skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wow, the first half was all good and informative, than the second half the authors started to dump all his opinion as known, absolute facts.

The fact is that Google, a multi billion dollar company which make ~90% of its revenue through ads, not only allows ad blocking extensions to be installed in its browser (which is rapidly gaining market share) but also not-so-evil enough not to tinker with the Top 10 extension list and allow an ad blocking extension to be listed as the second most downloaded extension. (2 of the top 10 extensions are ad blockers: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/list/popular).

To top it off, they are forthcoming about the ad blockers and how they view it and discussed it openly with everyone, by justifying it as a good thing. They agree with something most of us already know is that the single biggest reason we use ad blocking extensions is because of the intrusive and extremely annoying ads. If ads were non-intrusive and fast and targeted most people wouldn't bother with ad blockers. Google, the biggest online ad company gets it. This is good news.

And this is what the author writes?

"And of course, there's no guarantee that Google will always allow ad blockers."

Is the author really this ignorant? You don't even have to rely on extension to block ads. Hello privoxy: http://www.privoxy.org/
This is the new standard in xkcd explained.
News events issues damages trends
Report: The Most Active Online Are The Most Educated.
It would be, if the warming were even. Remember - as we increase the energy of the system, the _average_ temperature increases, but so does the range it's in. Cold will be colder, hot will be hotter, rainy will be rainier and windy will be windier.

It's not all roses.
Windows 7 leaving Redmond's help desk less busy
This sentence means that some people in the Apple compagnie doesn't really like VLC. So they remove VLC from the offcial Apple download page without any explanation.
We don't understand why as some other people in Apple do really like VLC...
Why bother with an EMP weapon, a rifle-calibre machine gun would do the job more efficiently.
Dungeons & Dragons For Microsoft Surface Has Come A Long Way
The only way many of the laggards are going to upgrade is if their favorite sites stop working. I think soon it will become too expensive to hack n' test for four versions of IE, and companies will start dropping support for IE 6.
YouTube video leads to Hollywood contract
The secrets behind menu design
Sorry, but I don't understand the point you are trying to make here.

By "random features" I mean that the features chosen are fairly arbitrary in nature, taken from arbitrary sections of a fairly arbitrary selection of standards. That's what makes the Acid3 test different from the Acid1 and Acid2 tests which were rather more specific in what they tested (i.e. CSS), something which is much more fundamental to the web than anything Acid3 tests.

Also, the Acid tests are deliberately constructed with browser bugs in mind. That's why IE fails it incredibly badly since it's been designed to make IE fail incredibly badly. There's no conspiracy when the entire point of the test is that it reveals browser bugs.

That said, Microsoft are behind everybody else, and no-one has said otherwise. However, given inherent limited resources, I'm not sure if I'd rather Microsoft focus on passing Acid3 than improving other aspects of their browser. Given the choice between good CSS3 support and Canvas or SVG Fonts and SMIL I'd prefer the prior pair, and I'm sure many of their users would gladly choose improved performance and stability over web standards.
If the infringer did not have to incur development costs, or reduced development costs, those would be saved costs and included as part of the damage award.

I will also add that the plaintiff only needs to enter the infringer's gross revenues of the entire company into evidence. It is up to the infringer to justify deductible expenses from non-infringing business in order to arrive at the profits gained from infringement.

Once again, this is assuming the US has jurisdiction.
While we cannot imagine the world of four dimensions, we can certainly think about it perfectly well.

Sagan said things in a way that was always very rewarding for the listener.
The point with this case is that the first 2 reps told me it's ok to fax emails. And then they closed the account.

And when I faxed signed paperes nobody wanted to look at them. Although they said "go ahead" and send.

The real problem is that the support personnel are not the one making decisions, are not telling the same, and you can't talk to the people who really do decide.

Plus, their action of closing my ability to receive payment (and provide service to my customers) without any warning is an extremely aggressive sanction, for no reason.

Let's close his account and then see if he was doing legit business. In the mean time, "we're sorry for any inconvenience this may caused you". When you're doing a 2-week promotion, getting an account closed even for a week for "inspection" is not an option. After 2 weeks we were back to normal low activity, without the bundle.
One thing that VLC Mac developers really want is testers! There is too few testers. This a job that can be done by any guy who want to try a new software. That's not an easy job but that's a valuable one!
"Consumer banking has always been free in the UK."

No, it hasn't. Charges for writing cheques, withdrawals, etc were common at one point. I remember the switch to free banking in the UK when I was a child - not having to pay anything to use your bank account normally without going overdrawn was a big deal at the time.
I wish I was as optimistic as you. Right now I'm fighting with all sorts of buggy edge cases in IE8's allegedly complete CSS 2.1 implementation. At the end of the day I'll put more faith in a hokey Internet benchmark than I would any organization's technical marketing efforts.
My SPECIFIC point was:

The "joke" here is: I wonder what would happen the poster if he wrote anything different?

Nothing! Seriously.. I keep a blog (in Turkmen) for more than 3 years and people actually living in the country write all kinds of criticism (in blog posts/comments), and guess what? We are all alive and well, have more than 1 million+ pageviews/year.

Oh wait, someone's knocking the door...
Reminds me of Brian Singer's documentary "Spin," which is no longer available on YouTube. It was made of raw Satellite feed going down to local news stations.
I am assuming that there already exists an encrypted communications channel between the ground and the UAV (command and control). So, it would be trivial to include a command to switch encryption keys at specific intervals.
This is absolutely false. The only thing true is the fact that there isn't so many mac developers for VLC. They need helps because they want to bring a really nice player.
Sounds almost like typical client demands.

"Seriously man, you're going to want to encrypt this. I know it's an extra 10k, but you've already spent 50 million. And I really think we should stick with Blue on the wings."

"Nah, ditch the encryption. We're already over budget. But please do change the wings to green... wait red... now let's see your blue again?"
"There will always be some group of people who want to block ads for personal reasons. But if we do a good job on the advertising side, people won't want to block ads. People will find them actually useful.

"I think there will be a nice equilibrium. If people get too aggressive with ads, then ad blockers will become more popular and companies will get less aggressive with ads. The market will sort itself."

As an Adwords advertiser, I agree. Maybe it's because I am selling a B2B product, but I have no interest in 'aggressive' ads that trick gullible people clicking them (the phrasing from this post last week: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=989729)

P.S. The headline seriously distorts Google's argument. Saying that the market will balance itself out as aggressive ads and ad blockers play off each other is not 'ad blockers will save online ads.' In fact, the Google rep doesn't make that statement at all.
Skribit Finally Launches, Aims to Cure Your Writer’s Block
Great point. It works as a gimmick to get a click, but after that you need to focus on your benefits probably.
I can have as many 142 tabs open. Performance on firefox is good, although they do eat memory :-)
Is anyone talking about the potential to not just grab video but to send control signals? What if the enemy could actually take control of one of these drones? Is that channel encrypted?
How about sending back false video to not allow the true operators to know what is really going on or to generate false positives.
Consumer satellite TV was around from the early 80's, and the struggle to scramble the signal in ways that people wouldn't get around to get free TV started promptly... They really had no excuse - while they might not expect some random guy with a little dish and a laptop, they should have been expecting hostile governments from easily having the capability.
It's a pity people don't seem to be reading these. As a young coder, I find tales of the earlier ages of computing and electronics fascinating, and they serve as a good reminder that even today there are areas of computing where the philosophy is completely different from the release early/release often nature of the web development sector I work in.
Every website attempts to expand until it is used for software release announcements.
I remember hearing about people intercepting well feeds that the networks would send (east coast to west coast etc.). They would use the big old dishes for it.

This is probably made up, but I heard that sometimes the well feeds contained worse-case scenario what-if's that news stations would prepare content for in advance. Like meteors hitting, plagues, etc.
They mean the hardware/software for the drones, not the protocol / format used for transmission.
Apple Patent for controlling your computer with your iPhone
Toxic Waters Database
Military Software Sucks
I don't buy it. The assumptions seem to be that A) annoying ads work in the short term and B) annoying ads cause people to use ad blockers. Sure, it follows that it is in the ad industry's long-term interest to avoid destroying themselves through annoyance. However, individual advertisers still have the incentives to be annoying, since the costs (more adblock) are distributed to all advertisers, but the benefits accrue entirely to them.

Maybe individual advertisers can avoid being annoying and hope that adblockers only target the biggest offenders.
The US has a system. It's called ACH (Automated Clearing House).

You can find many banks in the US that offer free transfers between accounts using this system. Examples include ING Direct and USAA.

I use this all the time, and never write checks.
Automated to Death
Most IE6 laggards are large companies with sprawling IT bureaucracy (I did some work at one up until a couple of month ago). And their favourite sites where the internal project and time tracking web sites. As long as those work they'll see no reason to upgrade from IE6 and they'll never make any changes to those sites that will break IE6. They really don't care too much whether the rest of the internet works or not.
The prime example here is again in politics, slander is a tactic always taken by the right-wing parties, however when your claims are hollow and see through they can fail by record numbers. This happened in the UK when Labour gained the majority with Tony Blair, the conservatives launched a slander campaign that not only alienated voters from the conservative party but had no effect on keeping liberal voters out of the polling booths, they essentially handed parliament to Labour. The conservatives here in Canada keep playing the same tactics and have yet to get a majority through their tactics. Again the same could be seen with tactics used against Obama, but they were baseless claims and liberal voters came out in force, conservative voters staid at relatively the same levels but decreased vastly in percentage.

Oh come now, you can't think of any examples where left-wing parties have used slander against right-wing folks? I do seem to recall some negative, and frequently untrue, things being said about George W Bush, or Sarah Palin.

Attacking the opposition is a common tactic among all political parties in all countries. If it goes too far it can turn off some moderate voters, but at reasonable levels it seems to work reasonably well. It's far less common when marketing products -- I'm not quite sure why this is, but possibly because it's easier to come up with positive things to say about your own product ("It has shiny new features X, Y and Z!") than to come up with positive things to say about a politician ("... uhhhh.... hope!")
On reviewing the list I don't think I'd be interested in following any of these twitterers (or should that be tweeters?). Someone should probably compile a list of top hackers on Twitter.
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Congrats, Paul!
Maybe. I've seen some unencrypted emails (html page from web-based emails) hit my box. But it was usually junk when I run it for half an hour last time.
Do you think obsfucation and spam could solve this problem? Could they setup cheap broadcasters all over the place that constantly send out fake videos and develeop a sophisticated filter they can use themselves that the insurgents wouldn't have access to? Then they wouldn't have to rework the drones themselves, and they could constantly rework the spam and the filter to stay ahead of them.
I've never minded Google ads at all. In fact I quite like them. The reason I have an ad-blocker is because of the many sites featuring sexually explicit advertising with no warning - a big no-no when you use the internet as a reference at work.

I'm not sure if I trust their motives entirely, but Google's theory about the market balancing itself is right on, IMHO.
2010: the year SEO isn’t important anymore?
10 “Top 10″ Lists Every Entrepreneur Should Read
Gowalla's 10 and a half days of Christmas game
Yes, VLC's reading of DVDs is much more permissive. I've never figured out what the deal is with Apple's DVD reading software.

Perian is hampered in many places by the limitations of QuickTime itself. Apple hasn't yet provided any API for QTX, but they've promised us that it fixes many of our problems. We've communicated with the QuickTime team, and they're aware of our frustrations and seem at least somewhat inclined to work with us once QTX has a reasonable API.
Congrats Stammy!
At the moment I use ad block in manual mode and zap only ads that flash or move.

It's a pain though and it's a constant temptation just to turn on easy list and kill everything.

If there was a filter list subscription for those which still permitted 'responsible' ads I'd probably use that instead.
Carter-Ruck wins £25k libel settlement for Trafigura
Google closing AdSense accounts, refusing to pay out?
Here’s a user script that does a similar in thing for several browsers:
http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~murray/code/#googleviewer
Lessons to learn from Danny Meyer's Shake Shack
They should've written unit tests obviously ;-)
My point was simply that describing the tests as random or arbitrary diminishes the value of the results without requiring an alternate viewpoint. That would be fair if it were truly random, but I don't think it is.

Edit: Your last edit provides the alternate viewpoint. Your position seems to be more that the attention is misguided, not random.
Power from Space moving forward in California
I'm still just looking for a plugin that opens tabs the same way as Chrome does. If it weren't for the ecosystem of plugins that I rely on for FF, I'd have moved to Chrome already...
Image captchas suck, period. I'm not sure if there's a better way to distinguish humans from bots, but forcing people to parse an image of distorted letters and type them into an input box is lousy for usability/accessibility no matter how you slice it.
Interview: Mike Dirolf from 10gen talks MongoDB
It's actually not so terribly dumb. The point here is to prevent fraud. People who take the time to credibly threaten legal action are, I strongly suspect, much less likely to be engaged in fraud. Real criminals would just walk away from the cash (lest they attract more attention) and put up another site on another PayPal account.

It's more than just squeaky wheel syndrome -- PayPal is using the context of your communication to determine who you are.

Whether that's ethical or not is a separate question. But it seems logical to me.
Looks great! I remember seeing the article about FriendFeed's datbase setup and thinking how neat it was. Very nice to see a simple implementation of that idea become easily available.

Now I just have to find a project where I'll need to use it!
> "Everybody's history is part of African history because everybody came out of Africa," Ibrahim said.

Is this why Africa is referred to as the motherland?
I think the 37Signals and Joel Spolsky examples are a little misleading. Maybe this goes without saying, but when blogging to get traffic, be sure to remember your desired audience. 37Signals and Spolsky's audience is web developers, like many HN readers, so they can promote their apps on a tech blog. If your audience is grandmothers or tweens, don't expect to get much traffic from your blog about Rails programming.
Do bloggers really have this problem? I have more drafts waiting to be finished than I have articles. I have too many ideas to execute them all. Am I alone?
I read a lot of the citations quoted by this guy and they seem to be saying different things than he does.

For example he says that fish oil has toxic effects on the liver and cites Ritskes-Hoitinga, et al., 1998. The actual paper says that fish oil may have hepatoxic effects in herbivorous animals and that therefor when using herbivorous animals to study the effects of fish oil on atherogenesis, the effects on these animals livers may need to be excluded (because it's not observed in other animals).
Focused twitter lists are great for free marketing by the way.

http://theplanis.com/pmotscores/ brings in 26% of my new visitors, all from a highly targeted vertical, with fantastic conversion rates.
I actually use this on one of my blogs. "Stammy" has done a great job of making a clean interface and widget. I wish him all the best.
Thanks guys! You beat me to the HN posting haha.
I thought they were in trouble with the release of Amazon's RDS, but it looks like they responded. Great work.
some of it is here http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/43.html
Some bloggers do. I think lots of people have writer's block on occasion. The tool is also a great way to get feedback from visitors on what they want to hear.
Agreed. Speaking poorly of others says more about you than anything else. The problem is that the impression is hardly favourable.
I did an "Ask HN" thread about a year and a half ago and found a good number of people with this problem. Skribit came out of that problem I had myself for my own blog http://paulstamatiou.com
Google’s Crummy Search Results for Appliances
This isn't just about reuse and embedding. Permissive licensing would include the ability to format shift; technically, it's illegal to rip a DVD and convert it for play on your iPod or other video player.

What's interesting is that Disney does seem to be getting it on recent DVD releases—by including a iTunes digital copy for use by the purchaser on the release. At Costco the other week, I saw something even more interesting: a combination digital, Blu-Ray, and DVD release of a number of Disney's recent films.
It's a straightforward collective action problem. However, annoying interruption ads work only when they can successfully interrupt people - through pop-ups, flashing, grabbing focus, and all the other annoying things they do.

It seems to me that the widespread adoption of adblocking software can only hurt the annoying, short-term thinking advertisers and help the not-annoying, long-term thinking advertisers.

As it gets easier to avoid annoying ads, the PR cost of being annoying will continue to rise until it starts hurting annoying advertisers in the short term - in effect, internalizing the negative externality of their activities.
Did you create your account specifically to make this factually incorrect comment?
How to get rich according to wise men
Not so much in the long term, but in higher quantities and when oxidized.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/fish-oil-health-benefits/
In the case of Tomato Garden they reported Hong Lei to the authorities who arrested and imprisoned him for three and a half years along with lesser sentences for his associates. But it seems to hinge on whether the theft has made any money.

http://www.chinaipmagazine.com/en/journal-show.asp?id=429
http://www.gomyhosting.com/windows/html/managedhosting/505.h...

What would be interesting would be the brief that Microsoft China gave to the sub-contractor. Did they encourage the copyright infringement?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperors_New_Clothes "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" worked because others agreed with the child. I also feel modern art is a waste of time. I don't feel the need to convince others of my viewpoint it's simply how I feel and I don’t mind expressing this to others. You happen to feel an attachment to music and that's fine, we can even trade off supporting things we find important that the other finds useless. Unless most of society agrees with me it's going to have little impact, but you need to understand value is a subjective proposition and I don’t agree with your assessment.

From the outside looking in music seems far flakier than most art forms. People also waste money buying high end cables to transmit digital information. Some people actually think buying a wooden knob will improve the sound produced by their high end sound system etc. At the same time most people are happy to listen to MP3. The soundtrack to a new movie can cost about the same as the actual movie etc. I suggested math for a reason, areas of math like number theory can seem completely useless and then produce something like RSA encryption which is vital for our modern economy.

PS: I like a lot of art and often enjoy “free” short story’s online more than the professionally produced kind. From what I have seen art with a price tag tends to be less interesting and focuses on entertainment or exploitation more than novelty. If I liked the kind of music produced for money today I might be more inclined to support music copyright, but as I don’t I see little value in keeping things the way they are. So it’s not like I want to have all the musicians in the world shot, I just don’t feel they create any value for me.

Edit: I avoided saying "Raving like a lunatic does not support your argument." when writting this, but you have not supported your argument so I tried to answer what I assumed was your basic standpoint. I would like to apologies that this post might seem long and unclear if you have a substantial point feel free to make it and I will try to respond.
I also work for Rackspace. While it is in our best interest that FathomDB sticks around, it's also in developers' best interest to use it. Why? No lock-in. We like these guys. We think they work hard, and they truly are a service oriented company. And if you decide you want to use them with us, or with Amazon, or any of the other clouds that emerge, FathomDB won't lock you in. Good stuff.
That's what they posted on their blog. What led to them noticing was Romy telling Craig they were using Pipes to gather information the day before. I hardly think it was a coincidence. It may not have been malicious and it may be the case that people were really using way too much bandwidth. I have no idea. But communication in these situations is paramount.