snikolic
Joined 16 years ago
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711
Submissions
142
Member since
Mar 2
Recent submissions
Comment · 1 year ago
Comment · 8 years ago
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.
Comment · 8 years ago
It's a reference to cipher from a Borges story:
Comment · 9 years ago
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.)
Comment · 9 years ago
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.
Comment · 9 years ago
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)
Comment · 13 years ago
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 [email protected]
Comment · 13 years ago
As someone using OS X over Linux because of monitor-related reasons, I actually think Ubuntu supports multiple displays better than OS X.
Comment · 13 years ago
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.
Comment · 13 years ago
To me, this is the most exciting part. I'm thinking Dropbox for application state.
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.