skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here are the economics of ad spend from when I worked at Travelocity nearly a decade ago.

For an e-commerce business the goal is what's called conversion, which is when a user makes a product purchase. The margins on conversion vary by product and product segment. At that time most people came to travel sites to book airfare and the travel sites just basically resold what the carriers had on their own sites plus a $7 service fee charged by the carriers. Hotels were more lucrative averaging a margin closer to $50 per purchase. Travelocity had figured out some pricing algorithm that dominated the industry for packages where packages were flight plus hotel and optionally rental car. I can't remember the margin for Travelocity packages but I want to say it was around $300 per purchase.

The problem with conversion on e-commerce sites is time. The more expensive the product the more time the user will spend investigating a purchase. The more they will hop between various different competing web sites. Air purchases had a time realization of a few hours, hotels about a week, and packages were about 3 weeks. That means you do anything to induce increased conversion it will be 3 weeks before you should expect to see money in the bank, which complicates analysis of what went right and what went wrong. This means A/B testing becomes supremely important.

Ad spend was the opposite across the board. Ad spend would always bring tremendous traffic to the site but almost never would it increase conversion. However once you have eyes on pages you can generate revenue by other means such as affiliate programs and certainly with ads on your own site. The most amazing thing about ads whether they bring people to your site and cost you money or they are on your own site and generate you money is that the money spent/realized occurs in real time. Suddenly your analysis becomes stupid simple.

Ad traffic is dirty traffic though. Ads that cost you money rarely increased conversion and ads on your own site substantially detracted online traffic, by as much as 15% in a near term and much more gradually over a longer time horizon. The margins on ads is next to nothing so the more you invest in it the more you must invest in it to justify the both the spend and decreased traffic volume. This is what I would refer to as a drug addition. They had an immediate high, it was killing their business, and they only knew how to increase ad participation. Toxic.
It seemed to work out alright for Tunisia.
It is very doable if you got a lead.

And highly improbable without n > 0 leads.
I was wondering wtf.

This was actually bad for me recently, cause I was unable to find tweets from a utility. Twitter would only show me tweets from random years ago, none of which were newer than 5 years old.

Later, I saw that they had tweeted about outages, and I just couldn’t see it cause I dont have an account.

This has not convinced me to get an account. I hope it convinces businesses to stop using twitter and Facebook as main platforms for pushing status notes.
Full Metal Jacket
It certainly seems that way. Earlier this year I was looking for internal 2.5" HDDs with more than 1TB of capacity, and I could only find Seagate drives.

I try to always buy from different vendors, but in this case I had no choice but to buy 2 drives of the same model.
People are conditioned to ignore the droning sound of exhaust. It's ubiquitous and also not very directional. Horns, on the other hand, usually work to get peoples attention.
Yeah, and writing this blog post is a major red flag for this company, no matter how you shake it out. Either they are lying, or grossly incompetent.
I mean these analogies could be applied to AI image gen too. Open up an image gen tool and press generate. Do you get a great image? No, because you didn’t even enter a prompt.
I used to use Fx’s Live Bookmarks all the time back when it was still around. It made sense in organizing ones bookmarks to also have feeds.
that's the problem with google's monopoly on advertising - we can't know
> That’s rather anti-human.

The car was probably driven by someone who needed to do a human thing. Drivers are not evil Captain Planet villains.

The anti-human thing is NIBMYs driving everyone out of cities and preventing density.
I use a DNS based ad blocker on Android which is very effective. It sometimes causes minor issues, but it works even outside the browser, blocking ads from apps that spam you at every turn.
Is he...OK? There's eccentric and then there's needing help
Checkout "revanced" (the git repo) it contains a collection of "patches" for a lot of major apps. There are AdBlock patches for Instagram and TikTok. You can build the patched APKs on your phone using their manager app
> Back in the early days of blogging, the tech press bashed RSS out of existence as it was supposedly too complex for ordinary users.

I don't remember that being the case. The tech press probably had various opinions on RSS. The ones I read were all fine with it, if they mentioned it at all, but that could just be my bubble. At any rate, what damaged RSS' adoption was not articles about it. People not knowing how to use it definitely didn't help. Content sources wanting to create walled gardens (how did that work out?) hurt a lot. Google Reader going away hurt a lot too. Everybody spending 100% of their time on Facebook or Twitter probably hurt the most. But tech press articles, that's one I don't remember being a major factor.
Redirected.app: Create custom redirections in less than 2 minutes
Slightly related: iOS 17 beta shows weather as forecast high as well the 50 year (1970-2020) average high for that day.

It is a small tweak but has really made me realize how this year is so significantly above historical averages.

Where I live in BC, Canada we have been 8-10 degrees Celsius over the average for much of the summer, which has made me wonder how native vegetation is doing considering it likely hasn’t experienced this weather and is less adaptable than humans and other animals.
> Yes, thus why i said in my orginal comment " or the paperwork that the dealer/tesla filed the title paperwork"

Your full sentence was "If I paid cash for a something, I am walking out with the Title, or the paperwork that the dealer/tesla filed the title paperwork in my name..." But there is no "walking out" in this case, because as I said in an earlier reply, "Most Teslas are ordered online and delivered directly to the customer." The paperwork is filed from Tesla's office, wherever that happens to be, far away and out of sight of the customer.

Of course this kind of error is much less likely to occur in a dealership, where the buyer sits down with the seller, and they go through all the paperwork together.
That is why I flagged it, as should you, and it should be removed from the site. It is low effort and misleading at best.
> I have done so.

You very obviously have not. I'm not going to do your job for you and spoon-feed it to you like a child. This isn't complicated, any truly introspective person with critical thinking skills can handle this.
> Do you remember two advertisements you saw today?

Thanks to uBlock, Newpipe and the like, I generally see less than two advertisements a week.
I just saw today that Innuendo Studios has an excellent video on this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF98ii6r_gU

"You Can't Get Snakes from Chicken Eggs"
A less malicious part of it also arises from the fact that the cheaper the modification, the worse it sounds.

You can make a car sound excellent with no drone with a $5,000 factory quality upgrade... or you can pay some bozo $100 to cut out your muffler and weld in a straight line pipe.

That may not entitle them, but it represents how people might make this choice without intentionally being a nuance in mind
Any digital or analog photo is a far cry from our biological signal processing.

Yes, their methodogy used lots of signal manipulation to produce the photo. Just like an RGB digital camera does. Just like analog film. Just like our rods, cones and visual cortex. Which one is the "correct" way to process the signal?

What you're claiming is that "photos" have privileged scientific status over other types of sensors/processing hardware. Someone else might claim that only biological sensors have privileged status. But neither claim is scientific since it cannot be verified.

In lieu of a testable hypothesis, we have to conclude that all frequencies of electromagnetic radiation and all mathematically-valid signal processing techniques are fair game for empirical observation.
If we're sharing I learned about him from the preeminent Proust scholar in the United States, while I watched Little Miss Sunshine.
Surely there is some sense of proportionality?

Is refusing to speak worse than the average felony?
The only common words in this one are “3D”, “as”, “a”, and “observed”
Just break the tree into smaller semantic components. I, on the other hand, find XAML much more unpleasant to read or write than Flutter.
Urban taxis are also the most straightforwardly profitable part of the driving industry. Rural taxis can't be as profitable because they're spending more time in the driving phase (lower margin) and the distance between fares is much higher. Worse, almost all of your customers have alternative transportation that doesn't need to drive to their location that they'd rather use and the possibility of fare sharing doesn't exist to reduce prices. It's a difficult, low margin market to compete in, a terrible choice to demo your expensive and unproven technology.
> Comrades, you must all analyse your own responsibility. If you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much better for it.

-- Mao Zedong (1959)

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-work...
Amazing, thanks for sharing
We must, must, must stop assuming the worst in others and jumping to react accordingly. Please, please don't fork serde. I'm sure this situation can be worked out without resorting to such measures.
I don't get this either. You watch a skilled tradesman work and he'll use all manner of tricks he's learnt over the years. His tools will do most of the work, he just gently guides them in the right direction. Then I'll see developers not even using tab completion in a shell. It's almost like tooling has to shout at them (like underlining errors etc) out of the box before they'll interact with it. It's so strange.
I’ve been a pure software engineer for close to a decade now, but before that I was a data analyst/scientist working with a marketing team, including their paid ad ppl.

We ran some legit experiments with ads, where we didn’t just count ppl who saw the ads then later converted (how Google, FB, etc. want you to “measure” impact), we compared them to actual control groups. We did find most types of ads to not be worth the $$.

However, remarketing did seem to be worth it, at the time, for us. This is when you generate interest in your product through other avenues (organic content marketing, organic social media marketing, PR, attending industry events, etc.), then when ppl show some interest in your product (visit your website), but don’t convert, you cookie them and keep showing them ads all around the internet. These ppl are already legit interested, they’re gonna pay more attention to the ads, and keeping your product top of mind can be enough to get them over the line to conversion.
> Vector types / instructions would be nice

It’s technically not a C++ feature, but both gcc (https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Vector-Extensions.html) and Clang (https://releases.llvm.org/3.1/tools/clang/docs/LanguageExten...) have vector types, and clang even supports the gcc way of writing them, so it gets pretty close.
There are 3 major challenges

1. We think the context you want is distributed into multiple APIs in most of cases and there are also multiple APIs on which you might want to search. Ex: Users, Tickets, Comments etc. A lot to build from scratch.

2. Addressing these for multiple SAAS tools means learning multiple APIs and writing different code for every SAAS tool.

3. Last but difficult is to keep all of this more real-time and build the whole tech around with webhooks to keep this real-time. Also, some SAAS tools like Notion don't have webhooks
I agree with you but with the additional point that this is how the job market for many fields has operated for several years. Tech has just be insulated until now.

I'm a mechanical engineer and scientist. I've applied to hundreds of jobs in the last 4 years. For every 100 jobs I've applied to, I've received 13 interviews and 3 offers. 41 applications out of 100 ghost me and never even reply back. This is now a numbers game. Networking helps, but only gets you so far in my experience. It may get you an interview, but a lot of places have long internal processes that can take months to hire somebody as various internal stakeholders examine several candidates. I'm not defending the process, since it is a complete waste of time for job seekers, but I do want to emphasize how this is not new to many fields outside of tech.
It’s just a shame that dealership grift has to get this bad until the government enforces regulations properly.

I know on a smaller scaler that these things mentioned in the article happen all the time. In college I had classmates who worked at a dealership and they talked about all kinds of shenanigans they pulled.

For instance, it wasn’t all that uncommon for a relative percentage of the cars sold on the used lot to be from other states like Texas where they would buy low integrity vehicles and fix them to a minimally viable state before bringing them to California. This had something to do with how they could get a certificate from TX saying the car was okay for resale without conditions applied (IE they didn’t have to report the previous / original condition) and that was enough leeway to get it past state regulators if you didn’t do it to often

new cars had a bit less of this nonsense going on I recall because the manufacturers are more concerned and keep a closer eye on this sort of thing, though I’ve heard that often cars would come in from the factory with paint scratches and stuff from travel and dealers would just patch over it as quickly and cheaply as possible to get it on the lot without car for longevity
No. The in app ads in Meta properties are served from the same gateway as the rest of the API.
I use windy all the times when we fly drones, it’s good.
I’ve not casually browsed reddit since apollo shut down, occasionally I’ll end up on a post from a search, or my wife will show me something she’s seen, but that’s it. I was a pretty heavy user before as well.

Before apollo stopped I had set my phone to limit me to half an hour a day, a limit I hit almost every day, and regularly exceeded.

I don’t really miss it though, so it’s probably been a net benefit for me, but I’m still pissed off at how it went down
Awesome project. You should edit the title with a "Show HN" prefix!
I for one welcome the slop on my feed.

That being said I don't mind a well targeted technical advertisement e.g. trade magazines, new electronic components, and so on.

On a less passive level the company my dad used to work for basically made a living selling marketing lists of people who they'd confirmed (via voice) were genuinely looking for (say) new solar panels.
Sure it will. It’s always been the case. Do you think reasonable advertisers have always been placing their brand next to content they don’t like? I think it’s more than acceptable that an advertiser demands their content not be next to neo-Nazi content. It’s the free market.
And it assumes you’re blogging for money, which is not universally the case. If you’re not blogging for money, those objections are of no value.
>Go Proverb #5: Make the zero value useful.

Yeah, it's a nice quip, but that's all it is. It sounds nice on first read to someone who doesn't program much. But it is inaccurate and not followed by Go, and is explicitly against the Google style guide.

The sophistry trying to paint a nil pointer as "useful" is just trying to defend a position you've dug yourself into in the process of this argument, so it doesn't really need to be addressed again.

>An empty set upon error is more meaningful than nil, usually.

This in particular is just a mistake in Go. Nil maps, unlike nil slices, cause panics, so people try to avoid ever returning them.

>But it does not match the current semantics of idiomatic Go code using the (T, error) pattern.

But it does match how (T, error) is actually used the majority of the time. The impedance mismatch is that code that currently has the semantics of Either, which is the vast majority of idiomatic Go, needs to use (T, error).
Not at all true. Third-party analytics tools exist.
> I think of enshitification primarily as an organisational/business phenomenon rather than a technical one.

Codebases can enshitified, this is a deliberate action. Having a zombie corpse codebase where bugs grow faster than features is not necessarily enshitification.

An enshitified codebase is created when a product person or a TL spends an undo amount of technical debt on new features or even better anti-features.
Eric from Trigger.dev here. We moved the docs from a dedicated repo into our monorepo so that probably accounts for the above issue
I wonder how a group of aphantasics would affect the results. Everyones' mechanisms for remembering things is undoubtedly different, but aphantasia means you don't have mental imagery to consult. Does this mean that aphantasics rely more on linguistic cues and connections?
I know WD used to be the darling, mostly of gamers it seemed. I never REALLY trusted them because the clients we had with the WD Black drives seemed to have more failures than my beloved Ultrastar or even Deskstar (I seemed to miss the Deathstar failures, I believe it was largely an issue of cooling). I sure was sad when I heard WD bought HGST.

I had one of the Deathstar drives that I started getting I/O errors on, so I went to replace it. When I was taking it out of the system I realized it was quite hot to the touch. This was a mini tower system and I had two of the 5" bays open, so I closed them off with cardboard, left the original drive in the system and booted it back up, and it ran without errors for a couple three years after that.
It seems the Ask culture's norm is more favorable in welcoming new members whereas the Guess culture's norm is more favorable in building loyalties to the community among members. IMO curiosity and fear are underlying factors of the cultural differences.

An interesting thought exercise is when Ask people somehow happen to live in a Guess culture. It's like all the guess culture members are working with their own cryptography that's not allowed to the newcomer, and when the new person asks for the code, no one can clearly give the code to the newcomer. The code has to be learned by spending enough time with the community members.

Language is one such barrier -- unless you learn it at an early age, it is sometimes almost impossible to master the intricacies of a language. There are also other numerous cultural aspects that take time and effort to learn, which helps the coherence and integrity of the "guess" culture members.

But even in those Guess cultures, there are also people with curiosity and willingness to learn new cultures, which could move the cultures toward the Ask cultures. That's at least what I learned while I studied the 19th and 20th century history of Korea and Japan. They are not always successful in making changes and progresses within the society, but when they do or when the changes come, they are those thriving, by asking questions about the new world and the new norms. IMO this curiosity is the catalyst for the change from a more Guess culture toward a more Ask culture.

On the other hand, there's fear, the fear of the newcomers. IMO that's what drives the Guess culture, and also another powerful motivation that moves a culture toward more "Guess" culture. In US or European politics, you see all these nationalistic movements. As one of the comments said, even in US, the Guess culture is more predominant in the locations where the fear against other ethnic groups is dominant. It's just the correlations, but IMO there's some feedback loop between the fear and the Guess cultures.

In the end, it's easy to see why the Ask cultures would become more dominant: Ask cultures can easily talk to each other and learn from each other, while Guess cultures are exclusive even among themselves, which make them more difficult to learn from others.
Yeah, but can you use it in a regular desktop (not to mention laptop) since it doesn't use M.2?
The article suggests cold emailing. Never use your main domain for sending outbound marketing stuff. It doesn't take many to categorize the emails as spam before the domain suddenly becomes blacklisted and unusable for not just marketing but anything. Your outbound emails will hit a distributed black hole.
The truth is it is a net positive for most advertising for Android users to remove themselves.
Then you can choose psychiatric incarceration?
> can only be healthy if there is not a power imbalance

I don't know if that's any less true of "guess" culture. In guess culture the one with less power gets punished for guessing wrong instead of asking wrong.
Electronics are crazy. Depending on the amount of skill and/or effort you have available, there is an enormous spread of possible implementations at different price points.

For instance, I develop a product that we sell for $2500. When the company brought me in, the raw cost of the electronics was about $250. Right now I've got it down to $50, and I expect it to fall to $20 or $30 once we start producing at scale.
Isn't it in the terms of app stores that users need the ability to filter out abusive and bad faith users, and if the app developers don't comply, the stores need to remove the app? Muting doesn't cut it. I still see muted accounts in my feed. Blocking removes them entirely and I never have to suffer abusive accounts.
From what I understand, this is not a company, but the personal blog of a (former) consultant that worked for a company that had already spent $1.5mil when he took over. Given that context, the headline seems clickbaity as he wasn't personally involved, but whatever.
Since you seem unwilling or unable to follow an argument you started this seems more like an attempt to bait a response that you can report to the mods instead of an honest conversation. If you want to know why the alleged tangent was relevant, well, the posts are still there.
Would love to understand why you think so?
> but there is not a single car in sight, I think what on earth is wrong with these lemmings, do they have no brain of their own?

We have more than enough bored cops that love to annoy people both on feet and on bike with red-light tickets in quiet areas. For pedestrians it's just annoying with a 5€ "fine", but for bicyclists or e-scooter drivers it means a strike in your driver's license.
Nearly all of our agreements are in active sessions. I guess your business just needs better negotiation?
I think the point of the reports in that I linked is that we don't avoid climate change by following that time frame. Instead, we'd spend 100-300% of GDP on avoiding old projections, while moving forward into more poorly understood territory. Ignoring the timeliness of a particular change has been a common error / delay tactic of groups that urge less expeditious responses. Obviously, unless you link these reports, I don't really know if that critique applies - but it is a common critique for plans with a longer time frame.

Edit: I also want to add that any project that needs 100-300% of global GDP certainly qualifies as "one to two orders of magnitude bigger than anything we have done." Wikipedia puts the 1940 world GDP at 3,000 billion USD[1]. The manhatten project cost ~$2bn (0.06%). The whole war was estimated to cost the US ~$288bn (9.6%)[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product

[2](unreliable but fine for a ballpark) https://www.whatitcosts.com/world-war-ii-cost-united-states-...