning buzzword bingo if ther's ever been one) by identifying behavior on the internet, including so-called dangerous ones.

"Big Ads" is very apt. Advertising agencies are very much like start-ups: often their goal is to get acquired by one of the major agencies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_advertising_agencies

Those top 5 agencies are the ones who can afford to do privacy-invading advertising, because they can do it at scale.

Michael Crichton on the Unproven Dangers of Secondhand Smoke https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGoZ-b1OaW4

Not accoding to the study mentioned here:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...

One of my biggest frustrations with the people working to improve politics (Lessig is probably most famous among tech crowd) is that their constant refrain of how "rigged" the system is, turns out to be highly counterproductive. Instead of mobilizing people to action, it instead sends most people--like you--into apathetic despair.

Why? Because it's easy to be apathetic. This is not a knock on you personally, it's a statement on the human condition. Most people just don't feel like they have the free bandwidth (time, money, energy) to take on a big ideological fight, particularly if they think they can't win anyway.

But the truth is that the last 100 years of history is chock full of amazing stories of victories in just such fights.

I'm most familiar with U.S. history so I'll just highlight a few:

- 100 years takes us back to the beginning of the modern labor movement. Viciously opposed by well-funded industry and government forces, it nevertheless succeeded in massively shifting social norms and installing numerous laws and regulations to protect workers. It is still a strong force today.

- 60 years takes us back to the births of the modern civil rights and environmental movements. Like labor, they were out funded by huge margins, but still changed the world through shifting social norms and numerous laws and regulations. Both are still powerful movements today.

- We only need to look back about 30 years to see the birth of the modern LGBT movement, whose victories are in our headlines today. That movement will undoubtedly continue to be a powerful force in American society for decades to come, at least.

Now take a look at those timelines... 30 years is the most recent. The tobacco victories were on a similar timeline. Nothing comes quick and easy when we're talking about moving the opinions and laws of an entire nation. But is the fight winnable? YES! The evidence says it is.

Don't tell us here on hackernews or any other geek forum. Go to a RNC or DNC event. Go convince Trump and/or Hillary that corporations and rich people should pay 1950s-style tax rates. Go sit in front of wealthy old people and suggest socialism for the benefit of the young. Go tell the afraid and well-armed that they need to spend less money being so afraid and well-armed. Make sure to bring your running shoes.

Bernie Sanders is doing exactly that, and so far it seems to be working well.

You're forgetting that we do things that nobody understands and nobody else can do. We can't raise taxes on the rich, sure, but we're uniquely armed to provide technical feedback for legal decisions.

> I don't believe there's a technology bubble, but there is absolutely an advertising bubble. When it bursts, companies are going to be more desperate and will unload all the personal data they have on us to absolutely any willing buyer. And then we'll see if all these dire warnings about the dangers of surveillance were right.

If you read this paragraph critically, it is easy to find the problem with the argument in this article.

There is a fundamental failure to explain how the privacy concerns are having a negative impact right now.

The cigarette comparison is ridiculous, because cancer is an obvious problem. Cancer is bad. Cigarettes cause cancer. It's is very easy to understand that.

What is the "cancer" correlation with online ads?

Something that might happen in the future if the advertising bubble bursts?

I'm not saying that there isn't a serious problem. It's just that the negative affects are not clearly stated. And that is a problem -- especially if you want to cause change.

People don't want cancer. That's why cigarettes are almost universally seen as bad. With online advertising, what is the correlation? I don't see one.

edit: I want to add, that in my experience as a small publisher and a small advertiser, I have no problem with click fraud. The robots are not winning. (I spend around $30-40k a year in ads, generate significantly more in ad revenue.)

I agree. In general, I found this presentation to ramble far more and make weird connections than some of his other ones, which I remember liking. Presentations and talks such as Web Design: The first 100 years[1] (even if it was a while back and I don't remember it all that clearly), and Barely succeed! It's easier![2] (which I saw within the last couple of days) are quite good (if memory serves).

1: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vt8zqhHe_c

I liked this article's start but its finish went in a very different direction. Denmark has a ton of things right about it and it's an amazing place - but mostly due to social conditions that don't exist elsewhere in the world.

Denmark was almost entirely homogeneous until the 1990s and is slowly becoming less so - but in a very racially charged way. Their fastest growing political party, the Danish People's Party, is heavily anti-immigration and anti-non-danish folks. It's also has an incredibly well educated population due to decisions made 50+ years ago that would take a massive effort and timescale to implement in the US - even if it would work.

Also the definition of rich in Denmark is equivalent to lower-middle class in the US (with healthcare added). Homes are smaller, cars are fewer, people spend more of their take home salary on food and other basics... The main difference being it is less costly to screw up in Denmark.

Things are overwhelmingly getting better for everyone and even the poorest in America... http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2015/09/were-living-through-the...

...and the value of improving computers, technology, biology, space travel on a universal time scale is huge on a utilitarian scale. Things have never improved so quickly in so many ways.

Finally - "be the change you wish to see" applies here more than ever. No one is stopping individuals from donating large swaths of their money to causes - in fact almost all of those donations come out of taxable income. Targeting individuals to do great things rather than vague policy points may be a better option when policy has overwhelmingly worked in most areas.

  The main difference being it is less costly to screw up in Denmark.

We'd call that 'having bad luck'. That's the difference between the US and Western Europe in one sentence. We don't think you deserve a life of extreme poverty, homelessness and worse if you 'screw up' in being born with a disability, lower intelligence, to bad parents or in another way that causes the system to not allow you to be the worker you were supposed to be. We don't believe most people 'screw up': we believe they are unlucky and believe we could have been them.

"San Francisco is filthy and has a homeless problem it refuses to take care of and does its best to either ignore or address indirectly. It is full of tech elite who are completely disconnected from the world around them. ... I live in San Francisco."

I thought this was a little hilarious. For so many people who live in the Bay Area, a favorite way to pass the time is to complain about how terrible it is. I too thought it was terrible, so I made the irrational decision to no longer live there.

Everything else in the piece was pretty solid, as usual.

I want to hijack the bit on the EU cookie law to bring up a recent annoyance though: does anyone else here have their browser configured to block cookies by default? I do, on my main browser. Have you got any idea just how many sites completely fail to work at all with cookies turned off? I don't just mean sites that require a login or paywalled sites like NYTimes, and I don't mean sites where some functionality is crippled. I mean sites like Washington Post, which (apparently intermittently) fail to render any content at all. For those of us that are actively taking some steps to protect our privacy, the web is gradually becoming outright hostile.

> a favorite way to pass the time is to complain about how terrible it is

you forgot the kicker - while claiming to be superior to west LA, manhattan, chicago, etc, etc, etc.

Admittedly, idlewords is a self-employed immigrant(?) sole-proprietor running a self-sufficient small business with open financial books and an equally open business model.

Far from the regular demographic starting or running our current decade's "unicorn" startups with million dollar Series B and burnrates larger than some small countries.

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if a good portion of his time or money went towards improving the state of affairs in SF. ;-)

Complaining about something doesn't mean that you're not disconnected from it, at least in the sense of feeling like you have any personal responsibility about it or agency to change it. People complain about the weather too.

> I want to hijack the bit on the EU cookie law to bring up a recent annoyance though: does anyone else here have their browser configured to block cookies by default? I do, on my main browser. Have you got any idea just how many sites completely fail to work at all with cookies turned off?

I have at various times tried to use the web this way by default, and it's frustrating to no end.

The comments from the talk about the browser being the user agent really hit home for me. The browser is all we have to fight this, and it still (mostly) does what we tell it to. There are ways to deal with cookies other than outright blocking which allow you to bypass such defective-by-design sites (e.g. "private browsing" and add-ons like self-destructing cookies).

The biggest concern I have, though, is how much computing I do on my Android telephone now. I have Firefox and uMatrix even there, sure, but it's an entire product designed to collect my data.

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 fast way to heat up Mars would be, as he posited several methods to do it. He later indicated that nuclear bombs would not be the preferred method.

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).

Musk is doing more for improving lives than most, with jumpstarting the transition to electric cars, and pushing solar power hard. And one of the complaints in the article is "you can't even get a decent internet connection" and guess what one of Musk's big projects with SpaceX is!

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.

The entire article is written to be humorous, but that's doesn't mean he doesn't have a point here. Namely, this mindless pursuit of space is hilariously culture-deaf because in the end, if all these miracles somehow come to pass, we'll just bring our stupid problems with us to our colonies. In a few generations we'll have homeless people on Mars and a tech bubble exploding there as well.

If we can't fix these problems locally, how do we expect to fix them remotely?

The article most definitly does not have a (valid) point here. Idlewords is painting Elon as a bored billionaire who wants to nuke Mars because he has nothing better to do. It's completely ignoring both the reasons (and context) of the quote, and the fact that said 'bored billionaire' makes good and impactful progress in three important big problems of humanity - namely, energy safety, transportation and access to space.

Even what you call "mindless pursuit of space" isn't so; SpaceX aims for space for known, well-thought and well-defined reasons. It's not just fueled by imagination.

SpaceX is COTS welfare for LEO launches to the soon to be retired ISS. It is not on track for Mars colonization. Its utility is vastly exaggerated by the types of people who read HN and reddit. While it is impressive, it is just cheaper launches for certain edge cases. Colonization and terraforming other worlds is pure fiction right now and going on TV and yelling about dropping nukes to make Mars human safe looks absolutely crazy to even educated people.

The article paints Musk fairly, as an out of touch dreamer with crazy ideas. He steps over homeless people to rush to television producers to spout off the same canned futurism we've been hearing for decades. His version is slightly more plausible, but it, of course, ignores all social issues; issues that will only follow us into space. The same way futurists predicted a moon landing but never imagine women would get to vote, for example.

Criticizing Musk for putting the cart before the horse is valid. Futurist talk is cheap and historically wrong. Men like Musk are the face of tech and its a little embarrassing to see stuff like this. Not to mention his hysterical tirades about how AI will enslave humanity.

Lastly, whats my incentive to migrate to a new colony if its just going to have the same problems we have here on Earth?

> SpaceX is COTS welfare for LEO launches to the soon to be retired ISS. It is not on track for Mars colonization.

That's a very cynical view based on... I don't even know exactly. NASA is not the only customer of SpaceX, LEO doesn't end with ISS, and the path towards Mars was laid more-less explicitly since day one. They're on track, even if behind the schedule.

> The article paints Musk fairly, as an out of touch dreamer with crazy ideas. He steps over homeless people to rush to television producers to spout off the same canned futurism we've been hearing for decades. His version is slightly more plausible, but it, of course, ignores all social issues; issues that will only follow us into space. The same way futurists predicted a moon landing but never imagine women would get to vote, for example.

That smells strongly of copenhagen interpretation of ethics[0]. So Musk is trying to solve a problem (or three problems) for humanity, and suddenly he has to be responsible for all the problems? Why aren't we criticizing Bill Gates here for helping Africans fight malaria instead of helping Americans fight homelesness at home? Also; SpaceX, Tesla and Solar City are creating jobs. Which counts for doing something towards the problem. What exactly are people criticizing Musk here doing themselves for the homeless?

[0] - http://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethi...

> If we can't fix these problems locally, how do we expect to fix them remotely?

That seems at odds with centuries of human existence. Nations, cultures, and people have migrated, immigrated, expanded, and contracted for a very long time. A hyper-local focus is (probably) just as toxic as a hyper-global focus, no?

This is a great piece, but I have to post a correction for this: "It boils down to this: fake websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money."

There are, in fact, also real websites serving real ads to fake traffic for real money. When publishers promise an advertiser impressions or downloads or some other metric on a campaign, and then the traffic fails to materialize, the marketing department can always call in the bots. It happens at some of the biggest and most reputable sites out there, and what's crazy is the agencies (middlemen who buy ads on behalf of publishers) know it and don't care because hey, the metrics got met and they got paid their cut!

Thank you, I appreciate the correction! That tactic hadn't occurred to me.

Drop me an email and I can tell you all about it :) (my first name at my full name dot com).

> The tech industry is not responsible for any of these problems. But it's revealing that through forty years of unimaginable growth, and eleven years of the greatest boom times we've ever seen, we've done nothing to fix them.

This bothers me. This bothers me a lot. There are two problems with this.

First, it's not tech's problem to fix. It's a city-wide problem. Faulting tech for not solving problems that are not tech's to solve is at best dishonest.

Second, this ignores the way that these problems have been codified as unsolvable by the city. For instance, you'll find a lot of support for housing first approaches among the tech community. You'll find virtually zero real support in the city, because that approach requires building housing. We all know how well that goes over. Pretty much any change encounters similar entrenched resistance.

So we wind up with a tech community that finds itself incapable of solving problems for everyone. We cannot contribute to our neighborhoods because our neighbors blow their tops when we try. We do the next best thing - we solve problems for ourselves. It's very far from ideal, but at least we can make ourselves a bit less miserable. We're going to get yelled at either way, so we might as well do so in comfort.

Want to see this change? Start by looking at why we stop caring about the communities we're in. I know I can't be bothered to care about people who have done their best to make me feel unwelcome from day one. "We don't want your kind here" does not move me to empathy - or funding local artists.

First, it's not tech's problem to fix. It's a city-wide problem. Faulting tech for not solving problems that are not tech's to solve is at best dishonest.

Tech workers living in the city are no less of residents because of their job. Tech is no less a participant of the city than any other business sector. Your post is basically the Bystander Effect in action.

Does that mean we should blame the finance industry for also not cleaning up the indigent? Because I'm on board with that.

I've seen what happens to people who advocate for things like more housing in SF. Do I need to be personally crucified in the media in order to be allowed suggest that there are major problems? Is it the Bystander Effect to note that a lot of people are trying all the things that are supposed to work and they're collectively accomplishing fuck-all? And that maybe throwing more time and effort and money into what's not working may not be wise?

But nevermind that. What do you think I should do? If you answer is to get involved in (local politics|my neighborhood group|planning board|whatever), then at what point am I allowed to give up in frustration at no problems being solved?

Right now I'd love for there to be some course of action that doesn't have a lot of precedent as a monstrous waste of time. I'll settle for being allowed to say that something isn't working.

When websites become regulated web developers will be like the general contractors of today. Only licensed web developers will be able to legally build websites, keeping everything up to the regulatory code. There will be inspectors and red tape.

I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

IMHO certainly not a good thing. The Internet needs less centralisation, not more.

Why not have both?

Building codes are there for a reason. Have we had our equivalent of Tacoma Narrows or Triangle Shirtwaist yet? The event that Schneier said would be the "privacy Exxon Valdez"? Possibly the OPM hack qualifies as the latter.

Provided we get codes that recognise the difference between personal, small business, and large business, it won't be so bad.

Various governments are already attempting to push "building codes" for privacy in software.

http://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/features/deleting-a-whatsap...

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/08/421251662/...

You cite two examples against privacy, but not the EU (mostly) pro-privacy data protection rulings. Or accessibility requirements.

In the long term trying to preserve privacy entirely through guerilla action isn't going to work (see China), and it certainly isn't going to work for everyone, so we need to take advantage of the normal democratic channels to achieve the right changes.

It's interesting you say this. My father-in-law has worked in a number of quite heavily regulated industries (heating and building, for the most part), and often refers to what I do as being "the wild west". I think he mostly views it as a positive and regularly talks about making hay whilst the sun is shining...

Well, in the US at least, there is a homeowner exemption, meaning that you can do the work unlicensed as the homeowner, it still has to be inspected though.

The effective inspection requirements vary. In rural areas outside of city limits (with the possible exception of really wealthy counties) no remodel is inspected ever. In suburban areas outside of city limits inspection is more likely if plumbing or electricity is involved, but is by no means universal. My impression is that most severe problems are caught by the home inspectors that mortgage lenders require.

This seemed a bit uncalled for:

"Here's Elon Musk.

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."

Italics mine.

I agree with him. Billionaires are prescriptive. "I will solve this problem".

It doesn't hurt to ask what problems need solving.

Ultimately this just isn't altruism but it is promoted as whilst people are in deep shit all around him.

I'm not really sure what my point is but I suspect it is a new form of hypocrisy.

There's truth in that, but in Musk's case, he's already done a great deal for the world with Tesla and SpaceX. If Mars is what he wants to do with the rest of his money, that is his choice. Certainly better than what certain other billionaires are doing with theirs.

Huh? What have SpaceX and Tesla done "for the world"? Provide rich people with electric sports cars?

Tesla has shown that electric cars can be both viable and cool. Even if if Tesla itself remains a niche car, Tesla should get the credit if/when in the future electric cars become the norm.

In addition Tesla is betting big on making better batteries. If they can pull that off then that will end up being their true legacy with the whole car thing becoming a neat historical footnote.

As for SpaceX they'll go down in history as pioneers of commercial space flight and wherever future commercial companies decide to take us, they'll all point back at SpaceX as the company that first showed that it could be done.

Well. If SpaceX succeeds in its goal of making putting things in space significantly cheaper, they could enable a lot of nasty things like weapons in space, global surveillance systems, increased use of military drones etc.

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.

I will certainly concede that there are scenarios where it works out to be for the worse. However I don't believe that any of those scenarios involve military weapon platforms. I am however more than happy to hear arguments as to why I am wrong.

You could say that about any technology. "The invention of microwave technology will just lead to microwave weapons, Oh No!"

That doesn't make it wrong.

If those "microwave weapons" end up enabling the killing of millions of people (like e.g. nuclear weapons can wipe out the whole earth), then those left will be right to say:

"Hmm, maybe we were better off without microwave technology after all. In fact, just because we can make something, probably doesn't mean that we should make it".

Sure, it's always a concern. Just because we make something doesn't mean that we should use it. So you've already got that ethical dilemma covered on the basis of usage, if not invention.

On the other hand, if you don't develop technology, you'll never know if it will be used for good, and you'll never see the advantages if it is. And failing to develop something does nothing to prevent someone else from developing it later. If something is possible, you want to be the one making it possible, not the one cowering in fear while someone else forges on ahead.

It did. And you pay good money to carry one on your person.

Ever wonder why what comes out of Silicon Valley seems to augment the Military surveillance effort?

"The Secret History of Silicon Valley": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

I don't see any problem in considering the good and bad of any technology, its implementation and its effects. I would say it's good engineering practice if anything.

More than anything I think premature, excessive and/or misguided credit is damaging to engineering and entrepreneurship. It shifts the focus from knowledge and creativity to adoration and exceptionalism. Quite opposite the mindset of Musk himself.

I don't think Musk has proven anything yet but has given people some hope that things are certainly possible.

I genuinely don't believe we need electric cars though at all. We need less travel and transport and redistribution of facilities and skills. That's a much bigger problem. At the moment, the hub/spoke and centralised model of society has no redundancy and providing ubiquitous cheap transport isn't going to solve that, just make the problem hang on longer by forcing people to remain sitting on their butts on a freeway in a slightly better car rolling into a job they could probably do at home or doesn't need it exist anyway.

Also batteries need to be filled up, recycled, disposed of still. We'll see how that goes shall we...

SpaceX isn't fundamentally changing the model of anything, just packaging the same turd differently. That might be to build capital (customers = capital) but there isn't anything fundamentally different to what they are doing at the 10,000ft level. ESA have had a similar model for a couple of decades.

> SpaceX isn't fundamentally changing the model of anything, just packaging the same turd differently. That might be to build capital (customers = capital) but there isn't anything fundamentally different to what they are doing at the 10,000ft level. ESA have had a similar model for a couple of decades.

Of course they are. The whole point of everything they do is to cut down the costs of launching things into space by 2-3 orders of magnitude, which itself is just a step towards their real goal, i.e. Mars. They're pretty straightforward about it.

SpaceX did fire a cheese into space. http://www.space.com/10459-wheel-cheese-launched-space-priva...

As much as I'd love to own a Tesla car and it does show a lot of innovation in the right direction, it's still a luxury sports car that only few very rich people can own.

If he built an electric car for the masses, that would be a big deal for the world.

Of course he's pushing inovation, but he still hasn't done "a great deal for the world".

Maybe he caused some changes in the US, I'm not in a position to see that, but saying he changed the world is quite a stretch

> If he built an electric car for the masses, that would be a big deal for the world.

This is exactly Tesla's goal with the Model 3, targeted at $35,000.

I don't think you understand the amount of time and money required to reach mass production scale of affordable vehicles. Tesla was very wise to start with high-margin sports and luxury cars, because it gives them the capital needed to continue re-investing in production capacity and battery technology for more affordable cars in the future.

Tesla is playing a long game, and so far it's working. The popularity of Tesla alone has driven other auto makers to step up their electric car game, which is indeed a "great deal for the world" to help get us all off combustion engines.

Interesting, was not aware of that project.

Agreed that maybe the luxury car is the right way to start his attempt with a healthy cash flow.

In fact, I'm a big fan of people like him, who have the money and instead of just playing the markets to get more of it, he uses it to build something that can eventually help us.

The main reason for my comment was that some people idolize him like he has cured cancer or erradicated world hunger. These people should to take a step back :)

You could say the same thing about cellular telephones, which once upon a time were also luxury items that only very rich people could own. If they hadn't gone through the "here's a fancy thing for the rich" phase they never would have reached the "here's an affordable thing for everyone" phase.

It's his money, not ours or the governments. If he wants to wipe his arse on his cash and set it on fire it's none of our business.

> Billionaires are prescriptive. "I will solve this problem".

That's good, and that's sort of the point of getting money, is it not? We should encourage those who are rich to pursue goals beneficial to everyone. They have the ability to achieve things no "democratic" groups (and countries) can, because the latter are plagued with coordination problems.

Yes, I thought that both this line, and the Peter Thiel reference about giving women the vote, were intellectually dishonest.

"Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars."

This deliberately takes the quote out of context to make it seem silly.

Thiel wasn't "complaining" about the extension of the franchise. He was simply making the historical observation that women are a hard constituency for libertarians to convince.

"Then he outlined his plan to detonate nuclear weapons on Mars."

This isn't a new idea - Kim Stanley Robinson mentions nukes being used to melt underground polar ice in his Mars trilogy.

After all, we'd all think using nukes to move an asteroid on a collision course with Earth was a good idea - so its not like a "harmless" use of a nuke is impossible.

I think this is the source of Musk's "claim": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV6hP9wpMW8

Musk just said that there are 2 options how to warm up Mars: the fast way and the slow way, Colbert asked about the fast way so Musk mentioned Thermonuclear weapons. IMO the quote in the presentation is not honest.

I don't think it was uncalled for. It takes into account that the target reader/listener is up on current events (the Musk quote from Colbert) and is in on the joke that it is an exaggeration, but one that parodies itself.

In the long run, writers (and presenters) must take the risk and assume that their audience is intelligent and informed, lest we be left with lowest common denominator dreck.

Very interesting and thought provoking piece. Some pretty strong points being made. I'm on board with the "valuation-crazy" criticism and the "San Francisco sucks" part was also interesting.

I really like the suggested "creative commons type licenses for websites" or promises. I have doubts that it'll work but its a reasonable instrument that I'd like to see. There's already ways of promising these things but I like the idea of having nice icons and solid branding for it like you get with CC.

I disagree with some points, most notably the "money sitting offshore doing nothing" one. It's not hoarded it's saved to be spent later (which is actually a good thing). The central planning argument also seems contradictory. He rails against big VC making decisions about what to do but then it seems that his suggestion for a fix is letting some other elite (himself?) decide. I'd much rather have the people that invest their money make the decisions than some social norm that says "space flight/immortality is not a desireable/realistic goal"

Of all the recommendations in this piece, I think the right to be offline is by far the most necessary. I simply do not trust my devices not to track me without permission. I have no way of knowing whether or not my mic and webcam are on at any time and if someone in Maryland is staring at my bloodshot eyes staring at the New York Times.

Every Internet-connected device should have a hardware off switch, same for cameras and microphones. I would be interested to hear the opinions of people who disagree.

Not that I disagree overall, but there are good reasons why manufacturers avoid hardware off switches:

  - ugly
  - unreliable
  - confusing UI: you need to know whether it was physically switched off or auto-powered-down to know how to turn it back on

Solving some of these, like by designing a better mechanical switch, might push things forward.

Tape a piece of tin foil over your webcam.

There are two groups that put tape over their webcams in large enough numbers for me to casually notice a trend. Grandparents, and people who work in infosec.

>I've also met people on the YouTube ads team, and they hate their lives and want to die.

Maybe those informational widgets that pop up when you Google suicide-related terms didn't actually arise from a sense of humanity or civic duty, but from a desire to reduce employee turnover in their ad divisions. /s

Macabre humor aside, I actually wonder if there's any organizations out there funding ads targeted at suicidal individuals. Search terms can only go so far, and ad networks have the ability to gain a far more complete picture. You'd almost think it's something ad networks would partner up on pro bono.

Moreover, it's not hard to imagine imperfect targeting being beneficial, e.g. a family member being alerted to a loved one's state of mind via receiving the ads themselves. Obviously there's quite a few ways such a scheme could backfire or otherwise have adverse effects, though it is interesting to contemplate.

Asking google for suicide topics usually starts off with a big info box (non-ad unit) of:

  Need help? United States:
  1 (800) 273-8255
  National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
  
  Hours: 24 hours, 7 days a week
  Languages: English, Spanish
  Website: www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org

As for YouTube ad engineers, pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them. So, the engineers implementing these things must be under corporate (read: clueless) pressure to crapify the user experience solely to appease management.

(edit: It's also hilarious how ad tech people refuse to recognize how evil and backwards their entire business models are. They vehemently defend, downvote, and mob-mentality their way through the cognitive dissonance of hurting hundreds of millions of users in exchange for retaining their jobs. Because, after all, if I'm doing the work, it can't be bad, right? I'm not a bad person, so the people arguing against me must be the evil ones.

One comment theme that seems to get instant downvotes on HN: the concept you are not entitled to track and record every client-side user action. So many people assume invasive tracing and recording of all user behavior is "just how the world works" and "if we don't do it, we'll fall behind." Kinda military-oligarchy mindset, isn't it? If we don't have all the power, who knows what people will do!)

>pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea

What makes you say that?

>Asking google for suicide topics usually starts off with a big info box (non-ad unit) of:

Yeah, I wasn't suggesting those were ads.

> ... pretty much everybody on the planet knows forced pre-roll youtube ads are a bad idea. Nobody wants to watch them.

Totally agree. I'm amazed a better method hasn't been implemented.

It seems like anti-suicide ads would be mostly funded by the Ad Council, religious organizations, and non-profits.

When I switched my evil bit on, I came up with a company that helps you make your suicide look like an accident, so that your life insurance pays out, and no one perpetuates hateful memories of you for taking the easy exit.

The premium service makes your suicide look like a civil offense against you, so that your family may also win an additional settlement from a large corporation or government entity.

The extra-evil service matches you up with a demolitions engineer from a terrorist organization that most closely shares your values.

The morally questionable service matches you up with rich people awaiting organ transplants, who don't pay you to kill yourself, per se, but rather to enjoy the final moments of your life in the vicinity of a particular hospital, without being burdened by worry about the future financial needs of your loved ones.

And that's where I turned my evil bit off, because I was starting to creep myself out.

I'm so glad someone finally has courage to comment so poignantly on what San Francisco has become. This sentence will stay with me: "But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable"

Hey! Reminds me a Washington DC.

SF is pretty culturally hostile to outsiders. Maybe if more residents felt like it was "their" city, rather than just the place they live, they would feel a greater sense of responsibility to improve it.

This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.

> This problem probably affects most cities with a large transplant population.

I've been thinking about this a lot mainly because I live in Nashville which is experiencing its own growth challenges with a lot of transplants. I've been here since 2008 (TN since 98) and I'm really only just now being to take "ownership" of the city. Perhaps it's because I'm out of school finally and thinking more long term, but it's tough to consider a city "yours" when you know you're going to be transitioning (potentially) to a new job and a new city.

But since I've got a job here, it seems like it's more appropriate to put more effort into my own hometown. It's tough to get past that mindset that you're only renting the city and somebody else will clean it up. Part of it is there seems to be a stigma against having an opinion about how a city should be without a certain amount of time spent living in the city. This just encourages, in my mind, a bad attitude towards active civic involvement. But it has to be tempered with the understanding that a transplant does have less experience of living in the city.

I don't know where I'm really going with this. Maybe all I'm saying is young people, I think, probably view the city they study in as they do their student housing or an apartment: something they rent and somebody else's problem.

It's very difficult to feel that a city is "yours" when you are constantly attacked for the gall of trying to do so.

>Eighty years of effective technical regulation (and massive penalties for fraud) have made commercial aviation the safest form of transportation in the world.

De Havilland comet crashes and the ensuing bankruptcy probably is the real reason why flying is safe.

Usually when regulating succeeds, the industry is with the government trying to get loose guns back in the line.

> 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 tech is already on the roadmap for set top boxes and roku-type devices to scan the room for wifi and Bluetooth devices in order to determine how many many people (and who) are in the room, and tailor the ads accordingly.

I know HN is pedantic about original titles, but shitty ones like this are better to be edited.

In this case, the URL alone is enough to tell you that it’s probably worth reading.

I assume you are familiar with idlewords.com since before?

It's the blog of Maciej Cegłowski, somewhat famous in certain circles for running successful one-man business Pinboard [1]. His blog posts end up on here pretty often too [2].

[1] http://pinboard.in/

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?query=idlewords.com&sort=byPopularit...

It's not, unless you already know the kind of content it carries.

It's a terrible title...

Personally, the title just told me that it's probably one of those "you won't believe what happens next" YouTube videos.

The URL told me that it's probably a talk (maybe about that category of videos?) using words that don't do anything.

Skimming the first screen worth of text led me to the conclusion that it must be about privacy or hacking.

And here I see comments about advertising?! Two or three words, one being "Talk", the other being whatever this is actually about, would have helped tremendously here.

I think you have been trolled. I was pleasantly surprised to skim this page and find that most of the threads were not devoted to the clickbaitedness of the title; most people got the joke. Yes buzzfeed-style titles are awful but most of us know that already.

I only sort of get it. What does the idea of reining in advertisers run amok have to do with accepting socialism as the one true government? The connection seems tenuous.

His point is that this is a larger symptom of Silicon Valley having a bad sense of how to improve peoples lives or what's important. This was my least favorite part of the talk and it was my least favorite part of the talk when he touched on the same theme in "Web Design: The First 100 Years"[0].

[0]: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

What makes it your least favorite part?

To quote:

>But we expect that people will trust us to reinvent their world with software even though we can't make our own city livable.

Where does it propose "socialism as the one true government"?

>I would urge you to get back in touch with this side of yourselves, climb in the longboats, and impose modern, egalitarian, Scandinavian-style social democracy on the rest of us at the point of a sword.

I think you answered your own question there.

It is only in the United States that "modern Scandinavian-style social democracy" is apparently indistinguishable from socialism.

Socialism means large-scale state ownership -- or some other kind of collective ownership by The People -- of "the means of production", in the hope of controlling production to match need. Scandinavian-style social democracy means high taxes, a generous welfare state, and quite a lot of government regulation, in the hope of keeping people safe, healthy, and adequately fed and housed. You might worry that there might be a slippery slope from the latter to the former, but they aren't at all the same.

Uh, considering that many major European parties explicitly identify as "socialists," I'm not sure it's the US that's confused.

It's the US that is confused with the notion that socialism == communism.

Its kind of like how countries with "Democratic" in the name usually aren't democracies. Or "Peoples" in the name usually means the general public are not even remotely in charge. Politically, names don't mean much.

They do when everyone else agrees. They call themselves socialist, other people call them socialist, and their policies match most definitions of socialism.

Tell me again why you think we shouldn't rightfully classify many European parties as socialist?

Perhaps 'gjm11 is caught on Pinker's euphemism treadmill? If "socialist" is no longer a word we can use in polite company, how will we signify that political and economic arrangement?

I don't think I'm caught on the euphemism treadmill; I have no problem describing some systems and some people as socialist. (And, for the avoidance of doubt, I don't regard it as an insult to do so.) I just don't think it applies accurately to Scandinavian-style social democracy.

That's reasonable. If you wouldn't mind, you could help understanding by pointing to particular aspects of the Scandinavian style that disqualify the "socialist" classification. After all, there are some people on HN who unironically describe USA as "socialist".

(Apologies for the tardy reply.)

Many European parties have things like "social democratic" in their name. They advocate social-democrat politics.

Some European parties have "socialist" in their name. They mostly advocate socialist politics.

The social democrats have typically had more electoral success than the socialists. That is why the nations of Europe frequently implement social democracy and less often implement socialism.

So, e.g., none of the parties currently represented in the Swedish parliament has "socialist" in its name, but the largest is the "Swedish Social Democratic Party". (There is a "Left Party", which I think is an actually socialist party.)

In Denmark there is a party called the "Social Democrats" which is, guess what?, a social democratic party; there is also a (much smaller) "Socialist People's Party" further to the left. I think that one is actually a leftier social democratic party, but then Denmark also has a centre-right party called "Left" :-).

Norway's main social-democrat party is called the Labour Party, but they also have a "Socialist Left Party" which is actually socialist.

All those things you have described are classed as socialism in the UK as well.

These advertising proposals are actually surprisingly reasonable and acceptable. It's nice to see someone admitting that eliminating advertising entirely, or eliminating all JavaScript, is not a tenable goal.

Having worked at several publishers, this is actually an advertising model we could support. It would work better for users, publishers, and most advertisers. The only people who would lose out are the AdTech firms.

Unfortunately, I think getting there requires that the people who want this sort of thing start acting reasonable. Instead of constantly demanding the death of all JavaScript, or an end to a century-old business model, demand measured change like this.

Very interesting analogy between VC and communist central planners. Makes a lot of sense.

Followed by a conclusion that communism would be the solution, which makes a lot less sense...

He said social democracy, which has nothing to do with communism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Social_Democratic_Labo...

"The RSDLP later split into Majority and Minority factions, with the Majority (in Russian: "Bolshevik") faction eventually becoming the Communist Party of the Soviet Union."

I don't understand the disdain for technically literate people shown a few times in the article. Solving the problems is the better solution but in the face of how impossible it is due to the changing landscape maybe it would be a good idea to educate tech illiterate people instead. I think it's a viable alternative with possible positive side-effects of getting enough momentum to make legal solutions possible as well.

Additionally, sad news is that there a lot of people who don't care about their privacy or the homeless however hard you find that to believe.

It starts of by saying there is a video version. Does anyone have a link?

I have not found one yet; I do not believe one has been posted at the moment. But, I would love to see the actual talk and the Q&A as well. Here's hoping one gets posted.

I would like to know this as well. I'd love to show this to people, but asking them to read a rather lengthy piece is a bit much.

I just have to take issue with his claim about privacy being a luxury good:

  In this world, privacy becomes a luxury good. Mark Zuckerberg 
  buys the four houses around his house in Palo Alto, to keep 
  hidden what the rest of us must share with him.

What nonsense! The neighbors still live there and pay him instead of a bank. He did it to prevent a developer from forcing him to move, essentially.

And no one forces us to give our data to him. Don't abuse language. Only the state can legally use force, and they often do it illegally as well.

I don't exactly have warm and fuzzies about Mark, but there's enough truthful appalling material out there to support your claims about the lack of privacy.

Here is Bill Maris, of Google Ventures. This year alone Bill gets to invest $425 million of Google's money, and his stated goal is to live forever.

He's explained that the worst part of being a billionaire is going to the grave with everyone else. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”

This is my FAVORITE example of SV silliness. "Waah death! But I'm TOO RICH to die!"

I must have missed the bit where how this simpler new world will get rid of ad-clicking bots is explained.

I guess if we’re returning to a simpler age then all ads are display ads & rates are set by guesstimating website reach using old school methods: things like actually going out and surveying your target audience to see how many of them actually read the site in question.

If the new normal is “We've sold our customer’s privacy and personal data to the highest bidder and yet we’re still wasting 50% of our ad spend & have allowed a faceless Silicon Valley company to insert itself in between us and our customers.” then the old way of doing things suddenly looks quite attractive by comparison.

it's fine, pay per click sucks anyway. They will just move to the renting space model that is being used (and proven to work) in billboards.

advertisement revenue and ads ROI calculations predates internet by a fair margin

>The people in 1973 were no more happy to live in that smoky world than we would be, but changing it seemed unachievable.

Not even remotely true. "some" people were no more happy. Most were not just used to it, but enjoying it.

I love the bare-bones layout of this page. Very easy to read. All bloggers should learn something.

Shorter lines are easier to read. Not like this -- https://aws.amazon.com/message/5467D2/ -- which is impossible to read without narrowing your browser.

Oh, and these idealistic socialists you want to take over and transform San Francisco? Good luck dealing with them once they're in power. Oh, wait, doesn't SF already have a fairly socialistic city government? It's done so well for the quality of life...

The real problem is crony capitalism, where large corporations have captured government regulatory processes, and effectively work hand-in-glove to maintain control of world processes that only benefit the "elite".

So we're now at the point where Douglas Adams' Electric Monk[1], [2] idea becomes viable, except for watching ads, not for believing in things for you...

Someone should start an "advertising consumption as a service" company where we can pay a subscription to a 3rd party to provide software to consume all of the ads that would otherwise be targeted at the user! Some of that fee can then be sent to the original advertisers as a return on otherwise-lost advertising revenue!

Please note, that this in no way resembles a protection racket.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirk_Gently%27s_Holistic_Detec...

[2]: http://theelectricmonk.com/ElectricMonk.html

I suspect it won't be long before ad networks supply self-hosted proxies in multiple languages for sites owners to use. Or, since ad blockers primarily use DNS names, ad networks could simply add CNAME support to their infrastructure. Granted, either approach would injure the ad networks' ability to track you, and expose those cookies to the site owner, but I would suggest that fingerprinting tech is mature enough that proxying the request won't prevent the ad networks from correlating identities.

It's cat-and-mouse. We're enjoying the benefits of a faster, safer and cheaper web (as are the developers behind those content sites using the ads, I reckon), but my prediction is that those benefits will be short lived. There are cleverer people than the browsing masses, they will find a way.

Love how his use of humor, like the red/pirate/danish flag just go right over the head of commenters here. HN stereotypes in full effect.

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.

It's unfortunate how this piece goes off the rails towards the end, because it's so well-written and elegantly persuasive.

a) The parlous state of San Francisco does not strike me as relevant to the issue of how advertising violates privacy on the Internet.

b) And then when he does get on the topic he exhibits the same blind spot he's decrying in other techies -- ignoring the role of decades of foolish ideological governance and one-party rule of the city leading to its terrible social stratification, and instead deciding to blame techies for not inventing more comfortable park benches for the victims of those policies to sleep on.

- "...and robots love money"

30 years of reading Science Fiction and I never thought I'd hear those words...

You need to watch more Futurama.

Read the text, and find it rather troublesome that the author is constrained to thinking of advertising and invasions of privacy as such a new phenomenon. Yes, I get that it has advanced significantly. New players, etc.

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.

Really interesting, thanks for sharing.

I guess my reluctance to raise any hopes here is caused by two things;

a) Unless I'm missing a trick this is a legislative issue, and fighting for privacy isn't on the political agenda (except maybe in Iceland because those folks are phenomenal). What's more, until the ERMAGHERD TERRRRRSM narrative changes it won't get a look in, and even then you'd need to get enough people interested in privacy to make it a fair fight against all the lobby groups who'd want to shut you down.

b) Some of these proposals seem overly privacy-centric to me, which I guess is fair in the early stages of an idea, but it makes me worry that it won't be taken any further. The example that comes to my mind is limiting behavioural data to 90 days. Some insights from behavioural data might take a year or more to come to light. While as a consumer I might shrug at 90 days, as someone trying to understand how people use new types of products I personally would push back against that as being unreasonable (and a hinderance to innnovation).

Advertisers will get their wish (crawlerbots don't have a pulse) when wearable tech becomes more mainstream. A quote from The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson:

You could get a phantascopic system planted directly on your retinas, just as Bud's sound system lived on his eardrums. You could even get telæsthetics patched into your spinal column at various key vertebrae. But this was said to have its drawbacks: some concerns about long-term nerve damage, plus it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the fucking middle) all the time—even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who'd somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself

Brilliant - I am starting to draft the regulations as a test of the viability (please see http://blog.paul-Brian.com) but the one I really want to try is the GPL version of privacy law.

"You can have my data if these conditions apply".

Love it

This will probably get me hellbanned here, but here's a bit of gold:

"The companies that come out of [venture capital funding] are no longer pursuing profit, or even revenue. Instead, the measure of their success is valuation—how much money they've convinced people to tell them they're worth."

I yearn now for a modern day Ambrose Bierce to write up something clever and cutting, with entries like:

_valuation_: how much money you've convinced people to tell you you're worth

>This will probably get me hellbanned here, but here's a bit of gold:

Oh can we please not start adding this bit of meta to our posts? It's in the same category as "I know I'm going to be downvoted..."

> The losers are small publishers and small advertisers. Universal click fraud drives down the value of all advertising, making it harder for niche publishers to make ends meet.

This is absolutely not true in my case. I'm both a small publisher and a small advertiser. I have absolutely no trouble making ends meet. Perhaps I will in the future, but it is very unlikely that click fraud or or privacy concerns will be to blame.

How many people do you employ and/or pay livable wages to produce content?

I work with around a dozen freelance writers regularly. I usually aim to set the pay so they'll earn a minimum of $25 an hour. Although, they're freelancers, so that really isn't up to me. I just accepted a piece for publication -- and I'm fairly certain the writer spent no more than 30 minutes on it. The call for submissions went out, and 30 minutes later I got the piece. I'm paying $65 for it.

In general, I'm always looking for ways to justify spending more money on producing better content. I work hard to build the trust of my audience and to provide ever increasing value to them. Fortunately, as my business grows, this becomes easier in some ways, due to economy of scale. A bigger audience generates more revenue, which means I can spend more on content. Better content means more readership, which in turn increases revenue. It's a gratifying business. :)

"Apple alone has nearly $200 billion in cash that is doing nothing."

Um, I assume they have it invested in some manner.

According to http://www.cheatsheet.com/features/how-does-apple-invest-its...:

Cash, money market instruments, and other types of fixed income. Basically lots of things that can be turned into cash quickly without much volatility in their price.

But it's still invested in the sense that somebody is leveraging it.

"When it bursts companies are going to be more desperate and will unload all the personal data they have... to any willing buyer."

I have long predicted this outcome and always thought I was being a bit too realistic. It's nice to see someone else making the same forecast.

Of course, only time will tell.

Insurance companies essentially already do unload what data they have about you to any willing buyer.

Doubtful many folks will stop buying insurance due to this fact.

I am not sure I understand the comparison. Search engines and adtech are not selling a product, other than the process of serving ads. If sales of ad space and adtech decline, these companies are in trouble. And their "assets" are mainly personal data.

Maybe I missed what you were trying to say.

This is the best story I've seen on HN in a long time. I wish I could upvote again.

I'm also totally onboard with a new, anarchistic alternative to the internet. I think about this idea all the time, but I don't have anywhere close to the knowledge needed to start figuring it out.

But the point I made with the story is what the end user has in his hands. Although a handful of website owners can change their own perspective to use valid ads in their own house but for the end user. .? Should be made with some better solutions for the end user.

This was a great piece.

It's a bit surprising to me that the page includes a Google Analytics tracker.

put captchas in front of ads.

https://recaptcha.sucks/

i didnt say recaptcha

Man that article started out so good and then got so bad. Really unfortunate that someone so passionate is just another idiot.

Just laught a bit on Red Flag. I'm from Russia (: Kind of "been there, done that"... Jolly Roger FTW

And the guy says he's Polish.

I guess we're at a point now where todays 25 year-olds have never seen what socialism can deteriorate into.

Well he also mentions Denmark quite a few times.

You'll find that much of Europe is in some form of "socialism" by American standards. And we're doing quite well from it!

Heck America is Socialist by American standards. Sure, after the Great Depression we got half a dozen Socialist institutions, but I'm not talking about that.

Every cooperative preschool; every farmers' coop; every social club in America operates on Socialist principle. In private we love Socialism; in public we resist. No idea why.

Cuz one do not operate a state as a farm?

In Soviet Russia we tried vice versa: to operate farm as a state.

Even today every business entity has to have specific person responsible for accounting, fire defence, labor health, energy efficiency etc even if you have just 1 employee and he is business owner.

If you write customer name and birday somewhere (or name + almost anything), you have to sign with him additional agreement about personal data. There you have to specify how you will use it. If you get blood type or any other health info - you will have to certify your datacenter, use open crypto and have specific responsible employees.

I don't want to speak for him but from his other writing I think idlewords has a fair idea (from personal experience) of what old fashioned central planning communism looks like.

For the record, there are lots of places on the socialism spectrum and many of them haven't deteriorated at all, and some of them look quite lovely...

I do not mind central planing. I like Soviet culture far more than Hollywood and CocaCola. I even can see myself a soviet soldier ready to defend homeland.

I just do not want to bring a Red Flag to evey corner of the world on a bayonet of my rifle. And that's it. Even if I bring free cookies and right to privacy with it.

There is no "socialism in one dedicated country". Socialism needs whole planet. Lenin said that pretty clear.

The greatest defence of your privacy is the sheer volume of people on this earth.

The big difference between VCs and state central planners is that VCs are voluntarily given the money that they use. In Poland it was taken under threat of force.

And the homeless problem in San Francisco, and the other problems it faces, are mostly due to poor governance rather than Facebook or Google.

If you own a real or near monopoly on a service that I must use for work, school, my health, etc I'm not fucking voluntarily giving you money. There's this misconception in capitalism that everything is optional - just don't buy it if you don't like it. Its wrong. I buy a lot of things I prefer not to from companies that sicken me, but I have no choice in the matter. There's no green or ethical tablet or green or ethical car, for example.

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