spunker540

It probably didn’t hurt that Japan has a declining population, so supply > demand

The one big exception I can think of is the arts. But they usually require an audition or portfolio for acceptance. CS majors take anyone but then not until first week of classes is it clear how much pre-reqs are expected.

Here’s a different take: when you set up an ad campaign for retargeting, you likely select users who “viewed or added to cart in the last 30 days”; you should also add an exclude for “users who purchased within the last 30 days” but it is very easy to forget the exclusion.

Also sometimes there may be communication lags between retailers and ad networks. Some retailers may only upload purchase data daily, sometimes there are gaps in uploads etc.

I think most advertisers would prefer to not advertise the same item that people just bought, but it takes perfect execution both technically and from the marketers creating campaigns to pull it off cleanly. When you’re managing dozens of campaigns across half a dozen ad platforms, it’s easy to miss some of the details that matter. And while the wasted ad impressions may annoy the consumers on HN, it is likely a rounding error for advertisers and not a huge cost driver.

I’ve had way more yellowcabs in nyc refuse to take me to the airport than ubers/lyfts.

The issue here is the “potential reach” calculation when setting up an audience/targeting for a campaign. It has nothing to do with the billing for actual impressions. If you say you want to target “English speakers in the US” the potential reach may say 200M. However your ad spend limits and frequency and bid options and ad creative ultimately determine who sees the ad at what price, and generally prevent you from ever hitting that max reach anyways. Apparently that potential reach calculation was known to be off by some percentage (maybe overestimating potential reach). It has no bearing on what you get charged as an advertiser and I doubt this disrupted any campaigns.

Try reaching out to recruiters directly on linkedin to enter the system instead of just submitting your resume to be auto-screened. You'll probably have to have a short screen call with them first, during which you can make the case that despite the lack of CS degree you know what you're doing, talk about your passion for that company's work etc, and it should be pretty feasible to get a true coding screen from there.

These recruiters are so used to cold-calling via email/linkedin and getting no reply, I feel they'd be pretty happy to have someone actually interested (and qualified) fall in their lap.

It’d be neat if rather than just display a lifetime average they displayed a stock ticker for the ratings. You could see the app was good but then very lowly rated for a few days before ticking back up for example

He never suggested any conspiracy. He just noted how a confluence of events are really dramatically displaying our reliance on huge centralized services all at once. Between Trump and Parler de-platformization a few weeks ago to RH only allowing sells while Google and Apple clean up their reviews for them.

You can buy a couch or fridge, or clothes or a TV and still return it after trying it out, and that includes massive re-packaging / shipping costs. There's no way in hell it's impossible to return digital points!

Totally agree. Plus most purchases in the physical are returnable, even after some use. There's no way to argue that it's technically infeasible to "return" digital points or whatever. That's just apple and devs just being dicks saying "sorry we have your money now and there's nothing we can do..."

They tried this and had to stop after “I trust Cambridge Analytica, so please send my data there”...

I’d love to see the HN discussion on a study titled “An analysis of unconscious bias on HN”!

Great point though

Is it? Apple controls the keyboard and camera. Why only prevent terrorism or child pornography at the app-level when you can stop it at the os level?

But people were accessing Facebook on Google and Apple devices — so who’s to blame really?

Seems like a huge hit to the myriad business-to-consumer chat startups that sell premium messenger experiences to brands for customer service etc. It’s also a hit to any business who has invested in chat as a service/sales channel, assuming that all chat APIs will be subject to the same limitations.

These APIs that are being limited have very little to do with user privacy and mostly impact usability. For example it looks like handoffs between chat apps are no longer possible in Europe- a company could have an entry point chat bot that routes to a live human, or routes to an order-taking bot. That routing is no longer possible without the “handoff protocol”.

It looks like users can no longer send attachments to a business either. (Or rather they can still send the attachment, but the business can’t use the api to access it?). I don’t believe this is a win for users and just shows some unintended side effects of EU legislation.

I think making urls non-clickable absolutely reduces the effectiveness of spamming urls. How the hell wouldn’t it?

I was referring to the fact that they don’t make urls clickable, to disincentivize spammers sharing urls (at least make it a less effective spam tactic)

I don’t think instagram’s link policy has anything to do with dark patterns. Rather it is a distinct design choice for a social network to avoid spam. Another key decision instagram made was preventing shares/retweets, with the intended effect of promoting original content. These two consequential decisions (both made very early on in Instagram history, likely even before the fb acquisition) made original photos the focus. It’s an opinionated app and has succeeded because of it — I don’t believe either decision should be called a dark pattern.

In the US, if you live on the coasts, most southern accents you’ll hear tend to be comedic relief, uneducated, unsophisticated portrayals in tv/movies. It is unconsciously drilled into the culture that a southern accent is a sign of poor education. It’s hard to fight all that unconscious reinforcement as much as people may intellectually agree that accentism is bad.

I don’t want to get political but it doesn’t help that it’s mostly southern states trying to eliminate evolution curriculums and other anti-science stances...

Do companies hiring exclusively via video calls (due to covid) actually make sure that the person is the same in each round? Or is the same person who shows up on day one?

This is a beautiful and profound take on a brighter future despite the huge changes we’re all seeing. It is very possible that while local mom and pop basic retail dwindles, it is replaced by more enriching social opportunities. People will have marginally more free time due to time saved running errands, and marginally more dollars to spend. hopefully more meaningful local experiences can fill the void.

Genetic engineers sound a lot like machine learning engineers— tweaking huge complicated models which can only be understood through observation/experimentation. Often times the training is stochastic and not directly repeatable too.

Curious what indexing features you find most useful. For me the killer feature was how ocr rendered a lot of photos searchable by the text contained in the photo. But also cool how you can search “mountains” and see all your photos related to that.

Or it affects perception of time such that time moves slower for the group with cookies. This gives them more time to chew on every word of the lecture and absorb more digestible facts.

Photos and videos of people are not generally useful for ads. You know what is valuable? Actual purchase decisions sent in by advertisers. Photos and videos of people’s dogs and food and kids etc is strictly to entertain the other Facebook users and keep them coming back.

An advertiser is willing to pay tons more to serve an ad to someone who has bought similar products in the past, and is likely to buy their product again, or has recently abandoned a non-empty shopping cart. Or has even just interacted with a previous ad. That is the data that increases ad revenue. Not facial expressions while scrolling or group photos at restaurants.

It sounds like Peter Thiel’s idea (though who knows where he got it from)

Is behaving ethically not a part of being a designer or a PM or a director/boss?

Those stats are in the article (cited, in fact)

Facebook’s ML can probably use these events and improve DoorDash’s ad delivery efficiency by a significant percentage. It potentially equates to millions of dollars of savings depending on how they use the ad platform. Even just allowing doordash to measure their advertising outcomes is a big deal compared to traditional advertising. You could spend $X million on tv and have no clue if it worked, or spend it on Facebook and use these events to get precise measurement to what degree your ad dollars are resulting in real business outcomes.

When I was in a high school busking band, we went to the local mall to make some money playing Christmas songs. We set up in front of the Apple store and within 10 minutes we’re kicked out by security. As we were leaving, someone from the fledgling Microsoft store told us they had a stage we could play on in front of their store the following day (our first “paid” gig, they gave us gift cards). The joke was on us though as it was an outdoor mall, and the temperature didn’t break 20 degrees. The guitarists fingers could barely play, but it was memorable nonetheless and presented a clear contrast in how the Apple store vs Microsoft store treated young buskers!