punee

NIH much?

Developers cost a lot of money. Mailchimp doesn't. Maybe your "clueless micro-managers" know a little more than you think.

Full article here for anyone interested: http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/economics/a-phool-a...

Huh? The answer is in your question. Non-public advertising. Medical sales.

> Once you have one human level AI you can make more replacing each human in the production of the human level AI - you basically start at the end point and working backwards replacing each job performed by a human with an AI.

Again, I don't see how that follows. Once you know how to build something, you can do it again. Of course. But what if building a functioning AI that can replace a human costs $100 bn?

Certainly it's not going to be economically viable to replace tasks that do not produce high ROI, even if you assume AIs are paired with indestructible robot bodies made out of unobtainium that are as versatile as the human body (have we even built one of those ever?).

I'm familiar with the idea that AIs could make better AIs and lead to some intelligence singularity, etc. Again, I think there's a lot of handwaving behind those ideas. We have no idea what the complexity of building more complex intelligence is, or what it even means.

I think what you're saying makes some amount of sense, but I still feel there's a lot of handwaving and hidden assumptions around the way such a system gets bootstrapped.

If you have links to more detailed ressources on that topic, I'd be interested in reading them.

So we're going to need robots to replace all the humans. I'm not sure how that fits in the zero marginal cost narrative.

I'm not sure I really understand the economics either.

Is AI going to be free? Who are the owners of capital going to sell their production to if people have no income? What are people who don't own machines going to do? Curl up in a ball and let themselves starve to death?

"If the AI is at human level then it can do all human jobs."

I don't see how that follows. How does a computer program do manual labor?

How does human level AI make everyone unemployable?

Someone in the comments section of the blog links to an interesting article w.r.t. your first point:

http://www.nature.com/news/registered-clinical-trials-make-p...

The snark in the original article makes the author sound like a total idiot.

But let's not get in the way of HN's Two Minutes Hate?

Okay, so now I'd like someone honest to read this whole thread and tell me with a straight face that Hacker News is "full of libertarians", as I read here from time to time.

I mean, there's someone here who doesn't understand why some people try to lower their tax bill by "taking from the government's pocket", and it goes completely unnoticed.

I can't be the only one to find this hilarious?

I don't want to sound too critical, but have any professional typographers reviewed this?

I'm mostly asking because at first glance, some of the models look quite terrible to me (questionable font pairing, excessive column width, no visible grid, etc.).

What I find interesting here is to evaluate exactly how great your idea was compared to that of your competitors.

It sounds like in your case, what made the idea good was not so much the product itself, but applying it to the right niche (product-market fit in modern startup parlance), possibly at the right time.

So maybe your idea wasn't so great after all?

I find it very common to hear people say "people made money off of my idea": that means people don't consider market timing or marketing to be part of the idea. Isn't that odd?

I guess that comes from "ideas" living on a spectrum from a vague "AirBnB for X" to a fully baked narrative that includes a very precise vision (not that that's what ends up being executed in the end). You hear a lot of the former, very few of the latter.

If by "consumption culture" you mean "sales", then yeah.

I guess because Google's Dutch auction was considered a failure.

You don't think it's hard to explain what?

How advertising causes high rents in San Francisco?

Be my guest.

Yes, and people left Syria to go to Europe because of advertisements too. Damn advertisers. They were behind it all along.

Preposterous.

If only we knew who's buying all the advertising, maybe it would start making sense.

Walk me through the causal process here. Does it go something like...

Landlords want more money so they devise a massive marketing campaign, including a complete cultural narrative, TV series, movies, and even gasp whole companies created out of thin air.

They infiltrate media outlets to con dreamers into coming to their city, and expect to charge them 10x more than they used to pay in rent. They have to, after all, to cover the costs of the largest ad campaign ever created in the universe.

And it's a massive success! It just worked. Whoa.

Or... Maybe that's just not very realistic.

Maybe your rent is high because you live in a city with a flourishing job market for highly qualified and highly paid workers who came there to find new jobs, and whose real estate market has a chronically low supply of housing due to various cultural or regulatory reasons.

You make some valid points but... Complaining about a $5 user acquisition cost?

If you think that's expensive, try a field sales team.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what you're asking.

How is which industry growing? If you mean how is ad tech growing, it's growing because digital advertising as a share of total advertising is growing. It's mainly eating up advertising budgets that used to go to newspapers.

You can check out this article linked somewhere else in the thread for more data: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-03/advertisings...

I think much of the value you lost went into the pockets of your landlord and the local businesses you patronize (which is what you wanted?). How exactly do you suggest your money ends up in the pockets of advertisers? I'd love to hear it.

> It might not be part of production per se, but it's necessary for getting the item to the buyer. Advertisement, much less so.

Is that so? How do you figure? How do you get an item to a buyer that will never be a buyer because he never heard of your product?

> As a consumer why should I care whether brand X sells -- except if I'm its owner?

Well, thank you for unearthing what I believe is the crux of the question so concisely.

Let me put a twist on your question: As an employee, why should you care if the company you work for sells?

Society is not made of people who are 100% consumers.

People need to sell stuff to make a living. Advertising is a way to sell stuff.

I don't like to pigeonhole people, but I've heard the arguments you're making a million times. Almost invariably, they came from people who'd never had to sell anything themselves to make a living.

Go ahead an try to sell people "crappy products" with advertising. See if they buy. What you'll discover is that people don't buy crappy products. They buy "good enough" products. Sorry people's standards aren't up to yours.

We can argue until the sun comes down about what is "essential" or "beneficial" to society, but that's entirely subjective.

I also don't understand the very common belief expressed around here that it would somehow be a good idea if humanity were reduced to its "essentials" or to stuff that they "really need". Art isn't essential. The internet isn't essential. Comfort isn't essential. Entertainment isn't essential.

"Advertising is very bad and unsustainable and it's going to bring about the end of the universe because of evil venture capitalists. Is this what you want? No! So if you want to save your soul, you can repent now and start using sustainable, ad-free services. Like mine. Only $11/yr."

Your message is a little disjointed. Are "other parts" marketing or not-marketing? Take your pick.

Anyway, the article doesn't discuss where ad money goes. It would need to use figures for that.

Instead, it tries to paint a market as some sort of a conspiracy that purposely creates complexity to steal money from consumers. It's essentially FUD.

You seem to suffer from the very common bias of "build it and they will come."

It's irrelevant whether a cost is "essential" to the production of the item. Distribution is a cost that's not part of production. Would you say that people pay a "consumption tax" on freight transport when they buy any physical product?

You say "most" web startups are based on advertising. That would require proof. I recall seeing someone breaking down the list of the current "unicorns" by revenue model. A minority is financed by advertising.

First, numbers would be required to see exactly how the market is "economically upheld" by VCs.

Second, I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but your example seems poorly chosen. Uber and Lyft live off of venture capital. Even absent Uber/Lyft, the transportation market was/still is one of the most cartelised around.

Third, you could certainly find satisfactory counter-examples where the money "ends up" (money keeps flowing, btw, that's why simplistic diagrams aren't very interesting) in the hands of a larger pool of companies. But if the point of the article is to tell us that social networks is a highly concentrated industry, that's hardly an upvote-worthy revelation.

Judging by the language used in the article, it is apparent that the author has a beef with advertising.

I'm glad he can have a lifestyle business sustained by earned advertising he gets with mentions on Hacker News, but it seems a little disingenuous to pretend that can work for all businesses.

Is this article a joke?

Suppose for the sake of the argument that instead of drawing an arrow from the consumer to ad tech, I drew an arrow to... any other market.

Couldn't I make exactly the same argument?

People pay a "consumption tax" to fund every part of the products they buy.

That money flows into the pockets of myriad companies with intricate supplier/client links.

Investors pour money into that market and create new companies hoping to make money back on their investment.

That happens when their investment manages to get market share by "cannibalizing" competitors.

Some investors lose their shirt. Some companies go bust.

My question is: so what?

It seems like there's little more in the article, not to mention the complete absence of any numbers to back the claims that are made or give a sense of scale.

So my conclusion is that what the author really wants to talk about is how these bad companies own private data, yadda yadda. Nothing new here.

So I guess the author is just doing this to push his own ad-free product.

Inception.

That's because the article is just a thinly veiled ad for the author's ad-free service.

That's incorrect.

"all muslims living in Europe who have the potential to be radicalised" is the subset of muslims who have the potential to be radicalised.

Your comment would have been valid if he/she had written "all muslims living in Europe, who have the potential to be radicalised."

Yes, syntax matters. The HN crowd ought to know. ;)

If you know the word and you're looking for synonyms, use a thesaurus.[1]

If you know the general idea and want a more precise word to describe it, I'd look into WordNet, especially concepts like hyponyms (subsets of a general word, car -> ambulance) and troponyms (different ways of performing the word, useful for verbs, e.g. eat -> slurp, gobble, peck).[2]

If you know the context and you want a word that "sounds good" in that context, use a collocations dictionary.[3]

[1] http://www.thesaurus.com/ [2] http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn [3] http://www.ozdic.com/collocation-dictionary/pupil

So science advances slowly?

Then I guess Coke won't "continue to bleed sales and struggle" as the parent suggested?

Note that Coke ALREADY provides "healthy alternatives" (they sell bottled water if that's your thing). And also note that the parent has no idea what part of Coke's product line the dip in sales was caused by, whether it's an industry-wide phenomenon or not, etc. etc.

That's because the parent is just some armchair financial analyst spouting nonsense.