I mean, Polymarket ran this ad during the World Series that all but encouraged using the platform to trade on insider information: https://youtu.be/x6I-ZS8hZUg
I guess the thin veneer of deniability here is that the whistleblower isn’t shown actively trading on the information lol.
Was fun to have a Series in which each team was the best in its league and in which each team was competing for its first championship. I’m a Red Sox fan, and I remember 2004. It’s a tremendous experience as a fan (of the team or just of baseball). Go Brew Crew.
I grew up in moonshine country (or at least what was once moonshine country before they moved on to pot and then meth), and I never heard of a still causing a forest fire.
They’d occasionally go blind from methanol in the shine or slowly give themselves lead poisoning from the solder in the still, but no fires. So, they were at least safety-aware enough not to want to lose all their product and get the authorities on their case by burning down the area around their still.
I’ve played this for several hours now, and it’s fun! Acknowledging that this probably wasn’t intended for long-term game play, I might nevertheless suggest a few tweaks:
1. The purchasing agent AI makes some incredibly unhelpful decisions. I’m not sure what triggers a decision to order, but often it seems either not to order inputs that I am running low on (i.e., after it’s a problem), or it will order them to be delivered by rail, when I need them in the next day or two. The number of times I’ve been in the middle of handling a list of RFQs only to be hit with a notification that I’m out of something is frustrating.
Also, it seems to have a weird attachment to ensuring that I have an excessive stock of materials that get used up relatively slowly (e.g., urea), while it constantly lets me run low on materials that run out quickly (e.g., muriate of potash and dolomite filler).
It would be nice if I could just set a minimum amount of each input that I want to keep on hand and let the agent keep it at or above that amount, perhaps with a threshold triggered if it wants to order by rail.
2. Some way to automate bids a bit more. I’ve been running at 1.5x order volume, and having to edit each individual bid before sending it off is a chore. Maybe allow the user to set a certain predicted probability of success for all bids, and then autofill the bid with the amount that satisfies that condition? The user could still modify the bid as needed, but if I have a standard probability threshold I’m shooting for, it could make things easier.
3. The net worth calculation is opaque. I’ve been sitting on level 7 for what seems like forever, and I’m still around $2.45M. It would be helpful to know what is factoring into it, apart from cash on hand.
On the whole, I’ve enjoyed playing this. It’s a nice little diversion.
It’s good—better than the much-revered Elements of Style, imho, which is overly prescriptive and frankly unhelpful at turns, even if it’s well written.
But my all-time favorite is Virginia Tufte’s Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. It illustrates the variety of English sentence structures in an ordered way with a plethora of examples. The approach is not prescriptive; rather, it allows you inductively to develop a feel for the syntactical rhythms of the language.
Also, I love Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. It’s a lovely, entertaining little book, filled with Fish’s insights as an eminent literary critic. What I appreciate most about the book is that Fish walks you through a number of examples and explains how and why they work, so you can walk away as both a better writer and a better reader.
I grew up in East TN, and this feels like the death of Queen Elizabeth, Mother Teresa, and your favorite fun aunt all rolled up into one. Except no one had a bad word to say about Dolly. She was beloved around the world, but she was an institution back home.
I grew up in Kentucky, so Dolly still felt like a sweet distant aunt that nobody ever had a harsh word about. Went to Dollywood several times as a kid.
My hope is that people will try an emulate her charity and compassion.
Was raised in middle TN myself. Dollywood was amazing rivaling Disney World/Land. It had parts you could go to watch blacksmiths, glass blowers, and others.
Ham radio websites might be my favorite genre of website. Their design is always a throwback to the internet of my youth, and they almost always have tons of interesting technical content.
It's interesting how simple advertising is as well.
> Please Support My Advertisers!
Some jpegs. No js, no moving shit, just logos, some text, some call to action in a banner format. That's it.
Also:
> A random number generator determines which company's Banner Ad will go in a particular position*. I wrote the code myself and it is very simple and foolproof.
> I do not collect page traffic or link click statistics for advertisements. Your website server statistical analysis is a much better reporter of inbound links from RF Cafe than I or anyone else can provide.
Nice.
> Banner Plan: $400/month
I count 22 advertisers, so there's obviously lots of incentives for advertisers to work with this site. Good for them, and nice to see it can still be lucrative for what I believe to be a single person operation. Quality content still matters.
More importantly, because the ads are not evil (no tracking attempts) then my adblocker and privacy plugins do not recognize them as any sort of threat. They are rendered just like any other honest jpeg. So these adds are more effective than 99% of all other adds: I actually saw them!
While I agree with the sentiment, the world of Internet advertising just doesn't run like that at this point. The current advertisers all look like they're in the RF equipment supplier, which is probably, all things considered, what we'd probably call a niche. I would totally prefer things to be that way, but having compared to major ad networks, in the eyes of advertisers, doing things this way mostly mean throwing away that sweet sweet analytics data and some control. There's just very little incentive for most businesses past a certain scale looking to advertise to do things this way.
It's a niche website, and they're advertising for people who are interested in that niche. I do hands-on work with RF sometimes, and I learned of at least two new-to-me companies with products that relate to the space I operate in while just poking around the website for a few minutes.
This isn't stuff that I want to buy for me to putter around with at home. It is instead stuff that I can use to solve problems for clients; things that be quoted as a part of a larger-scale job.
Like the advertising that supported the trade rags of yore, there's definite function to this very deliberate style of ad placement that probably isn't worth trading for that sweet sweet analytics and some control.
These weren't random ads for dick pills, Raycon headphones, or NordVPN. It is instead all highly-targeted and industry-specific.
It's remarkable in that I saw the advertising at all since I've been blocking ads on the web for as long as we've had a web to advertise on.
But I did see these ads. I noted some of them. None were garish or distracting. I took no action to block them.
If he's trying to offer ad placement for companies who want to inform people like me of the stuff they sell, and I think that he is, then: His method completely nails it.
I don't disagree at all, and as I said, I'd love for this approach to still be more of a thing. My point was more that it's taking an ever shrinking proportion of the advertising pie, cause your typical marketing people are more interested in targeting to as large a targetable audience as they can, meaning these smaller sites aren't even on their radar. They speak in hit and conversion rates. For niche markets however, as you said, there's visibly still an audience, so hat off to him for still offering that kind of space.
Ah yes, the good old internet where “you cannot access this website from your region” was the absolute norm. Why cant i access this website? God knows. I just cant.
This is most definitely NOT the internet of my youth.
Once I got to 37% total countries identified (seen?), it basically stopped showing me new countries. I went through five or so rounds without seeing anything that I hadn’t seen before. Which was gratifying, since I was getting 20/20 every time, but you might tweak it a little to add in new countries more frequently.
I always love when a literary piece ends up in my feed from HN because I can always guess the one of three users who posted it (usually one of lermontov, apollinaire, or samclemens—there may be a couple of others). I just want to say that this English major appreciates your work and the variety you bring here. I’ve found some excellent stuff because of y’all.
I got mine a month ago, and I’ve read 13 books on it so far. Its chief advantage is its size: the ability to carry it with me all the time and to pull it out whenever I have a free moment is great. (And also, although I have no evidence to support this, I think the smaller format helps me to read better, as I am able to focus on a small block of text rather than letting my eyes wander all over the page, as they are wont to do.) This little device may be the best $60 I’ve ever spent.
I loaded mine with cpr-vCodex. It has some useful features, and it gets updated almost daily. I find the “reading achievements” a bit gimmicky, but it’s otherwise a solid firmware option.
I guess the thin veneer of deniability here is that the whistleblower isn’t shown actively trading on the information lol.
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