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Really cool history. Thanks for sharing this. I can imagine if you "know the truth" about the business you're in you might want to get out. I felt like that ab

by anonu 7y ago

Really cool history. Thanks for sharing this. I can imagine if you "know the truth" about the business you're in you might want to get out. I felt like that about certain financial jobs I've had in the past. The actual work felt like it provided no real value to society, but the intellectual challenges were what kept me there.

andrepd 7y ago
>The actual work felt like it provided no real value to society A sign of a broken system that needs urgent repair. Most financial jobs, hft, adtech jobs... We have our best minds working on things that do not provide any useful value to society. This is not a good state of affairs.
- brandnewlow 7y ago
  I can’t speak to finance but I get confused when people bash advertising in broad strokes. People running businesses need ways to exchange money for new customers. That’s advertising. Making that more efficient might surely be annoying but a complete waste of time?
  - kijin 7y ago
    The parent said adtech, not advertising. What we call adtech today is advertising plus tracking. The tracking part is what most people seem to have a problem with.
    - BlueTemplar 7y ago
      Post-war advertising isn't much better itself, being based to make people to want things they might not even need...
      - kijin 7y ago
        Yep, the marketing for diamonds was a prime example of that. But at least De Beers didn't try to track individual brides and grooms and show them different diamonds based on what they were talking about on the phone. Maybe they do now.
  - Riguad87 7y ago
    I still say we ignored the Main Street and non-scale non-flow micro-sensitive and disaggregated or rather yet to be aggregated, customers, not whole by reasons superficially readily learned. Sobel's The First Junk Bond, gives the mechanics of preservation of the vast onshore reserves, until (I don't have the recall but I think Sobel gives the trigger price) $50/B plateaux. In 95 I wrote the level of inefficiency in agency transactions was 60%. In 2018, stories on the embedded framework fraud of online advertising buying, gave the same number for the new system's inefficiency. Print, my world despite the gasping inhalation of every party I speak with, remains almost unchanged in headline volumes, despite the unbroken prophecy of all trade journalism.
  - saidajigumi 7y ago
    I think you have a vast disconnect between the reality of advertising today vs. the quaint mid-20th century mental model that you seem to hold. Or you're being entirely disingenuous about what people complaining about "advertising" mean. If modern advertising 1) did not vacuum up personal data in extremely invasive ways, 2) didn't distort the entire business models of the largest tech companies against the interests of the overwhelming majority of their users, and 3) wasn't a broad attack vector on that same user population (dark patterns, outright malware delivery, just plain terrible UX everywhere, etc.)... then there'd probably be very little complaint about advertising, relatively speaking. Put another way: no one gripes about the existence of Craigslist. Thought experiment: what if the targeted advertising model was illegal, both enforceable and enforced with teeth. How much of what's detrimental about modern advertising would simply vanish, like a bad memory?
    - vasco 7y ago
      Not taking sides but what you described were the natural developments of "making advertisement more efficient", people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers, therefore making advertisement cheaper and more efficient. If this is a net positive or negative for society is something I'll stay out of.
      - rhizome 7y ago
        Efficiency is overrated. It's an acceptable rationale for destruction and exploitation (the process demands it), but that acceptance doesn't make it a good thing overall. >people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers I mean, did they really? Where can I read about these successes?
    - coredog64 7y ago
      Nitpick: Plenty of people gripe about CL. By giving away classified ads, CL killed a huge cash cow for many newspapers.
      - 7y ago
  - hansvm 7y ago
    I think the parent comment was referring to adtech in particular, which I agree isn't inherently bad, but which currently has a model of: 1. Slurp up as much data as possible no matter how sensitive and no matter the societal cost. 2. Use that data purely to increase the efficiency of wasting an enormous chunk of the world's bandwidth and computing resources (anecdotally, something like 30% of my traffic before I started blocking everything at a dns level) _pushing_ ads to anyone who might match by any means necessary whether they want them or not. I might even acquiesce to some form of push-based ads being broadly beneficial (e.g. for truly novel offerings), but for almost everything that currently shows up as an ad I would much rather be able to efficiently search for it and find it once I'm actually ready to buy than to be inundated with hundreds or thousands of worthless ads ahead of time in the off chance that they'll bring a particular product to the forefront of my mind and sway my purchasing decisions. That's kind of the point of frameworks like async/await :) Adtech is using a polling system to try and demand my attention with a, let's say, 1% success rate, but we could cut down the noise 100x simply by awaiting my next purchasing decision.
vostok 7y ago
That's interesting. I actually feel quite differently about my own experience in finance. HFT is a great example mentioned by a sibling comment. You kind of need some number of traders out there to make sure that market prices are honest and fair. HFT has done a great job of reducing (a) the number of people involved in trading per dollar traded and (b) the amount of money made by traders per dollar traded.
- anonu 7y ago
  "keeping markets efficient" is how I justified what I did. But what's that number N of market participants where N+1 brings a de minimis improvement in efficiency. I think the number of market participants (large institutional players) is already well over N. To the point where its just computers churning trades. To be clear, nothing wrong with that. But from a personal perspective you start to question your contribution.
- skrebbel 7y ago
  I'm very far from the finance world so please correct me if I'm saying something stupid. But how does eg an algorithm that sells stock when the newspaper headlines have a "negative sentiment" help ensure that "market prices are honest and fair"? What's "honest and fair" about stocks across the board dropping because of bushfires or a virus outbreak, only to rise back to pre-headline levels half a day later?
  - amylene 7y ago
    The best way to make a correct prediction is to continually update your estimate as new information comes in. As it comes in. That’s all the markets are doing. When the virus starts, the markets adjust downwards because there is a chance that virus kills tens of millions, which would have severe economic impact. As the world public health starts to reduce the error bars or bad outcome likelihood, the market adjusts. The problem is that you’re thinking of something as having a concrete value. Instead, think like Tetlock teaches in superforecasters. Then you will have a better model of what’s going on.
Riguad87 7y ago
If you think into the problem some more, I believe that you will conclude, on the face of the natural problem and without need of further information, that exit from a complicated family concern is the provision of the older generations and never in the realms of practical viability for those who inherit legacy management and ownership. I am very much interested in knowing your thoughts, should you, on reflection find my point above not to be self evident.
dang 7y ago
(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209972)

by anonu 7y ago

andrepd 7y ago

>The actual work felt like it provided no real value to society A sign of a broken system that needs urgent repair. Most financial jobs, hft, adtech jobs... We have our best minds working on things that do not provide any useful value to society. This is not a good state of affairs.

brandnewlow 7y ago
I can’t speak to finance but I get confused when people bash advertising in broad strokes. People running businesses need ways to exchange money for new customers. That’s advertising. Making that more efficient might surely be annoying but a complete waste of time?
- kijin 7y ago
  The parent said adtech, not advertising. What we call adtech today is advertising plus tracking. The tracking part is what most people seem to have a problem with.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Post-war advertising isn't much better itself, being based to make people to want things they might not even need...
    - kijin 7y ago
      Yep, the marketing for diamonds was a prime example of that. But at least De Beers didn't try to track individual brides and grooms and show them different diamonds based on what they were talking about on the phone. Maybe they do now.
- Riguad87 7y ago
  I still say we ignored the Main Street and non-scale non-flow micro-sensitive and disaggregated or rather yet to be aggregated, customers, not whole by reasons superficially readily learned. Sobel's The First Junk Bond, gives the mechanics of preservation of the vast onshore reserves, until (I don't have the recall but I think Sobel gives the trigger price) $50/B plateaux. In 95 I wrote the level of inefficiency in agency transactions was 60%. In 2018, stories on the embedded framework fraud of online advertising buying, gave the same number for the new system's inefficiency. Print, my world despite the gasping inhalation of every party I speak with, remains almost unchanged in headline volumes, despite the unbroken prophecy of all trade journalism.
- saidajigumi 7y ago
  I think you have a vast disconnect between the reality of advertising today vs. the quaint mid-20th century mental model that you seem to hold. Or you're being entirely disingenuous about what people complaining about "advertising" mean. If modern advertising 1) did not vacuum up personal data in extremely invasive ways, 2) didn't distort the entire business models of the largest tech companies against the interests of the overwhelming majority of their users, and 3) wasn't a broad attack vector on that same user population (dark patterns, outright malware delivery, just plain terrible UX everywhere, etc.)... then there'd probably be very little complaint about advertising, relatively speaking. Put another way: no one gripes about the existence of Craigslist. Thought experiment: what if the targeted advertising model was illegal, both enforceable and enforced with teeth. How much of what's detrimental about modern advertising would simply vanish, like a bad memory?
  - vasco 7y ago
    Not taking sides but what you described were the natural developments of "making advertisement more efficient", people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers, therefore making advertisement cheaper and more efficient. If this is a net positive or negative for society is something I'll stay out of.
    - rhizome 7y ago
      Efficiency is overrated. It's an acceptable rationale for destruction and exploitation (the process demands it), but that acceptance doesn't make it a good thing overall. >people found that by showing targeted ads they'd have to show less of them to get the same amount of new customers I mean, did they really? Where can I read about these successes?
  - coredog64 7y ago
    Nitpick: Plenty of people gripe about CL. By giving away classified ads, CL killed a huge cash cow for many newspapers.
    - 7y ago
- hansvm 7y ago
  I think the parent comment was referring to adtech in particular, which I agree isn't inherently bad, but which currently has a model of: 1. Slurp up as much data as possible no matter how sensitive and no matter the societal cost. 2. Use that data purely to increase the efficiency of wasting an enormous chunk of the world's bandwidth and computing resources (anecdotally, something like 30% of my traffic before I started blocking everything at a dns level) _pushing_ ads to anyone who might match by any means necessary whether they want them or not. I might even acquiesce to some form of push-based ads being broadly beneficial (e.g. for truly novel offerings), but for almost everything that currently shows up as an ad I would much rather be able to efficiently search for it and find it once I'm actually ready to buy than to be inundated with hundreds or thousands of worthless ads ahead of time in the off chance that they'll bring a particular product to the forefront of my mind and sway my purchasing decisions. That's kind of the point of frameworks like async/await :) Adtech is using a polling system to try and demand my attention with a, let's say, 1% success rate, but we could cut down the noise 100x simply by awaiting my next purchasing decision.

vostok 7y ago

That's interesting. I actually feel quite differently about my own experience in finance. HFT is a great example mentioned by a sibling comment. You kind of need some number of traders out there to make sure that market prices are honest and fair. HFT has done a great job of reducing (a) the number of people involved in trading per dollar traded and (b) the amount of money made by traders per dollar traded.

anonu 7y ago
"keeping markets efficient" is how I justified what I did. But what's that number N of market participants where N+1 brings a de minimis improvement in efficiency. I think the number of market participants (large institutional players) is already well over N. To the point where its just computers churning trades. To be clear, nothing wrong with that. But from a personal perspective you start to question your contribution.
skrebbel 7y ago
I'm very far from the finance world so please correct me if I'm saying something stupid. But how does eg an algorithm that sells stock when the newspaper headlines have a "negative sentiment" help ensure that "market prices are honest and fair"? What's "honest and fair" about stocks across the board dropping because of bushfires or a virus outbreak, only to rise back to pre-headline levels half a day later?
- amylene 7y ago
  The best way to make a correct prediction is to continually update your estimate as new information comes in. As it comes in. That’s all the markets are doing. When the virus starts, the markets adjust downwards because there is a chance that virus kills tens of millions, which would have severe economic impact. As the world public health starts to reduce the error bars or bad outcome likelihood, the market adjusts. The problem is that you’re thinking of something as having a concrete value. Instead, think like Tetlock teaches in superforecasters. Then you will have a better model of what’s going on.

Riguad87 7y ago

If you think into the problem some more, I believe that you will conclude, on the face of the natural problem and without need of further information, that exit from a complicated family concern is the provision of the older generations and never in the realms of practical viability for those who inherit legacy management and ownership. I am very much interested in knowing your thoughts, should you, on reflection find my point above not to be self evident.

dang 7y ago

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22209972)