885 karma · joined March 1, 2013
A strong countervailing force (in some markets) is competition. If Google had more competition (both in terms of a independent search service and access to be the default search option in browsers) they might have to start caring more about the search experience and privacy.
Abstract:
Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning
Stories like a Tesla catching fire in a garage while it's owners were asleep is the risk that most fear [2]. Is there a greater risk of gas vehicles catching fire while parked in a garage?
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/gm-tel...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/08/04/tesla-f...
Apple supplier Wistron recently began trial production of the iPhone 12 at a new facility near Bengaluru, with full production set to begin soon. The iPhone 12 will be the seventh iPhone model to be manufactured in India, but the first high-end device to do so.
https://www.macrumors.com/2021/03/09/apple-iphone-12-product...
Agreed that adsense serves ads to 'open web' properties already. However they do this with user tracking, just like facebook already does. The suggestion above is to instead use contextual ad targeting.
Secondly - adsnese has no access to facebook's walled garden hence facebook could exclusively served contextually relevant ads on its own highly trafficked sites free from competition.
Thirdly - what's wrong with competition? facebook has the scale, relationships with publishers and advertisers, and technology. They could, if they wanted to, take a page from Apple and compete on the concept of privacy if their brand wasn't so tarnished by their insistence that they surveil their users.
Back to the core point - facebook and others facilitate transfer revenue from high quality sites (railway hobbyist sites in this example) and encourage surveilling individuals for only facebook's benefit.
With targeting you're correct that facebook (and others) can instead follow the user around the internet and show them (perhaps) relevant ads on sites that may be cheaper to advertise on (e.g. some crappy link-bait / SEO built site) which may be more effective than an ad otherwise shown on _that_ click-bait site but perhaps less effective than a railway ad shown on a railway related website.
Facebook can transfer revenue from the higher quality site on railway topics to lower quality sites that may just be click-bait and capture nearly all that difference for themselves.
Bottom line is you de-fund high quality sites (railway hobbyist sites in this example) and encourage surveilling individuals for only facebook's benefit.
oneAPI DPC++ Features Included in SYCL 2020 Final Spec [https://newsroom.intel.com/articles/oneapi-dpc-features-2020...]
Arstechnia's write up on OneAPI provides a good overview [https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/09/intel-heidelberg-uni...]
[edit: added arstechnia reference & link]
While this is a commonly held believe in many corners it doesn't appear to be well backed by data & research. Freakonomics also covered this topic in some detail recently.
Some examples where it's proven untrue:
Nytimes drops targeted advertising in Europe: https://digiday.com/media/gumgumtest-new-york-times-gdpr-cut...
>“The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us,” he said. “The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely.”
Danish broadcaster grew revenue after dropping targeted ads: https://techcrunch.com/2020/07/24/data-from-dutch-public-bro...
>The data shows the NPO grew ad revenue after ditching trackers to target ads in the first half of this year
Couple of thoughts and questions:
1. When submitting to HN the front page probably isn't the best thing. The blog post at https://www.ethicalads.io/blog/2020/12/ethicalads-newsletter... seems more interesting to me because you detail the number of ads, publishers, and revenue. It's much more likely to generate interest and discussion.
2. Classic two-sided market problem in that you need to attract advertisers and publishers to the network and there's no incentive to take the risk of joining. Any thoughts on how to make the network more attractive to publishers and advertisers?
3. Really like the focus on a niche audience (developers), at least as a starting point. There's probably an answer to #2 above.
4. Are there plans to increase the contextual awareness of the ads? E.g. if the publisher is focus on front end tools (e.g. react) might be able to tailor the ads on that site to more front-end relevant advertisements.
"Google uses the information shared by sites and apps to deliver our services, maintain and improve them, develop new services, measure the effectiveness of advertising, protect against fraud and abuse, and personalize content and ads you see on Google and on our partners’ sites and apps. See our Privacy Policy to learn more about how we process data for each of these purposes and our Advertising page for more about Google ads, how your information is used in the context of advertising, and how long Google stores this information."
I purposely didn't want to go down the "quality" rat hole because that tends to devolve into subjective opinions (see DDG threads throughout HN). My personal, subjective opinion is that blind tests would likely reveal very little differences and thus justify their major investment in brand advertising made by Google.
(not blind but compare https://duckduckgo.com/?q=best+wallpaper with https://www.google.com/search?q=best+wallpaper; do you really want 3 pinterest results to this query; this is the burden of being the dominant search engine - you're the one people will game)
--edited for typos
Clearly there are technology challenges (internet scale web crawler, indexer, search interface, ad technology) but these are not novel challenges anymore.
Funding is an issue as operating a general search index is likely very expensive with high upfront investment. Marginal costs are nearly zero as the major expense is likely fixed (crawling and indexing the internet) while variable costs are a small percentage (serving search results for each request).
Google, like Nike, Gucci, and Procter & Gamble, has spent billions to build their brand perception and cement the habit of using their products despite there often being minimal actual differences between competitive products.
But the critical one really does seem to be attracting new users. The history of DDG, ClickZ, Bing all seem to validate this. Just getting a user to _try_ a new search engine is very difficult despite it being "one click away." Certainly a deal with a browser maker / mobile manufacturer would aid this but it's priced amazingly out of the reach of competitors denying perhaps the most obvious way to get trials and traffic.
Google clearly knows this. How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be that default.
They open sources some components e.g. https://github.com/cliqz-oss/keyvi.
I think any long-term search engine competitor will eventually need their own index though DDG is doing well financially so far.
What problem do you think directory websites solve that search doesn't?
Essentially convert email newsletters en mass for customers to subscribe to.
> Wuhan’s Zhongnan Hospital found that 2.4% of its employees and 2% to 3% of recent patients and other visitors, including people tested before returning to work, had developed antibodies, according to senior doctors there.
Additional antibody testing is also underway in Wuhan.
Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/wuhan-starts-testing-to-determi...
https://www.wired.com/story/why-dont-we-just-ban-targeted-ad...
Interestingly this technique is usually used for executives though, like all interview strategies, this one is also not perfect.
There are also lists with links and contact info of important businesses to exercise your CCPA opt-out or delete rights with like data brokers such as Experian, Epsilon, TransUnion as a start. Even ccpa email templates that may be easier to use rather than going through a form (not sure if they will work).
It is still a little fuzzy to me. What is a "synthetic query"? Is this basically generating queries that would match the content (i.e. essentially reversing the process)?
Novelty, freshness are interesting but can lead back to the noise problem mentioned in the blog. If many pages are created that may match the query (e.g. "best new movies") many young pages will match this. Popularity would be useful but difficult to establish and then there's the clickbait and other gaming problems.
>Queries performed by people, if associated to a web page, serve as even cleaner summaries than anchor text. This is because all the logic put in place by the search engine, who resolved the query with a list of web pages, and all human understanding and experience that led one to select the best page from the offered result list end up embedded in the association <query, url>.
This would seem to present a "rich get richer" problem where the oldest links that have the largest click-through tend to float to the top making it difficult for a new result that may be "better" to appear high in the search results. Anyone know how search engines tackle this problem?
An orthogonal but related idea that is often floated is that many web sites _need_ tracking and targeted ads to survive and that they cannot exist without the [increased?] revenue they provide. Personally I think we'd all be better off with fewer web sites that were higher quality and if cutting off some revenue starved some of the weaker click-bait publishers out of business and funneled that revenue at about zero-marginal cost to other higher quality outlets that would actually be a _very good_ thing.
I actually built a general news aggregation newsletter inspired by Techmeme too (http://enclude.com) which uses ML to group the leading stories of the day together with the highest quality ones highlighted. My hope was to break people out of their filter bubble by exposing them to high quality coverage on the news of the day.
Did it as a daily email because I wanted it to be pushed to me and I wanted it to be limited meaning once you read it you're done. No need to suck up more time.
I've had no time to work on it and its in a state of disrepair but if anyone is interested in teaming up on it let me know.
I.e. How much more likely is someone who watches 21 hours vs 20 hours to be retained? Then how much more likely is someone who watches 41 hours vs 40 hours to be retained? I'm guessing that on average there is a much smaller difference between 41 and 40 than between 21 and 20.
I'm also guessing it may turn negative as some people have shown they will subscribe for a month, binge on their favorite/new shows, and then cancel. Perhaps renewing in a few months time to do it again.
Would also be curious about other metrics such as search time : watch time. I'd imaging people spending more time searching and less time watching get frustrated and are more likely to cancel. With autoplay it eliminates searching for some.
I'm also curious why there isn't a setting to enable/disable autoplay.