Why UX Design for Machine Learning Matters - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90124399/why-ux-design-for-machine-learning-matters <comment><USER2> Hi all! I'm actually the author of the article- if you have any comments feel free to leave them.

I specifically chose to address this to ux designers bx ml will be the future of product design and what I had noticed, from working at IBM Watson, was a lack of understanding across design and engineering teams how to "explain" or show what was happening in products using ux. This is actually the start of a column for fast co focusing specifically on design for AI and ml.

So how a product is processing information and serving up results has to be articulated to users- maybe that articulation is a visualization or maybe it's something else? It depends upon the product- but this was a call for thinking about how, if your product uses ml, how do you translate that for users in the design of the product? It's advocating that for ML we move away from minimal design.

<comment><USER3> No one understands how their car works, or their microwave, or even fridge. Why should they understand how something like ML works?

<comment><USER4> They understand when a car or a microwave or a fridge is useful, and why you wouldn't want to use one in place of another.

<comment><USER5> Yes if it wasn't for UX designers we wouldn't know when to use a fridge or microwave. Same with ML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "UX design" terminology confused me. It seems that the author is advocating more for tools and methods that let us visualize & inspect how a given neural network comes to be based on its training data, and why it gives a particular output for a particular input.

This ties back into the "neural networks are black boxes" argument that's been floating around for a while, no?

Is there any concrete research in this field? The initiatives the author points to seem to be mainly about highlighting the problem, not addressing it.

That being said, while I agree with it in principle, in practice what would compel companies to make their neural network based systems understandable and analyzable to users? There are plenty of non deep learning based systems in my life that I already don't have access to the internals of; for instance, it'd really be great if I could actually see the set of formulas that determine my credit score, for one example amongst many.

<comment><USER7> Patrick Hall and company wrote a good O'Reilly article on interpreting machine learning:

[https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/ideas-on-interpreting- machine-...](https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/ideas-on-interpreting-machine- learning)

<comment><USER8> very nice article; thanks for sharing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think a simpler start might be in order. Most developers, let alone users, don't know when, why and how, to use ML. I created (with partners) the "smart reply" designs that are visualizations of ML results that are used by Google in Allo and Hangouts and were used it various other earlier Gproperties. The goal was just to allow people to understand how ML uses probabilities to predict possible futures rather than one off single guesses. You can see and play a bit with how probability trees create outputs and play around with them. They were also designed to be implicitly participatory and multiplayer, rather than just static outputs you could either use or not use. The hope was that more sophisticated users could get a mental model around this and maybe become inspired.

I think several other "lessons" like this will be in order to better get people playing with ML driven interfaces before the average developer really starts seeing enough value to use tool sets meant to visualize the NNs.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't think the fundamental premise of this is correct although I understand the reason why it's being proposed.

Machine learning will mostly remove the need for UX expertise as it will allow us to worry less about manually interacting with machines as a way to get them to do things. Instead ML will do all the in between interactions behind the scenes and present us with results.

If you think about Machine Learning as a feedback loop where only the input and result become relevant then you are back to something more akin info graphics which used to be called information design.

A much bigger problem to solve UX wise is to think about how machine learning will design things and how humans will deal with the results.

[https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664](https://twitter.com/Hello_World/status/861735184990961664)

In the shown example the result created by ML is many times better than a human could have done but for it to work it also requires the ability to take this design and implement it into real life as the result is extremely complex.

A lot of things to explore in this space but I think we do ourselves a disservice to speak about is as UX.

<comment><USER11> As long as there are users, it will be necessary (or desirable, at the very very least) to design experiences for them. The assumption you make is that "talking to a humanlike intelligence is so natural as to be trivial." But salespeople, for instance, still need to be trained in how best to talk to their customers, what to say, what not to say, etc..

<comment><USER10> To the extent that salespeople are relevant and using ML nothing UX wise has changed. Same rules still apply.

My assumption is that many of the benefits of ML can't be used by humans but have to be used by other machines to create a final "useful to human" output.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The biggest challenge I think for designers in ML is, we are very often one step behind engineers who build ML algorithm. Without a good understanding of the capacities and limitations of machine learning, it's hard for designers to envision opportunities and be involved in the early strategic conversation</comment>


Ask HN: cloud supercomputing for the masses - <AUTHOR>

This is more of a brainstorming question than anything. Extremely curious what you all think about this concept. This was inspired by jasonlbaptiste's post on turning excel tools into saad offerings.
So my question is do you think there could be a consumer demand for spot queries against large scale datasets. I.e. A realtor wants to know the number of houses for sale in the us to war veterans between the ages of x and y during the lat 15 years.
This idea came to me after reading about a sports betting database on espn magazine that was selling for 15k a pop.
So could you guys see applications for letting average users run queries cheaply against a giant cloud/grid computing tool? <comment><USER2> Not unless you have a specific use case to address. In my experience the average user is pretty unimaginative about applications of general computing tools.

<comment><AUTHOR> i figured you'd need a few large data sets to start with. find verticals with data needs (stock market/finance for one) that have lots of quantifiable data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Infochimps and others have proved there is a market for large niche datasets, but I think the idea of hosting said data and charging per query could work - but is really just a twist on what the incumbents are already doing.

P.S what happened to YC-backed datamarketplace.com? Their site seems abandoned.

</comment><comment><USER4> Interestingly, Google announced something similar recently -- 'BigQuery' -> <https://code.google.com/apis/bigquery/>

</comment><comment><USER5> <http://infochimps.com></comment>


Ask HN: Funding my app myself - <AUTHOR>

Hi everyone,
I'm with a small team of people and have enough funds to fund about 1,000 hours of work to get the application built. That's nearly double the number of hours I believe we need.
The product we will be building is a web app for businesses and I think will be popular (based on design feedback I've received from target market). We have free and paid plans. I'm predicting about $500,000 in revenue over 2 years after launching.
My question is this: I'm going to self-fund this but am writing a "term sheet" and wondered what I should put on it?
I also wondered what percentage of profits should I be paid back in?
Also, I was wishing to make a profit from the risk I'm taking on, so any thoughts on a percentage I should be paid "over" what I invest?
I'm going to talk to my accountant about my tax implications. I'm including a clause that says I get repaid from profits from the company. Thanks. <comment><USER2> You'll need to add a clause where a certain share of the stock (I assume you own 100%) to be bought back by the company each year. The percentage will take in account of the risk since the company will keep on growing. In any case, you'll have to have to have a business attorney to write the term sheet due to legal wording and general liabilities. Your best bet is to find a good template and have the attorney modify it - that way you save the attorney's time and your money.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, I really appreciate it.</comment></comment>


Show HN: The Choice – An online programming puzzle RPG - <AUTHOR> http://thechoice.amos.me/ <comment><USER3> Is there an API reference? I don't remember how to ask a guard for a key, and apparently it's not guard.askKey.

edit: Ahh, got it. The @key was already given to me (was this specified somewhere?), so the guard didn't support askKey. I wonder if there's a more appropriate response than not having the method, but I'm not sure what it would be.

<comment><USER4> 'guard' is just a placeholder. Try typing

        key = @xzoor.askKey(@door)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it was my placeholder. I was being told that @xzoor didn't have an askKey method, because it looks like he only does on the one level where you're told to ask him for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very cool. What are you using for the voice synthesizer?

Also, I'm stuck on a bug: When I hit command-enter after typing "open @left", it spawns a new window with <http://thechoice.amos.me/[object%20Object]>. (Chrome 27, Mac 10.8)

<comment><AUTHOR> See, that's a very interesting "bug" that was reported to me before.

Here's a little behind the scenes: your answers are actually CoffeeScript that get compiled on the client (along with some support code for each question) and eval'ed.

Since window.open is defined, that's what's happening here.

The commands you're looking for, for that question, are more along the lines of 'enter'.

EDIT: for voice synthesis: speaker.js - an Emscripten-compiled version of espeak. It sounds crappy, which is just a perfect casting for this voice.

<comment><USER6> Do you have a link for speaker.js? I found "Speak-js" (<https://github.com/mattytemple/speak-js>) which is also emscripten-compiled from a C++ speech synthesizer. Same thing? Also, great game thanks for sharing with us; I very much enjoyed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is like the programming version of the Portal games.

<comment><AUTHOR> <3

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi! The Choice dev here - this is Episode 1, there'll be more to come. Tell me how you like it, how you felt doing it, what was hard, what was easy, what was fun, what was annoying, everything! Episode 2 may come out in June if I find enough people like it ;)

<comment><USER8> I accidentally hit Alt-Bkspc instead of Ctrl-Enter and lost all my state. _Gah._ Had I been a little farther along I probably wouldn't have been willing to start over to get back to where I was.

It would be nice if the game put itself in the history, so that Back would only take you to (say) the previous challenge. (That would also really help when you're trying to remember the syntax of a command.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Little know fact: there are 'save codes' - you can load the codes using hashtags, e.g. <http://thechoice.amos.me/#firstdoor> will bring you right to the programming part.

Didn't take the time to update the hash to reflect that though - some people would've noticed the URL has changed, others wouldn't have, and I would have needed to find an interface artifact to make sure _most_ people get it.

TL;DR design is fucking hard but if you dig most dev-friendly features are in.

As for backspace doing back, blame your favorite browser maker. And change the defaults. And report an issue. That behavior (previous on back) was always idiotic, imho.

<comment><USER9> Can you list some of the save codes for us? I've lost state more than a few times (old habit of hitting command-r to run code doesn't work well in browser-based development).

<comment><USER10> firstdoor, twodoors, secret, randomsecret, conditionals, lying, ship

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I got stuck on the crime question, and cheated. They're pretty difficult riddles! It wasn't immediately clear a hint would appear (after my first 6 answers).

Now I'm stuck in the door. Its interesting and somewhat fun, but I'm not sure I have all day to fail fail fail fail fail. Perhaps you could share your dropoff metrics once you have more data.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yup, would've added more analytics if I had the time - consider this a first foray into the world of "let's teach people stuff without them being even aware of it because they're caught in the story".

Hopefully! This is an experiment. Expect next episodes to be in increasing order of difficulty... Episode 2 is about deconstructing the game...

Btw, hints drop if you fail more than 5 times at a question. Just putting that out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'll be honest, I don't understand the logic I need to get through the truth- teller/liar test since it isn't quite clear what I'm allowed to do. If you just want me to do a ton of embedded if/else statements, meh, I've lost interest.

If the goal it to teach programming, increase an interest in programing, or expose a language that others might not be exposed to, the worst way to do it it to make your target audience feel stupid. The initial questions to show the answer command aren't very easy - frankly they are seriously flawed riddles. Second, showing variables isn't described well enough to intrinsically know what to do unless you've already been exposed to programming.

I guess it all depends on the target audience, but it's not all that clear who that is.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have a ton of embedded if/else statements you're doing it wrong. Only one if/else is required.

Thanks for giving me a course about game design and asking questions obviously not answered in Chapter 1. Where can I send you money? <3.

<comment><USER12> _Thanks for giving me a course about game design and asking questions obviously not answered in Chapter 1. Where can I send you money? <3._

Did you not post this expecting constructive feedback? Snark aside, chapter 1 of what? You haven't made it clear what this really is. Is this python? Do you want to use a game to teach the language or is this just a game and the language is irrelevant?

On the question I was having trouble with I was over thinking the isTrue method. It just wasn't all that clear to me until I did some pseudo debugging with it.

<comment><USER13> The language is irrelevant. It's coffeescript, but the whole thing is 'beatable' with an understanding of logic by following its instructions.

If you've never programmed before at all, some parts would indeed be tricky, including the part you mentioned. Still, if you understand how to solve the logic puzzle, you could do it using a temporary variable as previously demonstrated, rather than the more natural (to programmers) nested calls.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's exactly the point of the game :) Thanks for explaining it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I liked this. It reminded of poking around in a dos prompt trying to figure out how to play sierra online games. It stuff like this that got me into computers.

I got stuck at the Lying part. I was able to figure out both of them were lying to me. But still failed to complete the task. I wonder though how "difficult" these challenges are? I still consider myself a beginning programmer even though I can build web sites, and small basic python and javascript programs. Someone once told me I suffer from imposter syndrome. I never though so until using your application. I couldn't help but think "I don't belong here". With that said, I still found it fun, challenging, and frustrating at the same time.

</comment><comment><USER15> Pretty good execution, I was entertained. I didn't mind the puzzle difficulty, though the answers felt arbitrary. It was confusing going back from @left and @right to @door, which seemed puzzling for sure but guessing's no fun.

If the language were clearly built up on the screen (syntax, literals) it'd be easier to work with the EEM. Showing the bound functions would help, too, but would demystify the puzzle aspect. Sexps are more natural to me than this super sugary syntax that leaves you guessing, more or less. Guessing language syntax is no more fun than guessing random numbers. :( I would definitely play an Episode 2.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

Many people have complained about @door vs @left/@right - the reason for that obviously was poor decision-making during crunch time.

Making the game accessible to non-coders (it is - they just take more time - but are usually better at riddles) was hard, and caused some hard decisions to be made.

I'll try to make Episode 2 more polished. All this feedback is very valuable, though.

As someone once said: "If you're not ashamed of it, you haven't released it soon enough".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I liked it. The first questions was harder than the actual programming quizes, which maybe wasn't the goal.

I can't wait for part two!

Edit; I found a few bugs, commands like "print" and "open" does what window.print() and window.open() does. Is this intentional?

<comment><AUTHOR> See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5795893>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'd love a way to turn off the voice. As neat as it is, there's a noticeable pause on each new instruction, relative to the length of the instruction, where I assume it's busy synthesizing the audio it's about to play.

<comment><AUTHOR> No sound version: <http://thechoice.amos.me/?nosound>

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I could use a checkbox to shut off the voice. It gets a little annoying after a while.

Very nice. Somewhat fun and interesting. Xzoor isn't a very good guard if he's telling you specifics about your prison!

<comment><AUTHOR> See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5796039>

You're not in a prison. Much in the story is left to your imagination, but I can tell you this: you are very much a "free" agent in this universe. However, your value is constantly under thorough investigation to see if you shall remain a human, or be deemed a numan.

Hopefully Episode 2 will bring more answer as to what exactly this universe is, how it works, and how you can actually fight back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> At the very end:

> Tell me what you think about it by sending me a tweet.

ugh, really?

Other than that, quite cool, though the first question was needlessly oblique and I stopped playing right there the first go around.

<comment><USER19> I loved that question, it helps you to get into the mood of the game.

<comment><AUTHOR> Exactly. And if you've been paying attention since the start of the game, instead of treating it like a codeacademy or similar programming challenge type, you've already picked up on a few clues that.. the government (and its minions, including EEM) don't really hold you in high esteem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very entertaining! Is it aiming to be an intro tool for programming? I think it would work well as one.

Maybe literals (specifically strings) could be introduced a little more somehow.

Maybe @xzoor should have a more obvious human name like @jeff (since it's rather similar to @door)

At one point I forgot a method name, and couldn't scroll back to find it, I don't think it should be a test of memory (unless that's exactly what it is and in which case I deserve all the abuse my robot overloads can give)

<comment><AUTHOR> The @xzoor and @door similarity is a fair point - although @xzoor has a kind of emotional sensibility to me, I don't know if could change it. @portal would work for the door, though ;)

Non-human names are kinda voluntary. It's a hostile universe, ruled by machines. You're the underdog. You're survining through your coding abilites only. The fight back only begins with Episode 2 (covering subjects like 'cryptography' / 'security').

About forgetting method names etc: Episode 2 (and updated Episode 1) should definitely have a backlog - your previous responses. That's gotta be the top requested feature.

<comment><USER21> Speaking of @door, the @ signs seem gratuitously syntaxy. I guess it helps with the machine-world ambience, but much more of that kind of thing in the language would make it easy to stop playing.

(I liked the game so far.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> As I was completing the fly the Numans problem I felt kind of dirty because I thought I should really be using a for loop of some kind.

<comment><USER19> Actually you can use a while loop, i couldn't figure out the syntax for a "for" loop but while works fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> See <http://coffeescript.org/#loops> for reference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> ha never made it past the first test... looks neat though.

<comment><USER24> yep. i don't think i have the right background to answer this. is this based on a book or something from nerd culture?

<comment><USER23> Yeah I think that might be it to... once again though seemed like a cool idea

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm stuck on the very first problem.

        EEM: Here is your first assignment.
        It is more useless than you. What is it?

I have no idea what it is and the hints aren't helping. Isn't anyone else stuck there too? Or is it personalized/randomized for different people?

<comment><USER26> Just have to be creative/logical at the same time. Simple! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> On the step with the doors and the lier guard, there is a trick to know which guard is lying by asking one question only. This is due to the fact that you use coffeescript. Maybe you should whitelist the parameters allowed for the questions, to avoid "cheating".

<comment><AUTHOR> See cheating is part of the game - in Chapter 1 it's a bit weak really, but in Chapter 2 it's part of the game.

Surely humans do fight back at one point. Don't they?

<comment><USER27> Ahah fair enough, anyway I think this can be a good and funny introduction to programmation which makes more sense than platforms like codeacademy, etc... Nice job :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I really like it a lot. Somehow I got unfocused from the text box and tried to backspace to clear out my answer, which took me back in my browser and lost my progress :( maybe some client side storing of progress could be helpful. I was having so much fun!

</comment><comment><USER28> Took a few tries but I managed to finish it. I'd suggest removing the riddle parts since they can be pretty frustrating and aren't directly programming related. Or maybe give increasingly helpful hints and eventually the full answer.

<comment><USER21> I loved the riddles -- they really set the tone -- but yeah, that can keep people out who'd dig the rest.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, that's true. I've tried to make the game appeal to both non-coders and coders: non-coders seem faster at solving the riddles but on the other hand spend a lot more time on the programming part - and in counterpart, have a much more significant sense of achievement when they complete the game.

It's kind of introductory material, it sets a ground level for Chapter 2 - <USER2> you can't be bothered to sit (or run) through Chapter 1 you probably won't find the next one interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> \--The more you have it, the less you see. What is it?

And I answered Cataracts. And wasn't correct.

<comment><USER30> Did you try blindness? For cataracts, you would expect the question to ask "The more you have _them_ , the less you see. What _are they_?". I mean if you happened to ask someone if they have cataracts, it'd sound a little odd if they said "yeah I have it".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Very nice! Looking forward to seeing what interesting puzzles Chapter 2 provides.

</comment><comment><USER32> For the one were you are supposed to ask the guard (xzoor) for the key I keep getting the error Property 'door' of object # is not a function - Try again.

Otherwhise looks cool, plus I've always wanted to learn CoffeeScript, so thanks!

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, that was example code - do you really expect the game to give you the solution by itself? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I know it's kind of defeating the purpose, but it would be nice to be able to skip and see the answer to the question. Most of these step through games usually let you do that, although those are made for weaklings.

<comment><USER33> Also, I think the append method for the @log is getting exposed. I tried to do something (who knows now) and it said append was not a method which I assume is coming from one of the @log.append

<comment><AUTHOR> You're playing Episode 2 from within Episode 1. What are you doing playing the game you should fork it already.

<comment><USER33> Do you mind adding the build instructions to the README so I can run it locally? Rails holds my hand with coffeescript and I dunno anything just from looking at the Makefile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically just running 'make' will produce all the needed files in output/. Then you can use 'python -m SimpleHTTPServer' from the output server, and open <http://localhost:8000/> in your favorite browser.

For make to run correctly you'll need the haml, sass, and juicer gems installed and in your path.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is awesome. How about a version that records the interaction? Would be great for interviewing programmers! Like a fun version of interviewzen.com.

</comment><comment><USER34> Chrome crashed that tab after the first problem- but that happening was kinda surreal. At first I thought it was part of the game ;)

</comment><comment><USER35> I saw `answer '...'` and immediately guessed... coffee-script? Syntax highlighting confirmed this ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well played sir/madam/robot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If you are wondering what the methods on an object are, use this.

keys = (k for k, v of obj when typeof v is 'function')

alert(keys)

</comment><comment><USER37> Got this: EEM: Object NaN has no method 'toLowerCase' - Try again. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're probably at the beginning of the game, and you probably need to put your answer within single quotes (e.g. answer 'yes'). Not much error checking yet..

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's really irritating that the syntax is incorrect in some examples.

<comment><USER10> <https://github.com/nddrylliog/thechoice/pull/3> :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I am stuck at the Xena and Xzoor part anyone want to help me?

</comment><comment><USER39> for the door question, you should support: open @door, @xzoor.askKey(@door)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback.

See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5795893> for context - window.open gets called on 'open'. If any HNers have ideas for restricting what gets called, I'm all ears.

Source is on GitHub, at <https://github.com/nddrylliog/thechoice>

<comment><USER39> Sorry, I wasn't clear (and I think I meant "unlock", not "open").

I meant that you should support skipping temporary variables.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh. See that's another game design decision.

Nothing prevents you from typing:

      unlock @door, <action to get the key>

But when doing user testing, lots of non-coders got stuck at this point. It's clearer to them when things happen one after the other.

So, if I can find a good way to teach them that when you do a(b(c))) first, b is called first, then a with the return value of b - without making a lenghty tutorial-type explanation, I'll do it.

In the meantime, this'll do :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> it was easy for me, but really fun, I want more of this for sure..

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> answer '<script>alert("xss")</script>'

</comment><comment><USER42> bug: \</comment><comment>---

answer 1

EEM: raw.toLowerCase is not a function - Try again.

</comment><comment><USER43> Is this a programming language?

Why not use a programming language?

<comment><USER44> It's coffeescript[1]

[1] <http://coffeescript.org/></comment></comment>


We Have No Idea If Online Ads Work - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/06/online_advertising_effectiveness_for_large_brands_online_ads_may_be_worthless.single.html <comment><USER2> I remember reading the tobacco industry was actually secretly grateful when the EU banned them from advertising.

As I remember it, they were in a stale-mate. The market was pretty much divided up. Most people were loyal to their brand and that was that. Despite that, they were spending a massive amount of money on advertising even though their market shares remained unchanged.

The reason was that if one of them stopped funnelling massive amounts of cash into advertising, they would lose a big chunk of their market share to the others. So they were all paying mostly to maintain the status quo.

With the ban on advertising, the amount of money saved greatly outweighed the revenue lost as others couldn't advertise either so it really only affected new smokers rather than convince current smokers to switch brands.

I see a similar thing happening in my line of work. In our niche of e-commerce every player of importance works with the same online marketing networks and paying rather a lot per sale or click.

There's a whole lot of sites out there which basically exist to infest organic search results, send traffic to us and our competitors and collect their referral fee from the advertising network. They add no value[1]. Without them, the customer would have been similarly divided amongst the competition as well without having to pay for it. Yet, if we stop paying them, we'll lose a lot of business as our competitors will continue to do so.

Disclaimer: this is all as I understand it and in no way my employers opinion or persepctive ;)

1) Some do, by providing extra information or ranking the shops by what's best for the consumer (price, reviews) rather than the most cash-per-click.

<comment><USER3> NB, while tobacco ads are banned from TV, they are still everywhere on outdoor advertising, at least here in Germany. Actually, I went on a "street art tour" that turned out to be sponsored by a cigarette company, and they were _handing out free cigarettes_. So: tobacco advertising is alive and well in Germany.

<comment><USER2> Oh, over here that's been banned as well. I thought it was an EU thing but I guess it was our government. They're even banned from sponsoring events.

<comment><USER4> That is the case in Canada too. Tobacco companies have been banned from sponsoring events since sometime in 2003.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This reminds me of a fascinating article in The New Yorker called "Twilight of the Brands." [0] The author's basic argument is that brands have historically filled an information gap. Before the Internet, when consumers didn't have tons of on-demand info about products, brands were a compass that pointed them in the right direction. If the last Sylvania TV you bought worked well, you might buy another one without hunting down reviews for the new model.

Now that product info is ubiquitous, the author says, the role of brands and traditional advertising is declining. So, when I hear critiques about a particular form of online advertising, I think about the broader, more subtle ways in which websites influence our purchases. Companies are starting to pay more attention to online forums and social sites, which are more persuasive to consumers than traditional banner ads.

[0] [http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2014/02/17/140217ta_...](http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2014/02/17/140217ta_talk_surowiecki)

<comment><USER6> One place where marketers have gotten around this quite adeptly is Windows PCs and laptops.

Try searching for reviews on a laptop you find at Best Buy. There are none. The model number is 10+ random characters and completely meaningless. Comparison shopping between laptops on the basis of reviews is impossible. Consequently, they have you buying on 1) brand and 2) specs, which is right where they want you, and completely ignoring things like build quality and MTBF of parts which might be revealed by long-term reviews.

This is one of the (many) refreshing things about Apple. Macbook Pro _is_ Macbook Pro until the next refresh.

<comment><USER7> Ummm... I love my MBP but it's no way 'the' Macbook Pro until next refresh. I got a choice of two form factors and multiple hard drive/SSD, processor and RAM configurations.

The build quality is great, but don't pretend for a moment Apple don't play the specs game.

<comment><USER8> I think you know this isn't what he meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The premise of the article is naive at best

You can use web analytics to measure a conversion rate from ads. Hence user clicks ad -> sales happens (in the best cases). That's Internet Ads 101

In fact, with online ads the "if it works" part is much more measurable than for other medias

"Last year, a group of economists working with eBay's internal research lab issued a massive experimental study with a simple, startling conclusion: For a large, well-known brand, search ads are probably worthless."

Once again: "For a large, well-known brand"

Well, so do you mean that pumping ads for something everybody already knows (and already gets massive advertisement everywhere else) doesn't work? Color me shocked.

<comment><USER10> The point of the article is that the sale would happen regardless of the ad.

Ie showing an ad on Google to someone who types 'Ebay' in the search string is a waste of money - since Ebay shows up as the first natural result anyways.

<comment><USER11> However, this leads to the other flaw in the argument, where eBay has been the company most famous for abusing Google's ads, and using them in a completely nonsensical way.

[http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-not-to-run-a-ppc- camp...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-not-to-run-a-ppc-campaign- inspired-by-ebays-adwords-fail/61025/)

I'm sure you've noticed that a search for any noun called forth an ad for eBay. You're enticed to "buy Dog Vomit on eBay" when your dog is sick. And then, even if it was something eBay plausibly sold, when you clicked through it'd take you to a generic eBay search page or, often, a landing page that was not useful at all.

<comment><USER12> It is very unfortunate that the extremely interesting ebay study is being ignored by the SEM community because ebay has some bad adverts.

The methodology and findings should be something that advertisers look at and learn from (i.e. that traditional methods of tracking do not always do a good job of showing value) but instead people just like to point fingers and call names

<comment><USER13> It is not ignored, because eBay has some bad adverts. It did attract significant attention more than a year ago (the study was conducted in 2012, and media reported on it in early 2013).

"eBay has no idea if online ads work" would be a better title. Or "eBay can't get their online ads to work".

If you looked at eBay's search advertisements in the last years you probably have seen very ridiculous ones, like:

      Love.

      Buy it cheap on eBay
      Low Prices. New and used.

This is a significant waste of money, and seems endemic at eBay, not a rare occasion. Though it is too easy to point at this and discard the entire study, it is a relevant prior.

As a control they take MSDN/Yahoo vs. Google. The control should be a different advertiser, not a different advertisement network.

In the paper they mention removing the term "eBay Shoes" from their keywords, because they rank organically for that. They should have never added it, because it is a bad keyword for them. They should advertise on the brand name shoes they are selling. This ties back to the bad adverts by eBay: Fixing your mistakes and seeing change, is different from performing a controlled experiments on a healthy advertiser.

They muse about "the types of consumer that may already be informed about the advertiser's product". This adds a few problems: those customers may have been informed through the very advertisements they now claim don't work. Suddenly shutting down advertisements does not negate the effects of running advertisements years before that. The paper does not investigate the effect that ads have on brand recognition and brand trust. Usability tests show people clicking on advertisements first, because then they expect quality and a simple commercially interesting proposition.

I do think the problem they are describing "some customers may be so aware of a brand, that advertising to them becomes worthless" is valid. Maybe ad networks could help here and implement a form of "demarketing" next to their "remarketing" options: Once a user has enough knowledge of the brand, stop advertising. But a better (and currently available) method could be to apply remarketing and give these power users tailored advertisements. An example could be a buyer's program, promoting a new product from a well-purchased brand, or a referral bonus. To continue offering them advertisements like "eBay shoes" does not make much sense.

<comment><USER12> I am aware of the significant attention this paper got about a year ago. In my filter bubble (and I am in a massive filter bubble with regards to this kind of thing) the attention was similar to the rest of your comment - focusing on ebays failures of execution rather than the failure of measurement.

Other advertisers do not make the same mistakes as ebay with regards to landing pages, adverts or keywords selection but many make the same mistakes when it comes to measuring their advertising value.

Now, perhaps the errors caused by faulty measurement are not as important for other advertisers and I can see why this might be the case (for the reasons you list about how ebay is running their PPC) but what should be an opportunity for the SEM industry to look at how their work in valued and measured has instead turned into something else

> As a control they take MSDN/Yahoo vs. Google

They also used a geographic split as a control. E.g. if in the past areas A and B have performed similarly then pick one of them at random to stop showing ads in.

AdWords geo-targeting combined with this technique is a way for other advertisers - regardless of scale - to run similar tests. But we won't see many doing this because of the attitude that it is ebays execution that sucks rather than their measurement

<comment><USER13> The paper sure is interesting and should add value to the debate and approaches to SEM. To discard it by scoffing at eBay's execution would indeed be your own loss.

My biggest take-away is the saturation of advertisements and the effects it can have on running ad campaigns. Yours seem to focus on the common correlation-causation misinterpretation, and faulty measurement approaches.

I do think there are enough problems with the paper to not grant it the authority to speak for an entire industry (as Slate put it). eBay is just one (and a very big and unique) advertiser in this arena, and every move it makes (even to measure it) changes the entire ad network.

> They also used a geographic split as a control.

Thank you for this correction.

Aside: The problem with eBay's non-profitable advertisements seems to me a beautiful problem: The paper authors subscribe to the benefits of saved costs. I do not think that the marketing department of eBay subscribes to this benefit. For them, and external ad agencies, the more ads your run, the more clicks you get, the more you get rewarded, the better your monthly reports look. People at eBay's online marketing department must be smart enough to realize that many of these ads were worthless to the company, yet it was worth it for them to empty the monthly budget on a list of generic keywords.

<comment><USER14> _People at eBay 's online marketing department must be smart enough to realize that many of these ads were worthless to the company, yet it was worth it for them to empty the monthly budget on a list of generic keywords._

I read somewhere that alleged cookie-stuffers claimed that eBay's staff knew about the cookie-stuffing all along, and encouraged it so long as it increased the sales attributed to their own work in courting affiliates.

If true, these are both cases where incentive design (and measurement) are as important as people's skill with their craft.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Plus research paper, "Consumer Heterogeneity and Paid Search Effectiveness: A Large Scale Field Experiment" without the paywall: [http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/tadelis.pdf](http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/stadelis/tadelis.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER15> There are ads and then there are ads. One of the things that the company I work for, Qubit, does is to validate that the tracking tags that vendors put on people's websites drive an uplift. We talk about one of our clients doing it here [1]

While blindly targeting people using search engine "promoted searches" may not work for every impression, this does not take into account the ads that you see on other 3rd party sites - which is probably what people think of when they talk about "ads". Google's version of this is AdSense (as opposed to AdWords).

This is something that is quite easy to test, and we have seen that some really do work and some not so much.

But driving someone back to a website with an offer on something that they have added to their basket but not purchased, is one way to be sure that you are getting people buying after seeing your content. The problem then is to make sure you aren't cutting into your margins too much...

[1] [http://www.qubitproducts.com/content/video/arcadia-video- cas...](http://www.qubitproducts.com/content/video/arcadia-video-case-study)

<comment><USER16> > But driving someone back to a website with an offer on something that they > have added to their basket but not purchased, [...]

People like useful recommender engines (e.g. Amazon.com).

But not so personalized _smart_ ads that _follow_ them on every website the visit. What's wrong with the static ads that fit the targeted website category?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> We have no idea if online ads actually work _at the scale of huge corporate brands competing for mindshare_. I'm pretty sure it works for smaller outfits - every time I find an appropriate place to run an ad campaign, I see a permanant uptick in readers of my web comic. Eventually I'll have gotten everyone in that place who's going to be interested in my stuff, and I move on.

<comment><USER18> Willing to share where you advertise and why? I've got lots of friends and relatives doing comics online, would love to have a little specialist knowledge to help them out.

<comment><USER17> Mostly just Project Wonderful, an ad network that mostly sells ads on web comics. It's pretty easy to drop a couple hundred into a broad campaign, dink around in your analytics to see what sources give you engaged traffic, and drop some more money onto those specific places.

Also your friends and relatives may want to check out webcomics.com; I don't agree with everything Brad says about Making Comics On The Web but for the most part his site is full of a ton of great advice that's well worth the yearly fee.

<comment><USER18> Thanks! Was curious if Project Wonderful worked, given how remarkably cheap it is. Targeting specific comics works best, got it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> this seems to be based on a study done by ebay, who had an atrocious ppc campaign. it was run by monkeys. really no wonder they didn't achieve any good or predictable results. [http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-not-to-run-a- ppc-camp...](http://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-not-to-run-a-ppc-campaign- inspired-by-ebays-adwords-fail/61025/)

<comment><USER20> To be fair, for all these people know the examples of insane ebay ads are the experimental control. Probably not, but maybe.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> There are also new annoying features of online advertising that might turn consumers off. Even after buying something I frequently see ads for the same exact product from the same exact vendor for several days. For some reason this annoys me so much that it turns me off from the vendor.

<comment><USER22> It's called remarketing. If they're showing you an ad for a product you actually bought, they're doing it wrong. It's supposed to show you an ad for something you looked at, but didn't buy.

<comment><USER23> If it's not being done purposely for reasons others have mentioned, then I wonder if it comes down to the company's integration with Google. Presumably, Google wouldn't know if a sale took place unless the merchant somehow notified them. I'm guessing this might be with a pixel, script, or similar on their order confirmation page.

So, if the merchant failed to implement this, Google would never know to stop showing the ad.

<comment><USER24> No, the merchant stops bidding for the as once you complete the purchase.

<comment><USER25> Generally speaking, no. The cookie pools of users to retarget will be stored not by the merchant but a third party (either the company serving the ads, or a middle man). When a user gets tagged they'll stay in the pool of people to re-target either until their expiration date is hit, or until they are removed. So the merchant would have to notify (automatically) that a user should be removed, not just chose to stop bidding on that user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Online ads is a broad category. It includes social media, display ads, re- targeting ads, and paid search ads. Social media adverts are hard to measure in terms of ROI. At my workplace we have found a way to measure profitability for paid per click ads. We can optimize to drive more conversions at a cost effective price. Success depends on what one is measuring and what the end goal is. In the sea of data it is easy to get carried away on optimizing and improving front end metrics.

<comment><USER27> Read the article. The point is there is so much noise in the signal that optimization is generally not possible unless you are running a truly massive campaign.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> As someone who leads an analytics team in the advertising industry I have to say this title and the studies they are referencing are not accurate to the entire industry at all.

Advertising absolutely works when done right. The effect on brand consideration, shopping behavior, and incremental purchase value can be quantified. The most sophisticated advertisers spend a lot of money to accurately track and ensure their campaigns are lifting their desires metrics.

Now to the eBay study they reference. That study is specific to eBay, a large brand that has spent hundreds of millions a year on advertising for many years and is a top web property visited by a significant percent of the online audience. For eBay it turns out brand search marketing largely does not have a contribution as most of their shoppers are likely going to buy anyway.

Trying to generalize that to a brand that did not have the amount of equity, natural SEO rankings, and established shopping behaviors would be foolhardy. Additionally if you dig deeper into the eBay study they did find a positive effect for the small percent of users that are new shoppers to eBay. They just happen to be a relatively small percent of the audience reached with the spend given the large size of eBay.

In the digital space there is a huge variability in performance based on the type of ad, the nature of the targeting, the product being advertised, the creative message, etc. Trying to generalize to all online advertising without controlling for the kind of brand, product being sold, current marketing positioning, and campaign objective seems a bit naive.

In our work we find huge variability in performance even within the same web property dependent on the placement of the ad within the site and the unit being served. We measure how long the ad was on the page, how many users actually hovered over it in view, and then the incremental lift of exposed users compared to control group. Turns out if you properly optimize to maximize true ad viewing and engagement you will see lifts in brand response, digital visitation, and shopping metrics compared to the control.

In fact I'd much rather have money for digital advertising any day over old fashioned ads with the limited tracking possible. I know how many people saw our spot on the YouTube home page, how long they spent interacting with it, and can tell you exactly what they were interested in. For that TV spot I don't know if you were watching, skipping, going to the bathroom, looking at your phone, or any number of other factors which could diminish effectiveness.

TLDR; online advertising works when done correctly and absolutely can be measured

<comment><USER29> I've said this before on here, but online advertising is incredibly dumb. If you consider all the info Google and Facebook have on me, it's a really sad state of affairs.

I bought a new bicycle and religiously researched this topic and consumed a ton of cycling videos. What ads do I see on YouTube? Cars. I don't have a driver's license.

I once bought a NI Maschine Midi Controller. YouTube then showed me video ads for the NI Maschine Midi Controller for over a year after the purchase. Great business for Google, not so much for Native Instruments.

During a vacation in South Korea, I had logged into Facebook to post a picture. Facebook then showed me Korean ads in Hangul for over a month after my return. They have all the info on me, where I was born, what language I speak, where I live, where I work. Hilariously bad.

And so on.

<comment><USER30> Those three can be explained easily:

1.If you have never visited a car company's website then it's just that Google categorized your profile wrongly and only the car companies are bidding for you when it comes to show an ad. 2\. Just a company wrongly retargeting converters (people who have bought a product) with the same product that they have bought. 3\. In Real Time Bidding [1] for Facebook, their information about the user is very much lacking [2] so depending on the advertiser that bids you might get very bad ads.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real- time_bidding](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_bidding)

[2] [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads- api/rtb/#...](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ads- api/rtb/#bid_request)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ebay is known for very ineffective campaigns, which they tried to justify by publishing "papers". They basically claimed that the fact that search results exist, makes the advertising next to them mostly ineffective. There are so many issues with this argument, it is not even worth starting. But yeah this circle jerk has been going for a while. Also to claim that if it did not work them, it won't work for anyone else is a bit of an over generalization.

You will also find papers stating the exact opposite and how to get great returns and stuff. Everyone it seems gets a different experience from the same platform and then they justify it by publishing white papers. Just like anything else, it is never black and white. But black folks want everything to be black while white folks make fun of the black.

Also check this more detailed analysis that goes a bit deeper: [http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/13/dear-ebay- its-n...](http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/13/dear-ebay-its-not- adwords-its-you)

</comment><comment><USER32> They're a bit vague when describing the "I-was-going-to-buy-it-anyway" problem, but it sounds like they're mainly talking about PPC ads on search engines stealing from SEO links on the same pages. (Some of it seems to be talking about stealing sales from the direct channel, which I have no idea how to handle.)

If your website is already tracking ad performance on a per-ad basis (i.e., tracking all the clicks on that ad, and keeping what you pay per click below what you're getting per click), then optimizing for only the paid search traffic that's incremental, and not cannibalistic, is pretty straight-forward, conceptually.

For a given ad's keyword, instead of optimizing only for the results you get from PPC traffic, you treat your PPC bid as an input that affects sales across PPC and SEO traffic for that keyword, and optimize accordingly.

There are a few extra steps and decisions that need to be made before full implementation, but this is the basic idea. It's actually not too bad to account for.

<comment><USER33> There are other reasons to advertise in search engines on your branded keywords.

For starters, you have account wide and campaign wide quality scores which impact how much you pay per click across your entire account. Having branded keywords which will have high quality scores can help lower all your costs.

Secondly, your competitors can advertise on your brand even if its trademarked. Owning the top position is cheaper for you and a good idea.

Third of all, You would think a brand would want to own as much of the search results page as possible. It will drive up clicks even on your organic listings.

There are also many case studies that show paid search for branded keywords getting more traffic than just organic listings.

I'll search for a product and amazon all the time. I would just easily buy that same product from Walmart if they had it for less.

Branded search does not mean they will buy from you anyway. It could mean that, but it certainly doesn't guarantee that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is a classical example of a Prisoner's Dilemma [0] The conclusions drawn by the author don't seem to consider the fact that if Ebay doesn't buy ads next to it's own name, Amazon would. As with a Prisoner's Dilemma situation, if all parties(In this case companies with substantial recognition and brand loyalty) stop buying ads, they would stand to make the maximum profit. However, this opens them up to the possibility of losing clicks to a 'cheating' competitor, thus driving them into essentially an 'ad war'. [0] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma#In_economics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma#In_economics)

</comment><comment><USER35> This topic came up in a month-old submission about why eBay lost many of its organic rankings in Google's Panda 4.0 release. Some of the comments from that discussion seem quite relevant to this one.

[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7788804](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7788804)

When Slate refers to eBay research, is it based on methods that allowed ads like this gem?

        Vomit sale
        New & used Vomit.
        Check out the deals now!
        www.ebay.com

([http://www.wordstream.com/images/panda-4-ebay-2.jpg](http://www.wordstream.com/images/panda-4-ebay-2.jpg))

If so, can we really take their findings seriously?

</comment><comment><USER33> Advertising by definition is Arbitrage. Leveraging a disconnect between the value of the audience and the cost to reach and engage them with content. Efficient Markets dictates that over time advertising will become less effective. It is the natural progression of all advertising.

Here's an article I wrote a while ago about how content marketing and native advertising are the same thing converging on a point where modern day advertising stops working... [http://www.adotas.com/2014/05/surviving-the- adpocalypse-what...](http://www.adotas.com/2014/05/surviving-the-adpocalypse- what-will-you-do-when-the-current-model-stops-working/)

<comment><USER36> One of the flaws of many advertising strategies is that it assumes the main flaw of the market is imperfect information. However that requires a rational consumer. And Consumers are not rational. Selling ideas is as important as the good itself.

Take most car advertising for example. A significant portion of the ads are from dealers advertising sales. Those are classic attempts to correct for imperfect information on the part of the consumer. But the other portion of the ads are all about how you should feel in a given car.

When you see an add for a luxury sedan combined with platitudes about performance, speed, and engineering or a truck and cliches about America, the goal isn't to sell you on the merits of the vehicle, but to sell you on a concept of a brand. The ideal targets for these ads aren't actually consumers currently in the market for a new car, but the people who just bought a new car. The people for whom the shine is starting to come off the rose. If you sell someone the idea that yes their purchase makes them special, then they are more likely to be happy with their decision, more likely to repeat that decision later, more likely to be a unwitting brand ambassador.

<comment><USER37> That's the thing I always saw as lacking with online advertising -- there's no brand placement.

Online ads always seem to me to be focused on transactional response "Wow, I can use this weird trick to buy a vitamin, sign me up!"

Billboard/display advertising is really effective at this. I happen to know that a particular orthopedic medical practice that I wasn't familiar with has a walk in clinic until 10PM every day to fix broken bones, etc. That's effective advertising!

In contrast, I've been a heavy internet user since 1994. The only product I can think of that I actually learned of via online advertising is those X10 video cameras that dominated pop-up/under advertising a decade ago. That's pretty sad for advertisers!

<comment><USER27> > Online ads always seem to me to be focused on transactional response "Wow, I > can use this weird trick to buy a vitamin, sign me up!" Billboard/display > advertising is really effective at this.

Heh. For the most part online branded advertising is spent on display ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> As someone responsible for $xxxxxx monthly spend in online advertising, it clearly works. We measure it pretty much from end to end.

<comment><USER39> > As someone responsible for $xxxxxx monthly spend in online advertising, it > clearly works. We measure it pretty much from end to end.

Do you know how much profit you would have earned without the advertising? How do you determine that (if you can say)?

That is, without the ads, some customers would purchase more or more profitable products; some would purchase the same, and some would purchase less. But how would it net out -- and more interesting to me, how do you measure that?

<comment><USER38> Yes. If we stop advertising we stop getting sales proportional to the advertising spend. Most people arent coca cola.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I had guest lecturers from chief data scientists of companies that purchase these adds for companies targeted to users. I was told most companies do not want to pay for the controlled experiments, and many times even when they are run for 'free' they do not want to know the answer. i was surprised at the latter

<comment><USER27> It's incredibly infuriating but makes perfect sense once you understand the motivations of all the parties involved.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I think some idiotic consumer products will always require advertising--like soda, candy bars, figh fashion, etc.?

There are some industries like auto insurance where I think it's a waste of time. Every year I call around and get the cheapest insurance. I face had good luck with Mercury(last 4 years). Esurance only quotes for 6 months--that's why they seem cheap.

As to Internet advertising; my biggest grip lately is having to watch a ad video before the intended video.(I turn down the volume and look away for 20 seconds).

I have a feeling Google tracking works too well. I am waiting for the day DuckDuckgo is King. I don't like to be tracked. I don't like my house photographed.(Google put up previously requested blurred homes, cars, persons without any notice. If you think you have a blurred out house--check again.)

</comment><comment><USER42> Since Google does not have vast majority (more than 90%) market share in the US and it is possible to do geo-location based advertising (location based on IP information is largely accurate), they were able to test it out. Well, this shows that being a monopoly helps a lot with monetization when there are few technical possibilities to test . The slate article puts it very nicely. "Art was far more profitable than science."

</comment><comment><USER43> Well far too many online ads do the exact opposite with me, as in I tend to avoid the advertiser and/or their product. This usually only occurs when the ad is presented in some fashion which inconveniences me in the task I am using the site for.

Unobtrusive ads, more power to you. Pop up on me, find ways to circumvent blockers against such, or hide parts of the article I want to read, you get mentally flagged.

</comment><comment><USER44> How sophisticated is click-tracking these days? Is a click on an advertising link always billed, or are there other qualifying criteria in play? I ask because the only time I _ever_ click on an ad link is by mistake (typically when Safari is busy jiggling about with the page layout so that my finger hits the wrong target), and wonder if this is actually costing the company concerned.

</comment><comment><USER45> I would really like to see a similar study done with less well known brands, to see if it makes a difference in cases with non-household names.

</comment><comment><USER46> Just because something cannot be quantified DOES not mean it does not work....Marketing is often UNQUANTIFYABLE...but almost always effective.

<comment><USER47> I think people are being harsh in the down-votes here.

I suspect most people (HN people) hold pretty strongly the belief that everything _can_ be quantified. However, within reasonable limits and current stats and science, lots of things _in practice_ cannot - yet at least.

A lot of advertising probably falls under this. To verify effectiveness we'd need, as the article notes, to control for so many other factors that it would often be too difficult.

So we often guess, or leverage past knowledge and apply it to what we hope are similar circumstances.

If you take the point to be that marketing is not a hard-science, than it's true. Some cases sure, but plenty not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> How does one know that a keyword is a brand or not? If the click through rate is above 30% (people really searched for the term) and there is some normal conversion after clicking (meaning that people really search for the relevant keyword, they do not mistake it with something else), then the keyword is a brand.

</comment><comment><USER48> There is one very important point that I didn't see in the article, nor the comments. By not advertising in search, incumbents would make it less expensive for newcomers to put their offer in front of the incumbent's customers. This can be very risky.

</comment><comment><USER49> Discuss advertising with anybody and you'll come to the conclusion that apparently advertising works on _other people_.

Who those "other people" are, no idea. I strongly suspect some people really are just statistics.

<comment><USER50> Other people here. I've been working in online advertising for 10 odd years and have seen advertising working and not.

This Ebay example was great showing both sides; bidding for their brand term was a waste of money as they are a brand leader not in a defensive strategy. Finding new customers was profitable. It seems they let the former get out of hand and dominate their spend mix.

I see similar situations of excessive wasted spend all the time as companies target the wrong metrics (note: there always is some). Until this study I would bet my house the PPC team at eBay were being largely judged by 'CPA' type metrics. Every year they would have tighter goals in a market that is getting more competitive so they go for cheap wins that look good on paper i.e.grab customers already coming in as you know they will convert. I see this at almost every company.

Profitable advertising absolutely does exist but like anything, you need smart people running the program and you can't surround them with targets that make them go for the wins that look good in the short-term reports. As much as we monitor more advertising remains part art, part science. And I say that as a guy that likes his data more than most.

Anyway, if you're being told ads only work for other people you're talking to the wrong people. I love my marketing and what it can do for a company when run well. If you have any questions I'll happily talk your ear off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I read some of the comments and decided to go read the article, click the link, up pops a massive ad window for Slate. :-)

<comment><USER52> Well, sort of. It's funny because it really proves the headline right. Slate are trying to get you to sign up for their subscription package because I guess the ads aren't entirely cutting the mustard money-wise ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Search ads don't work. Please everybody stop spending money on ads... (so I can have them all to myself.)

</comment><comment><USER54> It certainly works out to the benefit of the advertising companies, the media companies, and Google, though...

</comment><comment><USER55> Why cannot they? Online ads usually work and they benefit the company as well as the individual users in the long run as well as the short run Ever heard of Google AdSense? That is the most common way to make the online ads work

</comment><comment><USER56> Ad impressions don't work. Twitter & Facebook can't monetize. Facebook paid >20B for companies that don't sell ads.

<comment><USER57> The point is that the ads don't work for the advertisers; clearly, they've worked well for the platforms selling ads, e.g. Google.

<comment><USER56> Yes. The advertisers are more and more aware of that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> We have no idea if ads work anywhere but it doesn't stop the ad industry.

<comment><USER59> Yeah we do: Coca-cola <\-- The product offers no value other than "brand". (Brand is advertising).

<comment><USER39> > Yeah we do: Coca-cola <\-- The product offers no value other than "brand". > (Brand is advertising).

It tastes good. How is it different than any other form of pleasure that is sold, such as (non-artistic) video games, alcohol, any luxury good, fashion, etc.

EDIT: ... or World Cup soccer, on my TV now.

<comment><USER59> No one would ever wake up and go: "I need/want coke" (without advertising).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> There are media productivity companies, like MarketShare that cost a boat load but accurately track every possible interaction with an ad and brand to see what actually works.

If you use a company like this and a DMP (data management platform) you can track ads and measure on a scale this article doesn't seem to even know exists...

It might cost you a few million to close the feedback loop accurately but there are companies that can correlate an unclicked banner impression to an in store offline purchase...</comment>


John Carmack on Functional programming in C++  - b-man http://gamasutra.com/view/news/169296/Indepth_Functional_programming_in_C.php

<comment><AUTHOR> Prior HN art for the original URL (plainly linked from Gamasutra btw): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3896404>

</comment><comment><USER2> Incidentally the book Modern Compiler Design in C has sample code in a mostly functional style and talks about these same issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> Please don't post an exact copy-of-a-copy of a blog post that was already an HN headline yesterday.</comment>


Apple's flagship Chicago retail store wasn't designed to handle snow - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/28/16828080/apple-store-chicago-snow-icicles-of-death <comment><USER2> Downtown Chicago is completely full of "watch for falling snow/ice" signs all winter. Not a problem unique to this building...

<comment><USER3> > Not a problem unique to this building...

Exactly!

That said, I'm a little surprised that Apple didn't try to go above and beyond here. Heating elements along the roof edge would more or less eliminate this issue without changing the aesthetics.

<comment><USER4> Heating elements? You underestimate the heat capacity of water, especially the phase change (i.e. "it takes significant energy to melt snow all winter long") - and how _much_ of it falls from the sky. There is a very low-tech solution that doesn't require electricity - but then, that's a complete antithesis of Apple solutions: [https://www.guttersupply.com/file_area/public/categories/Ima...](https://www.guttersupply.com/file_area/public/categories/ImageUrl5_1253026352_5938.JPG)

<comment><USER3> I didn't say it would be cheap, but it would be an Apple like solution to an otherwise fairly simple problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pretty much every building in downtown Chicago has these signs out front after a snow. The Verge needs to verge out of California once in a while.

I lived in various Chicago skyscrapers for about a decade, an it is both frightening and thrilling when a 100x100-foot sheet of ice comes loose and slides down the face of your building, right past your windows. I'm amazed the windows don't break more often. It was usually only one or two a season.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Designed by Apple in California"

</comment><comment><USER7> The most egregious thing here is the implication that downtown Chicago has uninteresting architecture!</comment>


JSON objects can have duplicate keys/names - <AUTHOR> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4627#section-2.2

<comment><USER2> Right. If you read the beginning of the RFC where it defines what an object _is_ , its an "unordered collection of name/value pairs". _Not_ , it should be emphasized, "an associative array mapping names to values".

There are quite a few applications where it is useful to parse JSON into objects that are associative arrays mapping names to values, in which case you need to either avoid duplicate names or resolve them somehow ("last-defined- wins" seems to be the most common rule.)

OTOH, its not too hard to imagine applications that would be more natural using the "unordered collection" model without interpreting JSON objects as associative arrays (a hypothetical JSON serialization of HTML, where JSON object member names correspond to HTML tag names comes to mind.)

But RFC also says names in an object SHOULD (in the RFC 2119 sense) be unique, which means (to adapt the language of RFC 2119 to the specific case at issue) that "there may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to [have duplicate names], but the full implications must be understood and carefully weighed before [using duplicate names]."</comment>


Turning Off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in iOS 11 Doesn't Turn Off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evpz7a/turn-off-wi-fi-and-bluetooth-apple-ios-11 <comment><USER2> This is a huge security, privacy and battery-drain nightmare.

Unassociated Wi-Fi chips constantly broadcast their MAC addresses allowing customer targeting and broadcast their previously associated SSIDs, allowing tracking of people when combined with SSID location databases like SkyHook.

Unassociated Bluetooth is also a privacy and security attack surface.

Finally, it's going to drain the already undersized iPhone batteries even more by not putting chips into powersave modes.

Apple smh fail, fail and fail... they really jumped the shark on this one. I hope this changes but I'll be skipping iOS updates for now and will skip future iPhones if this doesn't change, in addition to already skipping future MacBook Pros because of their horrendous unrepairability and unupgradability.</comment>


What do Unix command names stand for? - <AUTHOR> http://www.unixguide.net/unix/faq/1.3.shtml <comment><USER4> David F. here, with the best true Unix command-name story ever: In the late 1980's, Frame Technology had 50 or 100 employees, and as our product ran on Sun 3/50 workstations, not only the engineers, but many of the admins had them; and of course they all ran the SunOS version of Unix.

One day, Laurie S. from the business side came over to ask me for some help with her system: "I think I've filled up my disk, but how can I find out?" "Well, the 'df' command will show you that info." "But," she replied, "won't that just show me the files in your home directory?" "My home directory??? Why would it do that?" "Well, my initials are LS and that shows my files, and DF are your initials, so that should show your files."

I was super impressed.

<comment><USER5> I'm glad nobody taught me that.

<comment><USER6> Sometimes it only works with a trailing slash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The one major thing I really like about the terseness of these commands is that, although they have a steeper learning curve at first, once you learn them --- which happens quickly with repeated use --- they feel very natural and you use them almost as if they're an extension of English, like a special dialect; talking with coworkers, we use words like "cat", "grep", "ls", "sudo", etc. as verbs.

Contrast this with the verbosity of more "modern" command languages like Powershell: while those may be a bit easier to understand the very first time, every time thereafter it feels like you're talking in a language where every word is a minimum of 10 letters and two syllables long. The mental overhead is far higher.

I've always remembered "bss" as the "bull-shit segment" \--- because it initially doesn't have any useful content.

<comment><USER8> The commands you list aren't too bad because they get quickly learned through use. And "grep" at least is pronounceable and feels strangely apt as a command name.

In general though I think the terseness of the standard Unix commands is a problem, particularly for less often used commands. Even after many years of using them I still get "du" and "df" confused, for example.

<comment><USER9> But how.. du = disk usage, df = disk free...

<comment><USER8> "Disk usage" could plausibly be the command that tells you how much space you've got left. Maybe "disk free" doesn't apply quite as well to du's function.

If I was designing them from scratch, I'd maybe call them something like "size" and "space" respectively.

<comment><USER10> > _" Disk usage" could plausibly be the command that tells you how much space > you've got left._

 _" Red touches yellow, you're an okay fellow. Red touches black, you're a dead jack"_

It's a good thing there aren't any coral snakes around where I live.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> My favorite: "dd" the "copy and convert" command, but "cc" was already taken by the C compiler.

<comment><USER12> Ever since somebody told me the joke, I can't help thinking of it as "disk destroyer". It's a much more appropriate name.

<comment><USER13> Yep learned my lesson once on a malformed dd command and never again have I made a mistake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > nroff = "New ROFF" > These are descendants of "roff", which was a re- > implementation of the Multics "runoff"

Wouldn't it have been cool if nroff was "nuroff" so that run was spelled backwards, and "new" was represented phonetically?

<comment><USER15> Kristaps Dzonsons released a great and well researched history of roff derivatives and manpages in general: [https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html](https://manpages.bsd.lv/history.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I once asked Gumby if he and John Gilmore and Michael Tiemann named their company "Cygnus" as the result of typing "grep gnu /usr/dict/words". Without missing a beat, he replied that if they'd thought of doing that, they would have named the company "Wingnut".

</comment><comment><USER16> I like how the name of "yes" promises that it will say "yes", but it actually says "y". But "yes no" makes it say "no"!

</comment><comment><USER17> > cat = "CATenate" > catenate is an obscure word

The word is concatenate.

dd isn't on there, but it's good: it stands for 'copy and convert'. As you can imagine 'cc' was taken.

'less' is a joke, people who remember 'more' might find it funny, but few people remember 'more' so younger folks just think it's a nonsense name.

<comment><USER18> To continue the successor names, we've also got:

bison from yacc (yet another compiler compiler)

pine (pine is not elm) from elm (did that one stand for anything)

<comment><USER19> You missed flex from lex.

And then:

* getty; agetty ("alternative"); mingetty ("minimal"); mgetty (I always think "modem" myself); uugetty ("UUCP"); fgetty ("fast"); and ngetty (probably "Nikola")

\- [https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/316279/5132](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/316279/5132)

* ex; vi; stevie; elvis; calvin; elwin; javi; lemmy; pvic; trived; vigor; vile; vip; virus; winvi; xvi; vim, view, evim, exim, eview, rvim, rview, gvim, gex, gview, rgvim, rgview, vimdiff, and gvimdiff (VIM); nvi; and nvim (NeoVIM)

\- [http://www.guckes.net/vi/clones.php3](http://www.guckes.net/vi/clones.php3)

* pax, a peace treaty in the tar versus cpio argument

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The emacs "JOKES" file contains an extended section of proposed backronyms, along with a bunch of other 20-30 year-old jokey bits from usenet:

[https://github.com/emacs- mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/JOKES](https://github.com/emacs- mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/JOKES)

      EMACS may stand for "Editing MACroS," but some friends of mine suggested some more creative definitions.
      Here they are. Anyone have any additions?

      Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping
      Even a Master of Arts Comes Simpler
      ...

<comment><USER21> I've heard it as Emacs Makes All Computers Slow.

Probably was more applicable in the old days (as one call tell from the "megabytes" in the parent comment) than nowadays :)

<comment><USER22> I'm often surprised how Emacs can struggle sometimes on modern hardware, like for example when chain-executing complex keyboard macros - though mostly yeah, it doesn't apply all that much anymore.

<comment> cup-of-tea Emacs is actually faster than most editors, but it lets you do anything so of course you can slow it down.

<comment><USER23> The issue is it remains non-concurrent and any code (macros, extensions, …) executes in place of the editor doing its thang, so any non-trivial operation (or trivial operation on an entire buffer) locks up the editor until it's done and does its thing.

And while it might technically be faster _for the process_ , as is the case with e.g. STW GCs on large processes it 1. feels horrible and 2. as an editor is interactive it stops the user in their tracks and slows _them_ down to hell

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> According to the OpenBSD manual, yp stands for "yellow pee"

[https://man.openbsd.org/yp](https://man.openbsd.org/yp)

<comment><USER11> I understood that it originally stood for "yellow pages" because it is a directory service, but that the phone company asserted their trademark on the term.

<comment><USER25> Off topic: Are the Yellow Pages still a thing?

<comment><USER26> UK: yes, we still get sent one (along with a residential directory). It's no longer phone directory sized though. Now midway between A4 and A5 sized and about a centimeter thick.

<comment><USER27> Also in the UK. The last Yellow Pages we received, about two months ago, had a large 'Final Issue' highlight on the front. They've finally given up. I tried to dredge up some nostalgic feelings for it's demise, but flicking through the contents I really couldn't. About 40% of the ad space throughout the book was for one advertiser, Gas Safe Register, and I can only assume that got sold at a song to fill the space. I'd love to know the percentage of the population that are going to miss it. I can see why it's no longer effective with search engines being what they are, but there must still be a decent number of (presumably older) people who don't google when they need contact details.

<comment><USER28> The only nostalgia I have is for the adverts - the kids and the missletoe, fly fishing by JR Hartley, etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Also systemd: both a system daemon, and a reference to "Systeme D[ebrouille]", a French term for getting things done quick and dirty on the fly:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_D)

<comment> GuB-42 I am French, I know about "système D" but I never associated it with systemd.

"Système D" implies making use of what's available, it is hacking (the good kind). systemd is the opposite, it is nothing like a quick and dirty solution to a problem but a major architecture change that intends to replace these hacks with something cleaner.

If the french expression really was the origin of the "systemd" name, it has to be in a twisted kind of way, or some kind of private joke. It would be like calling an electric car "octane" or something like that.

<comment><USER19> Nor should you have. The systemd people themselves have been pointing out for years that it is "something completely different" and _not_ the origin, let alone the correct spelling, of the name.

* [https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#spelling](https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/#spelling)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The origin of `/etc` as the place for configuration files is also interesting.

It was originally meant for any files that didn't fit into any of the predefined categories like `bin`, `lib`, and `dev`, hence the name "etc".

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/56172/295743](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/56172/295743)

<comment><USER31> Equally the history of why we have /bin /sbin and /usr/bin. Lack of disk space. When the OS got too big for a single disk and expanded to a second the split came about. /home came about when they expanded to a third!

[http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...](http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html)

<comment><USER32> Also, remember that the /usr used to mean "user", as in, if you were "bob" then your home directory was /usr/bob. That dance was done twice!

Moving stuff to /usr/bin made sense after systems got too big for a single volume and you've got this directory on a nice, new spacious multi-megabyte disk (oooh!) In those ancient days of Unix the sysop acting as the "bin" user owned /bin and the files inside it and could overwrite them from tapes or compilation. (root would own the files in the sbin)

So /usr/bin technically started out as his or her home directory when logging in as that account... at least back then.

/usr/sbin only came about after /home became the colloquial location for home directories, such that you had parallel constructions for /bin and /sbin under /usr, and later, /usr/local just as you did at the root.

<comment><USER33> > _So /usr/bin technically started out as his or her home directory_ […]

That sounds wrong. /usr/bin existed at least as early as V6, but the 'bin' user's home directory was /bin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder why there few single character Unix commands? Was this intentional?

<comment><USER35> I don't know if it's intentional, but it would tend to increase name collisions with shell variables.

<comment><USER36> Plus all the good one character commands were already taken by the standard text editor, ed(1). It would have caused confusion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> bc = Belinda's Calculator. Apparently named after Belinda Cherry. [1]; i don't know who that is, but i assume she needed to do arithmetic on a unix machine a long time ago.

There's an older unix calculator called dc, for desk calculator; dc uses reverse-Polish, so it's a pain to use if you didn't grow up using those weird old HP calculators (or writing Forth). My understanding is that bc began as a shell script which would translate infix expressions into RPN and pass them to dc.

These days, if i want to do sums, i fire up a Python interpreter, or just plug them into a Google search box or Firefox address bar. But back in the day, i would use bc.

[1] [http://shannon.usu.edu.ru/Langs/LangList/Langs/B/Bc.htm](http://shannon.usu.edu.ru/Langs/LangList/Langs/B/Bc.htm)

<comment><USER21> Yes, bc is useful. You can even pipe standard input into bc, and get the results of the calculations on standard output.

        bc -l

used to be the invocation I used a lot.

I do that Google thing myself nowadays too :) They can even give answers to factorial(n) and the like. Found that recently. Wouldn't be surprised if a lot more too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Arguably not original UNIX but: Practical Extraction and Reporting Language, aka Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister aka `perl`

<comment><USER39> Which reminds me of my favorite one...

If Perl programs (executables, whatever you call them) are called "modules", why is the main place people download them from called CPAN?

It's completely illogical.

C = Comprehensive (It's not, it definitely does not contain all possible modules)

P = Perl (This is only one that makes sense)

A = Archive (If the things people create are called modules - .pm files, really - what makes this an archive? A collection of things? That's a weak leg to stand on. Yes, distributions formalizes this, but modules seems to be the common nomenclature.

N = Network (How is this a network? I think Wall - or later, Hietaniemi - <USER2> wanted people to think it was big and important in the early days)

This is all absurd and slightly sarcastic, but I finally got to write it down somewhere :)

<comment><USER40> CPAN was named after (in imitation of) CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network. CTAN was named by George Greenwade — the idea was to bring together (network) various TeX archives that various people had collected. See:

• [https://www.cpan.org/authors/id/H/HF/HFB/grok- cpan-1.01.pdf](https://www.cpan.org/authors/id/H/HF/HFB/grok-cpan-1.01.pdf) (page 3)

• [https://ctan.org/ctan/?lang=en](https://ctan.org/ctan/?lang=en) or [http://dante.ctan.org/what_is_ctan.html](http://dante.ctan.org/what_is_ctan.html)

<comment><USER39> Imitation, flattery etc, etc.

As I said before, take this with a dose of sarcasm :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I read somewhere that "Perl" isn't actually any kind of acronym but really stands for a pearl (the glossy ball thingy produced by certain species of sea life) - the reason being some kind of biblical reference to it.

</comment><comment><USER42> pwd - took me forever to figure out this had nothing to do with a password. According to this article, it means "Print Working Directory":

[https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/399026/etymology- of...](https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/399026/etymology-of-pwd)

"Historically, program output was printed on paper rather than on screens. So the print part is due to the output technology of the time that the command was developed."

<comment><USER43> I remap the 'p' as "present working directory"

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> >> The Perl language is Larry Wall's highly popular freely-available completely portable text, process, and file manipulation tool that bridges the gap between shell and C programming (or between doing it on the command line and pulling your hair out).

That's ...an interesting definition of Perl. Last I heard it was the "gaffer tape of the internet" or some such. I put off learning Perl for so long that I don't need to anymore. I wonder how often it's used nowadays.

<comment><USER45> I use it all the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I remember reading somewhere that supposedly when fsck was first introduced there was different letter in place of s.

</comment><comment><USER47> Two more: Serious - ditroff - device independent troff Snarky - vi - <USER3> (yah, I do emacs)

</comment><comment><USER48> daemon - disk and execution monitor

<comment><USER33> Folk eymology. The origin is a reference to Maxwell's demon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> tac = cat, but in reverse

</comment><comment><USER49> grep: global regex parser

<comment><USER50> No, that's not the origin of the name. Someone thought that up later. Also, the regex is globally _matched,_ after having been _parsed just once,_ so the name would not even make sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Sudo !! - sudo's the last command

<comment><USER52> The double exclamation is a shell feature, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've heard grep is for Globally find Regular Expression and Print (which comes from the :g/re/p command of ed).

<comment><USER53> Yep. It's second in the article :D</comment></comment>


I'm 17 and made the front page of Medium.com  - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thoughts-on-creativity/9b9b8a76cca5 A most recommended article: The Starbucks Theory. Proof that you don't need to be a journalist/CEO to write great stuff on Medium. P.S. Medium was founded by Ev Williams who made Twitter. <comment><USER2> His former post is interesting as well <https://medium.com/what-i-learned- today/be8b2dc0677>

</comment><comment><USER3> Why isn't the title of this HN post "The Starbucks Theory"? The author doesn't mention their age at any point in the blog post, so I fail to see why it is in the title.</comment>


Launch HN: Educaora.com – Education Platform - <AUTHOR> Hello HN!
I've worked on a platform for education, (https://educaora.com/) where you write educational articles with Markdown, Latex and a few commands to include questions.
Would love to hear your feedback :) <comment><USER2> I like it. Seems straightforward. What are your plans for the platform?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you :) Perhaps try to find some early adopters, like teachers or tech bloggers. Do you know of any that would be interested to try it out?</comment></comment>


Want a project? Buy BluWiki.  All proceeds go to charity. - <AUTHOR> http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=160421557085#ht_884wt_1167

<comment><AUTHOR> You might remember BluWiki from an Apple censorship lawsuit a few months back. More info: <http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/07/apple-backs-down-blu>

Of my web projects, BluWiki is Divvyshot's ugly sister. The site has always been much larger but has received a fraction of the attention. This would be a great move if you're looking for an instant source of traffic.

<comment><USER2> The auction isn't all that clear in some aspects...

1) What's being sold? The domain and content or the whole server/setup?

2) What's the current monthly costs like?

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything you need to achieve massive wiki success (domain, similar domains, wiki, slicehost account, etc) is included.

Another note: I was just told that our pagerank fell from 5/10 to 0. Probably happened a few months ago from wiki spam that we've been strugling with. If you implement a captcha you can might convince google to restore the PR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> It's funny. I used to help out with the PackRat (Alamofire's Facebook game that came before Gowalla) Bluwiki site: <http://packrat.bluwiki.com/> But due to some heavy-handed community leadership I ended up creating my own: <http://packratwiki.com/> I'm not really involved with the operations of either (and don't play the game anymore), but I think I emailed you at some point or talked to you via your Talk page.

I might end up snatching this up out of nostalgia. Could definitely be more monetized (look at Wikia for an extreme example), but I'd be more interested in the community-building aspects of it. Is Nathan Richards going to stay involved after the sale? That wasn't clear.</comment>