Have a friend high up at one of the “Big 3” in this space.
The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.
I remember when this was called cookie stuffing, and eBay even sent a guy to jail for doing it with their affiliate program. That’s the same eBay that owned PayPal, which now owns Honey…
It's totally different you see. This time the fraud was done by a faceless corporation maximizing shareholder returns so this is just an exercise in free speech by an immortal, in the same vein as running an unlicensed lottery.
if the computer belongs to the company, and you're using it as an employee, you should be told that such spyware is installed and your usage of said machines are monitored. Then there's no qualms about this at all.
It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.
|It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.
Uhhh... that seems very incorrect. If someone pokes their head into your shower session, it's an invasion of privacy - whether or not they let you know they're peepin on ya.
The equivalent here is if it's a company shower, and your supposed to be cleaning an office appliance, not yourself. In that context someone poking their head on to see how it's going is fine.
Aside, but NBC’s website is way better executed than I was expecting.
Perhaps it changed recently, or I just never noticed? I was expecting 100MB with back button abuse and retention dark patterns. Instead, it loads fast, has minimal guff, and the footer scrolled into view ending the page within sight of the end of the actual article.
Perhaps this is a reward response to not having to / be able to doom scroll?
To be fair Paypal got spun out in 2015, far before they bought Honey, so there actually isn't any point in time where eBay was engaged in cookie stuffing.
Now what I'd love is an extension that would inject a person of my choosing as the last click.
Amazon et al don't allow you to offer this as an affiliate program partner, not without a special and custom agreement at least, but if the extension was partner-agnostic and released by a party unaffiliated with Amazon in any way, there's nothing they could realistically do about it.
It'd be one way to bring Amazon Smile back, and on many more sites than just Amazon.
I always found Amazon Smile weird. Why not just donate, why have people jump through hoops just to prove that you should donate? So you look good but dont spend much money to do it due to user laziness. Ah… got it :)
Well, it's no less weird that store running a promotion saying 'If you buy item X today, we will donate one dollar of the proceeds to charity Y.'
Also not more weird than the British charity thing of "I'm shaving off all my hair, and that's why you should donate to charity Y." (I suspect Brits need an excuse before they are mentally allowed to do something silly. But any excuse will do.)
I've always been baffled by the British charity thing: You want to ride your tricycle from John O'Groats to Ffestiniog? Fine, do it. You want me to donate to this charity? OK, maybe I'll do it. I just don't see the connection between the two. Please explain the connection to me. You don't actually want to ride your tricycle? But if I donate to some third party, you're going to do something you hate? So you're saying I want you to suffer? I'd rather donate if it doesn't cause unnecessary suffering.
It's something we've been raised to do from a young age.
I've never thought about it before, but I suppose it's a way for you to provide some commitment from yourself as a condition for those you're crowdsourcing donations from.
If you don't deliver on your part, they don't have to pay.
When I was in high-school we did everything from shaving our heads, to having your legs waxed in front of the whole (boys) school.
I raised thousands of £ for charity this way, more than I could ever raise by myself at that age.
I'm sure I've seen dunk tanks (throw a baseball, hit the target, person falls in) in plenty of US movies though no idea how common that is in reality.
Regardless, one of the nice things about the practice is does mean people are at least somewhat committed to a cause they are raising funds for before they go soliciting. It also deals with the irrational part of the human psyche and moves the action conceptually from the person begging to the person trading which can have an impact on how people perceive it.
The charity you’re raising for sets up the infrastructure to do the activity. Charities, for example, have spots in marathons which are hard to get other wise.
So if you see a friend is trying to do some personal achievement, and you think the charity is a worthwhile one to donate to; why not combine the two and help your friend achieve their goal whilst also raising money for a good cause.
Shame so many creators took the Honey paycheck, even while Honey was taking money out of their pocket by stealing affiliate links. I guess few really vet their sponsors. Not even LTT or MrBeast!
LTT did eventually vet what was going on and spot the problem, but didn't have the morals to let anyone else know about the scam. And has since played the victim card (“Mommy, they are saying a nasty thing about us!” and “Other people had the same lack of morals too, why are you picking on us?”) having been called out for not warning others out there that they were being scammed.
BetterHelp is arguably worse. Everything I've heard about them sounds terrible, but they're all over YouTube and presumably they're getting a lot of vulnerable customers who will never receive the support they need.
The YouTubers that peddle this shit have no morals.
I'd take that as an indictment on those podcasts. All the stuff I listened to / watched that used them in the past has dropped them for more than a year by now.
I think Johnny Harris may still run adverts for them? But I watch him mostly because he's such a suspicious character to begin with.
When I first heard all this about honey I was shocked, remembering seeing Linus plug them. Of all the people to have the potential ability to see through it. The way I see it is that anyone who sponsors things like YouTube videos as widely as they do is generally a piece of s** company. Normally up to something, that makes it worth their while to spaff money on such things. 80 quid razors, AI driven news classifiers, VPNs, meh...
My more general rule is that anything being advertised to me must be way overpriced or a scam, in order to pay for the expensive advertisements. I won’t buy nearly anything I see advertised. I don’t run into many ads anyway, but some always get through!
Well he brought down his entire storage system. Twice.
I believe one time he had to bring in Wendell Wilson from Wendell Wilson Consulting, but more likely know to the Internet-at-large as the primary figure on Level1Techs YouTube channel.
I have no desire, nor inclination to dig through the thousands of videos LMG has produced on YouTube, but it's still up to my knowledge, and watching him fumble about with absolutely no clue is not only painful, but pathetic. Linus suffers from the same affliction many of my Ph.D.-holding friends have, which is that he believes because he knows a lot about putting together computers and electronics that he could handle building a large-scale data storage system.
These systems are complex, and to be well-built and maintained, they require domain-specific knowledge - no different than an OS programmer needs deep knowledge of C and C++, and increasing now, Rust.
It's a series of videos of someone way in over his head who should have brought in an actual expert - like Wendell from Level1Techs, or Patrick from ServeTheHome, from the get-go, instead of trying to do it himself.
Here I have to chime in and say that a certain YouTube razor is one of my favourite purchases ever. But I guess it's rather niche, being a double edged safety razor.
Marketers monitor the conversion rates very closely. Chances are some people caught on to the shenanigans within 24 hours, but couldn't figure out which part of the lead generation ecosystem was cheating.
What Honey did robbed content publishers of ad revenue, advertisers lead valuations, and end consumer confidence (bait-and-switch.)
I wouldn't want to be in the blast radius of that legal mess... Popcorn ready for when the judge defines the scope of who is liable =3
It was very similar to the classic banner substitution malware/adware from the early internet.
Most media people have gone back to unique affiliate discount-coupon-codes instead of clickable URL parameters to track lead referrals.
Unfortunately, this also leads to sampling bias, and campaigns spelunking spam statistics. I'd guess on YT irritating people drives engagement in some twisted way. lol =3
but you are also missing the fact that the great part of the industry works in the same way: using open source stuff, in a super parasitic way, to track and control millions of users.
Apathy? Communications spin? Lack of technical understanding?
I suspect some people installed it on a whim based on the recommendation of someone and then forgot about it.
Well, what do the end users care. So long as they get there honey $$. Yes, sucks for the real referer, and youtube creators doing the promoting (though they probably got paid more directly from Honey to do the ad then they would've gotten from there affil links).
Though, like what was exposed, Honey does a poor job for the end user too. There are other cashback sites out there doing what Honey claims/does, but passes on more to the end user. Though they're all taking the referral $$ from the real referer, if there was one.
Scam culture thrives on apathy and ignorance, just count this as yet another win for the bad guys who profit immensely off our increasing societal stupidity
I had this idea before Honey. When we spoke to our attorney, he instantly told us "that won't fly; you'll get popped for cookie stuffing."
The adware world had been doing similar things forever - injecting fake results into Google, taking over default home pages to show Google look-alikes.
When Honey launched on Reddit and got their first user bump, I started building our prototype. While digging deeper, you discover Honey injects JavaScript from their API, which violates extension store TOS, yet somehow this flies.
Fast forward, they hire the CEO of Commission Junction (CJ) as their CFO and everything becomes gravy.
Try to get offers via CJ, you won't get a response. All affiliate networks (CJ, Rakuten/LinkShare, etc.) have "stand down" policies in their contracts. You're supposed to detect when someone takes action like clicking a coupon site link and "stand down." Honey never did this. We had to demonstrate it was happening, but bring it up to CJ and they won't care.
It's regulatory capture of a borderline illegal business.
All cited studies came from RetailMeNot (since taken down). They claim customers abandon carts for coupons. Sure, some do, but those people will probably convert anyway.
Today, coupons are dying. We're in the world of personalized offers. Most coupon codes don't exist anymore - they're offer links. These systems try to "find you a coupon" which isn't real.
You're not supposed to share personalized coupons. These systems capture your coupons and add them to their list, but they almost never work.
I'd never try this business again. It's dishonest and terrible.
Fun fact: Much of this goes back to adware/search XML feeds from parking pages. IAC had a division called Mindspark Interactive Network (recently closed) - their adware division generating insane profit through Pay-Per-Download scam browser extensions tricking your grandfather, hijacking affiliate link clicks, same playbook.
The affiliate networks don't care as long as referrers look like they match approved pages.
Near the end he mentions the typoRules.js, rules.json, urlfixer stuff and Yieldkit. Apparently, whenever you’ve mis-typed a URL to e.g. amazon, it auto-corrected it and added their own affiliate id (which was then valid for 30 days). And the feature only needed very few changes to get applied even to correct links.
The closest software analogy I’ve heard is like passing around a callable/function with a standard interface. An LLM can call the callable and work with the returned data without needing to go back and forth between your application logic.
Do you think SpaceX or similar would be attacking this problem space if there was a business to be had here? Seems like a fun pet project that will lose money indefinitely, but love seeing small teams do big things!
I haven't looked into Boom's business plan but I assume they wouldn't have gotten this amount of money for this long without a plan to make money that at least looks plausible to investors.
Products or technologies that launch new markets often look like 'bad ideas' until someone figures out a way to make it work profitably. Otherwise we'd already be doing them. Paul Graham wrote a good essay on this, saying basically a startup entrepreneur's job isn't just finding a good idea that hasn't been done, because anything that looks like a good idea is probably already being done. It's finding something that looks like a bad idea (so isn't being done) and figuring out it's not bad if you just do it a different way or add a certain innovation. Of course, most things which look like bad ideas are actually bad ideas but searching the edges for exceptions is the valuable thing entrepreneurs do (along with creating new jobs).
Also, you might be surprised there are several companies selling high-end transcontinental private jets. One of the newer features of the latest generation is that they can fly at .9 to .95 mach instead of .8 to .85 mach. That shaves more than an hour off a flight. It's a relatively small market but this new generation has a waiting list of those lining up to pay ~$20M more to save a few hours per round-trip. Sure, it's a small market but it's profitable. Note: I have no idea if Boost's plan involves that market but paying more to go faster, and especially having the fastest option, is usually of interest to someone.
Nearly 10 years ago, I was at a Spotify recruiting event and they told us how they did embeddings at the time.
They took all user generated playlists and projected the songs into vectors where songs that appear together on playlists are closer and songs that appear less often are farther.
It’s likely changed a lot since then, but it seemed like a pretty straightforward clustering system at the time.
co-occurrence. It's the real backbone of almost all recommender systems.
This is the same way YT/TikTok does it btw. Co-occurrence is king in recommender systems in production. It's extremely cheap to calculate and by far the most effective method.
That's just bais collaborative filtering. Drdaeman is talking about using the actual content of the songs in your vector embeddings.
This is not really important if you have a lot of user behavior data and/or playlists for each song. But if you have a niche song that few people of listened to, collaborative filtering based recommendations aren't going to be good.
Real semantic embeddings (which can then be part of the input to the recommendation model) can be trained using self-supervision, e.g. an auto encoder or a seperate "next audio token" predicting transformer.
A recommendation from a person you know takes into account not just their knowledge of your preferences, but also how much and in what way they like/care about you, and conversely, your taking of the recommendation is colored by your rapport with the recommender. All that is something a recommender system has no access to.
Or, more bluntly: you aren't going to mate with a For You page, so it doesn't have the same evolutionary cheat code to your preferences as other people have.
Complicated, or worryingly straightforward and effective? It really does seem that over time, this would compress the space of peoples' preferences - and since listening stats also feed into production and promotion - the space of music produced.
$1,000/mo in a low income area of Dallas is a lot of money. Going from a $700/mo to a $1,700/mo apartment in Dallas is luxury. Not sure you're seeing this one clearly....
I was working on my first "startup" (if you want to call it that) and wasn't getting traction. The owner of a software consulting firm found me on Hacker News and brought me in as his first employee on a massive contract. We grew the team substantially, made great money and that lead to doing a real startup after. And then another. All from a post I made on a hiring thread.
Man, that's amazing. Glad it worked out. Sometimes I miss the old days of the internet where everyone was helping each other, so it's great to hear stories of it still happening on HN.
Most people don’t know that there are species that can, e.g. drop their metabolic rate down to .01% of baseline to survive without water or food for 30 yrs. Or survive in high radiation environments, or high pressure and temperature environments. More people should know that there is genetic precedent for crazy phenotypes that could theoretically extend to other species in the future.
Tuberculosis has an alternative metabolism that allows it to survive even encased in an oxygen -free environment that the immune system puts around it, called granulomas. There are 2000y old mummies with granulomas in their lungs that were found to still contain live tuberculosis.
I curious because the mummification process changed drastically over time, and during the early Roman period was much less elaborate than 1000 years earlier.
best to treat it like an expense from the perspective of shareholders