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skronch

51 karma · joined November 29, 2011

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skronch··on Gear Patrol has acquired DPReview
It's unfortunate for DPReview that this happened after they already lost their best talent (Chris and Jordan over at DPReview TV)
skronch··on Show HN: I made a simulator for personal finance
Is there a way to specify the % of income that is allocated to cash holdings vs. investments? The modeller seems to assume that I will keep all future income as cash, which seems unrealistic.
skronch··on Facebook is bombarding rightwing users with combat gear ads. See for yourself
The people who build FB's ads platform have their performance judged by metrics like revenue, eCPM, and internal relevance scores.

Building capabilities to add arbitrary human-defined rules into those optimization functions only makes their jobs more difficult and is a drag on hitting team targets. I'm curious why you think they're incentivized to do so.

skronch··on 18.7 Million Americans Vaccinated
This is a pretty good resource: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-glo...
skronch··on Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend
IMO large social media platforms are actually much more capable of running these experiments than academics. (Disclaimer: I work on ads at one of these companies).

Platforms can accurately determine who engaged with an ad (basic logging on their sites), they have infrastructure to create statistically balanced ad experiments, and can also accurately determine whether a conversion happened (either through a conversion pixel or through data brokers).

Running these tests on behalf of advertising clients, or for internal research is fairly standard. If we couldn't prove statistically that our ads were working, I would have left a long time ago.

skronch··on Google fired employees for union activity, says US agency
I remember them being pretty infallible from 1998-2006.
skronch··on Microsoft is reportedly in talks to buy TikTok's US operations
The 'skype' name in the network requests is more a remnant of a last minute change from the internal product name (Skype Teams) than a statement of the technologies underpinning the product.

The Teams comms/meeting stack was its own thing - an evolution (or frankenstein's monster mix) of Skype for Business and Skype Consumer technologies. That is one of the reasons why Teams did not have interop capabilities with SfB at launch.

Side note: The Skype for Business communications stack is a descendent of Lync/Office Communicator was completely separate from Skype Consumer (only thing it shared was branding).

Source: worked on Teams

skronch··on YouTube removes interview with professor of medicine on Covid stats and policy
This is akin to saying "I've heard enough of these NHTSA reports every week when car accidents happen. The thing is, I don't care. I just want things like this to never happen again."

A 0% error rate is a great aspirational target. But it's also important to acknowledge that a complex system may never be perfect. Insisting otherwise is ignoring reality.

skronch··on The Ticket
There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of the article, but this isn't one of them imo. It's pretty easy to find a few locations that fit that description, here's one: https://goo.gl/maps/GpJLjQBiLHvpQGA1A

(Note: the comment mentions a "jersey barrier", while the article describes a more generic "highway barricade")

skronch··on How much does it cost to build a home in Silicon Valley? (2016)
For the cost of construction or the land itself? The post is from November 2016, which could explain inaccuracies in the latter.
skronch··on Uber’s board wants Expedia CEO Dara Khosrowshahi to be its next CEO
In December 2011, TripAdvisor was spun off from Expedia in a public offering. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TripAdvisor#cite_note-16]
skronch··on Images of New MacBook Pro with Magic Toolbar Leaked in MacOS Sierra 10.12.1
Hopefully it will see more adoption than Force Touch on the Macbooks though.
skronch··on Most Used SDKs in Top 200 Free iOS Apps
Note that these are the top 200 trending apps (not most used or popular iOS apps), so the data set will skew towards newer (and more likely to be written in Swift) apps.
skronch··on Long-time Iowa farm cartoonist fired after creating this cartoon
linking the actual comic in question (since it wasn't immediately obvious in the article): http://www.kcci.com/news/39341462