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Comment by oceliker | Hacker News Reader

Ridiculously targeted t-shirt ads on Facebook are actually a thing, but probably not for privacy awareness purposes: https://thehustle.co/who-makes-those-insanely-specific-t-shi...

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This article got dark very fast

Even without seeing the result, it was entirely predictable what was going to happen when someone let a computer generate phrases from word lists. The guy who went out of business generated 700 different combos algorithmically and then did not proofread them. That seems absurd. 700 isn't really that many, a few hours of manual labor to cull the bad ones, and his business may have made money.

I think other people have made money successfully with the few hours of manual labor version. At least, I think I've seen their customized products continue to exist and be available...

Where did you get the number 700? The article says they had 22 million shirts

From the article:

"In the end, he generated about 700 variations of the phrase on t-shirts, and put them up on Amazon."

700 "Keep Calm and ___" shirts, they also generated 22 million "___ a ___ who ___ and __ " style ones for their catalog and listed 550k of them on Amazon.

All of the examples shown in the article were of the "keep calm and ___" variety. With 550K more in the catalog, I imagine there were plenty of wild ones.

With four options he may have only had to check a few hundred words. 68^4 ~= 22 million

https://www.reddit.com/r/TargetedShirts

I really really like those cell phone cases.

They made me laugh out loud for a few minutes. Did anybody actually buy those? There has to be someone with the right sense of humor.

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