
Ask HN: Are the best minds of our generation working on ad optimization? - Bakary
Paraphrasing Jeffery Hammerbacher.<p>Or if not ads, some other form of zero-sum value shuffling. Is this an accurate claim to make?
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ig1
You're making a common mistake among tech people that ad optimisation is
worthless.

Ad optimization has reduced the cost of customer acquisition for millions of
businesses. In the bad old days you just had to buy a billboard or tv spot and
hope for the best, acquiring customers was an order of magnitude more
expensive than it is now.

Many of the online services you use today (SaaS, online dating, mobile games,
etc.) would have very different unit economics without ad optimization - a lot
of them would be economically unviable.

Ad optimization might be unglamorous but it has an important role in market
based economies.

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brador
Ad optimisation has also pushed forward AI, machine learning, data science,
data collection. All lead to a massive net positive for humanity (so long as
they are not misused of course).

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Bakary
That last part has me a little worried, as I am under the impression that the
economic actors who will most likely be able to make these techniques blossom
to their fullest extent are unlikely to be even remotely interested in
people's well being. Facebook is perhaps the best example of this hypothetical
trend. I do hope it is confirmation bias on my end and that the reality is
less grim than it appears.

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bjourne
Appears so. It's not only ad optimization but also gambling. On tv, almost
half (or so) of the ads are for casino sites so you can imagine that the
business must be booming. I guess it is good for programmers because there are
a lot of employment opportunities.

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19eightyfour
I second the comment by ig1.

I think this is a natural consequence of a disconnect between what the economy
values and what the popular imagination values.

A disconnect mirrored by the mythological transformation, experienced by
nearly-all it seems, from naive youthful idealism, to somewhat-cynical grown-
up pragmatism.

I'll have a stab at describing the disconnect in the following way: our minds
are born in the gutter, with our imaginations looking up at the stars, but as
we grow up we come to value, not the lights of distant stars, which come to
seem cold and providing no sustenance, but the closer more familiar lights of
the homestead, the township, the city. Those things which end up reminding
most of other people, of home, of money and security, rather than lofty and
distant ambitions which our culture also mythologizes as ludicrous and insane.

As Picasso said, and Zuckerberg for a while echoed on his profile, and Musk
seems to against-the-odds still embody: "that every child is born an artist,
the problem is how to remain one once we grow up."

 _Random note:_ My Chrome autocorrect would like to "autocorrect" Zuckerburg
to Cheesburger -- you'd think the closest string in terms of edit distance
would have been "Zuckerberg" but hey, maybe it works off _some other metrics_.

I was planning to do some serious coding this evening. But cooking and had too
much wine so now I'm useless for everything except waxing ridiculously on Ask
HN.

TL;DR - ad optimization is unglamorous but necessary. And not even evil. More
relevant ads are a lesser evil for sure. We are raised taught to reach for the
stars, but as we gain that much-sought-after "independence", they get us to
trade, "a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage", as Pink Floyd
so eloquently put it. In other words, what's economically necessary is not-as-
yet completely in line with what our pure souls aspire to be.

Civilization is still an infant. What can you say?

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joeclark77
I think more generally the issue is that most of us are "skimming" off the
work of others, in the so-called "service economy" or "knowledge work". Being
a lawyer, banker, insurance agent, accountant, professor, etc, is not
dishonorable in itself; these services are necessary in some amount to make
the economy work. But there's no need for 50% or more of the population to be
doing such jobs. A small town with ten banks isn't going to be any richer than
a small town with two. A small town with ten manufacturing companies _would_
be much richer than a small town with two. Napoleon once mocked the English as
"a nation of shopkeepers" at a time when England's economy was largely
profiting off "real work" done in its remote colonies. I think the USA and I
daresay most rich nations today could be zinged with the same insult today. We
seem to have lost some of our vigor and competency when such an overwhelming
number of young people aspire to do cubicle jobs instead of, say, engineering.

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zer00eyz
If I look at my linked in, and I look at those who work in the space, I'm
going to have to answer with a resounding NO.

Thankfully they work in the adspace, because it keeps them out of other
industries where the code is important and their presence would be a burden.

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ddorian43
Many of them are also working on game engines. Source: look at notes on every
UDK release.

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SirLJ
I think the best minds work on "Wall Street" mathematicians, physicists, CS,
you name it, they are working for the big money...

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wayn3
not our fault. government monopolized research and then took a dump on it.
wall street pays what we're worth. universities do not.

besides, black scholes equation and heat equation are essentially the same
thing. if "quants" figure something out, that can be backpropagated into
research on the heat equation. several centuries later when the patents fizzle
out.

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SirLJ
Oh, I don't blame you, I do in fact wish I came to the same realization much
sooner in life, especially since started to design systematic trading algos
and drawing more and more income form the stock market...

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wayn3
i blame the fucked up academia situation. i'd rather work on interesting
things.

but i'd more rather make money.

