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Comment by throwawayish | Hacker News Reader

Oh. I'm European and I always wondered why in practically every American criminal-spy-scifi-investigative-themed TV show or movie there are people sitting at magical, proprietary computers able to find strange pieces of (personal) information in no time (but obviously always complex to use, because other characters don't know how).

I didn't know about the "Bloomberg Terminal" before, but now that makes a lot more sense where that idea comes from.

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Bloomberg delivers financial information, not information on every individual.

That's facebook's job

I know it's a joke, but as a high spend Facebook advertiser, I can tell you that Facebook only sells audience information in aggregate, not on an individual basis.

...P R I S M...

That's not sold, so not comparable to BB.

Evil mode:

That's not sold

No, given freely away for "protection".

Evil mode off:

I have less problems with western TLAs as they exist today but find it very scary to think about what might happen once we see a really big data leak from FB. Or Facebook folds and is bought by someone who's set on making money from the assets.

Facebook is in the business of making money off the assets. The thing that keeps them off the worst edge is that they want to stay in business long term.

This is why I've started using the phrase "intelligence-entertainment complex".

Not yet.

They could use their ai to match you with advertised products. You wouldnt need individual data in this case.

Still, the AI matches you into an "audience" which is targetable. It doesn't tell the advertiser that they're advertising to John, Jane, and Joaquin, specifically.

Unless you make gender a datapoint, and advertise to a group of 20, where only one is male. Oldest trick in the (face-) book.

That isn't the point of the OP though? Think the point being that the inspiration for a proprietary system that does that is the Bloomberg Terminal. Although they're used all around the world, seems that their use and functionality is perhaps more in the American zeitgeist.

Yes, now that you mention it, probably ("where that idea comes from"). Nevertheless, strikes me as a totally absurd comparison - I'd never associate a bog standard Bloomberg Terminal (used in NY, HK, London, Frankfurt, ...) with some fictitious device from US movies.

It's a really strong analogy to how people think of command-line hackers, though. You type what seems like a bunch of gibberish with lots of slashes and hyphens at a hundred words a minute and then the computer turns into a rainbow-barfing unicorn. It doesn't seem that way to the hacker, because it's just another language.

Why does 'tac' mean "reverse abcd to dcba, line-by-line, on the input stream? Human brevity and wit. and then look at the Bloomberg Terminal and ask "Why does 'OTFN'* mean "empty oil tanks departing ports with a cost modifier proportional to the time left in port and risk of loading delays vs. departure cutoffs?", it's for the same human reasons: someone wanted to type as few letters as possible to get something done, and came up with something that seemed good at the time, and it stuck.

Hacking shows always show us people typing three commands and ending up at the [fictional agency of choice] here. Bloomberg can work magic beyond belief with three commands, and even more amazingly dedicated the HELP button on every keyboard to "press it repeatedly and HELP opens the chat to you", which is maybe the best approach I've ever seen.

* OTFN "Oil The Fuck Now" may or may not exist in Bloomberg Terminal, I sadly do not have access :(

Lexis-Nexis is probably the equivalent for individuals.

That would be LexisNexis.

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