HN user
A little history for folks seeing this for the first time: Ishkur has been publishing and updating this for over 25 years.
Truly one of the best artifacts of "the old internet". This gives me nostalgia. So many late nights as a teenager learning about the music I loved that seemed so inaccessible where I grew up. Thank you, Ishkur.
In this case, it sounds like CH is using publicly available data only. That doesn't sound like a violation of user privacy, unless Facebook is misleading users about what portions of their information are publicly available.
It's a reference to cipher from a Borges story:
Made me think of this NYT article from 2010 which mentions the fundraising experience of a female CEO/Founder. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/technology/18women.html
Some gross anecdotes about Bay Area VCs showing naked pictures of themselves, asking about her husband's sexual performance, etc.
(For the record, the company she was trying to fund has been quite successful.)
Slice (unroll.me) is owned by Rakuten, who also owns a whole family of companies including Ebates, Rakuten Marketing (a fairly large adtech company), Viber, Buy.com, and lots of others. Slice's data has all sorts of interesting applications, both within the Rakuten family and to third parties like Uber. If you're a Slice/unroll.me user, I'd bet that a lot of your online experience is shaped by the data you share with Slice. A lot of Rakuten's other properties actually share office space with Slice in San Mateo, so there's obviously plenty of opportunity for collaboration. :-)
The irony is that Rakuten also owns a significant (12 percent?) stake in Lyft. Pretty funny that one Rakuten property was selling data to Uber who used it to hurt a second Rakuten property.
Former VP-Eng at a product-ads ad-tech company here...
You can think of this as a two step process. First, connecting your Facebook UID to structured data about a specific product in a product catalog. Second, connecting your FB UID to multiple devices/browsers without cookies.
I think the second part (cross-device matching) has been explained well by other commenters: tere are multiple techniques involving IPs, hardware footprints, browser footprints, browsing habits, etc.
I want to clarify a few things about how the first part most likely occurred. There's been a lot of emphasis in discussion on the FB "Like" button. It's true that this is a possible way for FB to observe you have visited a specific webpage. However, it's more likely that there was a Facebook "pixel" on a retailer's website (some commenters have been referring to this as "javascript" or "retargeting"). Most e-commerce sellers use these today. They're basically a FB web endpoint that the retailer can pass structured metadata to that lets the retailer communicate to FB that an event has occurred on their website. FB allows retailers to send all kinds of metadata about all sorts of events - page loads, add to carts, checkouts, purchases, in-app events, and custom events. The retailer can also send very detailed info about the content being interacted with on a webpage, down to sub-SKU granularity (e.g. not just a particular shoe, but a specific color/size/variant of that shoe).
Historically, the FB web endpoint would return a 1x1 transparent image so that a retailer could embed it on their website's HTML and a customer's browser is "tricked" into loading the image from a third-party domain. Thus the name "pixel". This is still frequently done, but nowadays the endpoint may just be a REST endpoint and/or may be called via AJAX (or via an SDK within a mobile app).
Facebook also allows retailers to upload their Product Catalogs to Facebook. These are basically a CSV of structured metadata about every product the retailer has for sale. Then, when the retailer sends a pixel event to say SKU 12345 has been interacted with by a user, Facebook can reference that SKU in the retailer's Product Catalog to learn all kinds of info about it.
A really interesting exercise is to install the FB Pixel Helper extension for Chrome (I'm sure there are equivalents for other browsers). It will show you all FB pixels loaded on a given page and what metadata was passed along. Keep an eye on it as you browse the web, especially the next time you browse an e-commerce website. Facebook basically sees everything that happens. They may as well be ingesting everyone's Apache/Nginx logs. :-P
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/facebook-pixel-hel... (Note: I'm not affiliated with this extension in any way)
SocialWire - Full-Stack Engineer - San Francisco, CA
Online ads suck. But advertising keeps the web free (as in beer), and we want to keep the internet free. So rather than hating on advertising, we decided to do something about it.
At SocialWire, we are taking a new approach to advertising: building a recommendation engine for ads. Our system generates product-level ads and hyper-targets them to exactly the right audience. We do this at scale and automatically across a retailer's entire catalog. We want our ads to be so good that people discover interesting products through them, and find them to actually be useful.
We're looking for a full-stack engineer to join our small and talented team. As our fifth engineer, you'll have the opportunity to work on and shape all aspects of our product, from backend Python services to slick dashboard features in JavaScript. We work at the intersection of distributed machine learning and data warehousing, we like to experiment and take risks, and our engineers choose what they build. Most features are live in production just hours after they're completed. We push early and often (with testing and code review!). We ask tough questions. We get shit done.
Super sharp team, early stage company, awesome investors, huge opportunity, beautiful office, and interesting engineering/research challenges. Come join us!
If interested, drop me a line at stefan@socialwire.com
As someone using OS X over Linux because of monitor-related reasons, I actually think Ubuntu supports multiple displays better than OS X.
I don't know the current state of high density display support in X11 (and I may just be an ignorant user and plain old wrong about this), but it was a totally broken deal breaker for me a year ago.
To me, this is the most exciting part. I'm thinking Dropbox for application state.
This is pretty cool. It has always seemed sort of silly to me that I have powerful so many powerful computing devices in my life and yet most of the important applications in my life are inherently centralized and running on someone else's servers in a far away location. Obviously the power of a remote datacenter is necessary for many applications, but for others it seems unnecessary or even like a hindrance.
I would argue that this trend stretches back well before "Save the Cat" or even Syd Field or Joseph Campbell, all the way to Aristotle. This isn't really new stuff.
A few years ago I was backpacking through the Gobi desert and stayed with a Mongolian family. On the floor next to my bed I found a copy of Syd Field's famous guide to screenwriting. Until that moment, I hadn't realized just how widespread this philosophy of storytelling had become.
I bought my first bike from his shop, and built my second and third from his tutorials. A very great dude. RIP.
As former Somerville to Boston year round bike commuter (I' now in SF), I just wanted to tell you to rock on and stay safe. :-)
I know a good number of bike commuters in Boston and we've all gone down at some point, some in worse ways than others, but I don't think anyone has been doored too badly, which was always my biggest fear. In my case, I was hit from behind while riding with my lights on in a bike line (Somerville Ave) and thinking I was hyperaware of the cars behind me (the car drove off, but I'm pretty sure it was a drunk driver from the erratic driving). In a friend's case, a police car without its sirens on in JP blasted through a red light and hit him head on. Both of these accidents and most of the serious bike incidents I know of occurred at night. I'm actually more afraid of darkness than doors nowadays.
I appreciate how well this lines up with the PBR finder: http://www.yelp.com/wordmap/sf/pbr
SocialWire - San Francisco, CA - full stack engineer, javascript hacker, data scientist, "office manager plus" http://www.socialwire.com/#jobs
Online ads suck. But advertising keeps the web free (as in beer), and we want to keep the internet free. So rather than hating on advertising, we decided to do something about it.
At SocialWire, we are taking a new approach to advertising: building a recommendation engine for ads. Our system generates product-level ads and hyper-targets them to exactly the right audience. We do this at scale and automatically across a retailer's entire catalog. We want our ads to be so good that people discover interesting products through them, and find them to actually be useful.
With this comes a boatload of difficult data, analytics, machine learning, optimization, and scalability problems. We're formally hiring a full stack engineer, but we'd also love to talk to anyone who writes beautiful python, elegant javascript, or loves to look at data - we're open to contracting/part-time work for the right candidates. On the non-engineering side, we're looking for an "Office Manager Plus" run our office, finances, and HR while shaping and growing our awesome culture.
We have sweet digs in Potrero Hill; we've raised $3mm in seed capital from First Round Capital, 500 Startups, and a crew of other top tier investors; we've got an impressive client list and real revenue; we've got a talented team of hackers, designers, and burners; we've got a bright blue pool table, a fridge full of Pliny the Elder, an airstream trailer full of Stumptown espresso, and all the sushiritos you can eat.
Drop a line to stefan@socialwire.com and let's chat.
Some press: http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/13/socialwire-gets-2-5m-from-f... http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/02/socialwire-seed-extension-n...
Argued like a true economist...
Seconded. I'm curious to hear your reasoning, and your actual arguments will sway me much more than your credentials anyway.
I admit that 3D printing is a long, long way off from this, but I'd argue that every item I bring into my home and every material purchase I make is a potential application of home/consumer 3D printing waiting for a solution.
To be fair, those were actually fairly progressive and disruptive industries when was involved in lobbying for them.
This is gross.
Could you elaborate in a less rude and more informative manner?
Someone upset that they were rejected from YC?
Aaaannd cue internet vigilantes: http://cjwworld.cu.cc/?p=216#comments
Sincerely, thank you for sharing. (both your story and your generosity)
I'm in. Just moved to SF and ready to meet some awesome new folks!
I don't agree with the parent comment that I'm replying to, but I think this is a healthy skepticism to have. I don't think it deserves a downvote...
Hotspots, Posterous, BackType...who else am I missing?
Crimson Hexagon - Boston, MA
Looking for frontend web developers, web engineers, dev/sys ops, and backend hackers with an interest in machine learning and big data.
We use machine learning to measure public opinion about major brands, politics, etc. using the social web (including the full Twitter firehose) as our datasource. We make our findings available to our customers through a beautiful web product. We've collected, indexed, and are constantly mining an archive of over 100 billion web and social media documents, adding another 1+ billion each week.
Small team (6 engineers, 2 research scientists), mostly Java shop, plenty of free food and beer, impressive customer list, $5mm+ in funding, and growing fast.
Drop me a line at stefan@crimsonhexagon.com
Twitter's ToS requires third parties to respect deleted tweets, etc.
Trying to decide whether the disposable nature of this product meets that requirement...