Ask HN: Are the best minds of our generation working on ad optimization?

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

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?

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.

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

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.

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.