skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Advertising has approximately the same "context switch" problem[1] that programmers often complain about. By definition, an advertisement is not the thing I'm currently involved with.

At best, a even a "tasteful" ad requires you to

0. Interrupt whatever you were doing.
1. Parse text or recognize the basic features of an image.
2. Run whatever heuristics you use to decide if the parsed data is an ad.
3. Try to skip past the ad, either temporally or spatially.
4. *Continue* to monitor the ad until you recognize that it no longer
impedes the thing you interrupted in #0.

These are complex behaviors that have non-trivial costs. The only reason you don't see those costs some of the time is because you've invested a lot of time and effort learning these skills. If you abstain from all advertising for a few months, the parsing costs will become much more obvious.

> every

If your definition of "advert" is so broad it includes everything, it's not a particularly useful definition. Ad blockers (and this discussion in general) are talking about ads that are not the content the user requested; otherwise ad blockers would ban the entire page.

[1] http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-...
The more you know…

The article mentions salmon being responsible for the popularity of sushi globally. I actually prefer salmon sushi over tuna sushi by far. In fact, if it wasn't for salmon, I probably would've never like sushi. My first few experiences were with tuna and I hated it each time.
Thx, accepted.
Definitely an interesting hack, it's interesting that the rules were updated to make it illegal.
I'm so tired of hearing this. Just because web developers need to solve different problems doesn't mean it's easy.

This kind of crab mentality of "you aren't a real developer until you are miserable like me" is really getting old and it only serves to make the whole industry look standoffish and bad.

Yes, some of the work I do on the web is easy, but so is the view components of any other system. The time spent bit twiddling to try and get a little more performance out of a browser to be able to render a game at 60 FPS or spending time understanding what each browser compiles my JS to under the hood (after it was "transpiled" [i hate that word] from another JS dialect) so that I can figure out why what should be a simple copy is taking so fucking long is just as difficult as some of the shit you have to deal with.

Stop trying to make it into a contest.
Please prepend four spaces to this - you have broken formatting on the entire page.
Never heard of Sussman's AASP course, is this a new one ?
Your comment makes this page have a long horizontal scroll, and a total pain in the ass to read now. Perhaps you can edit that and put in spaces so it wraps? Thanks.
Here it is:

javascript:(function(){document.styleSheets[0].addRule(".highlighted_to_remove","background:red !important");var e=function(e){if(e.keyCode==27){i()}};document.addEventListener("keydown",e);var t=function(e){e.stopPropagation();this.classList.add("highlighted_to_remove");return false};var n=function(e){e.stopPropagation();this.classList.remove("highlighted_to_remove");return false};var r=function(e){this.parentNode.removeChild(this);i();e.preventDefault();e.stopPropagation();return false};var i=function(){var i=0;var s=document;while(s=document.body.getElementsByTagName("*").item(i++)){s.removeEventListener("mouseover",t);s.removeEventListener("mouseout",n);s.removeEventListener("click",r);s.classList.remove("highlighted_to_remove")}document.removeEventListener("keydown",e)};var s=0;var o=document;while(o=document.body.getElementsByTagName("*").item(s++)){o.addEventListener("mouseover",t);o.addEventListener("mouseout",n);o.addEventListener("click",r)}})()
You miss the point, they don't regulate Bitcoin, they regulate citizens. Just because you can't stop something completely, doesn't mean you can't outlaw it. Bitcoin, like all commodities now and in the future is taxable under current law because the law taxes all income of any form except things we say you can deduct. That means it covers new forms of assets as well as existing ones. Not paying your taxes is illegal and is more than enough threat—as it always has been—to make citizens obey the law.
Take a look at the URL slug:

nytimes.com/2015/09/20/opinion/is-big-tech-too-powerful-ask-google.html

It looks like they changed the headline on the website. The slug usually reflects the original headline and they don't want to change it later to keep links working. (I'm assuming this is the case here since I didn't personally see the original headline).

News sites are much too fond playing with their headlines to drum up hits, and with New York Times in particular I can't help but think of this quote from one of their editors:

I often hear from readers that they would prefer a straight, neutral
treatment — just the facts. But The Times has moved away from that,
reflecting editors’ reasonable belief that the basics can be found in
many news outlets, every minute of the day. They want to provide
“value-added” coverage.

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/19/sunday-review/did-reddit-b...
"The science of climate is not settled, and will not be settled in your lifetime. Get used to it.
"

The science of the shape of the earth isn't settled either. Nothing is ever really settled. But to "un-settle" a matter of science, you need actual evidence. Which the deniers do not have.
No known system scales to seven billion people. (Just try to calculate what it would mean for every family in the world to buy a car.)

Why would you think that a political or economical system needs to be globally scalable to be useful? Or that it would even be desirable?

It would be reasonable to believe that a family, a business or a city should not be governed in the same way a country or a planet is.
I always give a two months quarantine to an article about some theory which is nice to hear (celebrities are fake), groundbreaking (they're doing it so long and are bald swedish vikings!), and on the verge of conspiracy theory (the're hiding), WHILE THE ARTICLE IS BASED ON THE BOOK "INCIDENTALLY" ;-) JUST TO BE RELEASED (AND BOUGHT BY US ;-).

Two months it's a great time to wait and decide if it was book promotion or worth read.
> But, slavery is defined by ownership, not abuse.

I disagree, slavery is about force against consent. I agree that abuse isn't necessary for slavery to be bad, but force is. Nobody is forcing content creators to create content without their consent.

> But all did labor for the benefit of another without recompense, which is heinous enough without added abuse on top of it.

I do plenty of labor for the benefit of others without recompense: I volunteer. Again, it's not about labor without recompense, it's about force. Slave labor and volunteerism are both labor without recompense: the difference is that slave labor is forced against the laborer's consent.

But let's go back to the ownership thing for a second: are you really claiming that people who use ad blockers are trying to take ownership of content creators and/or their content? Really? Even if I did agree with you that slavery is about ownership, your argument doesn't make sense.

EDIT: At a more fundamental level, it's completely arrogant and entitled to assume that just because you performed labor someone should pay for it. I've put a lot of labor into learning how to play guitar. I could probably post a bunch of recording of my guitar playing and get a bunch of people to listen to them and view ads. But I couldn't get anyone to pay for my recordings, because I still suck at guitar. Am I entitled to recompense for the many hours I've spent practicing?
While i have noscript installed for general streamlining of my browsing experience, I long since dug up a gif control extension for Firefox because i got tired of the "joke" gifs that was floating around.

https://github.com/simonlindholm/toggle-gifs

Sadly since then many sites etc has moved to gifv, basically a webm with a different name.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10237636
There has been crap pop music churned out by modest talents for decades. 90% of commercial music is completely devoid of any redeeming artistic merit.

Great music is produced by every generation. All you have to do iisten for it.
That's possible, but we don't have a mechanism that can cause it and it's unlikely to happen anytime soon on its own.
fish farms had just gone commercial in the 70's but hadn't grown that much at the time. the excess of high quality fish was wild salmon.

in the 70's in norway (and in alaska, can't speak about anywhere else) commercial fishing was in it's prime.

you can read more about the history of norwegian aquaculture here. http://www.svt.ntnu.no/iso/anders.skonhoft/Marine%20Policy%2...
I think that's part of what makes an "it" person work. It is manufactured, but it is also "true" (by some definition of the word). I'm not criticizing Rihanna (or even Katy Perry, though I think musically Rihanna is occasionally more ambitious) in stating that they are building a manufactured product, anymore than I am criticizing friends who work for Apple or Google. It is a product, and they're good at helping build a product that people want to buy. I'm also not generally envious of them, despite being a lifelong musician and occasionally thinking, "it'd be nice to make a good living making music". The lives they lead, while extraordinarily privileged, are also demanding in ways that most non-famous folks never experience. Staying "real" through that experience probably is an admirable trait...and maybe why Rihanna being "real" is such a big deal to musicians who are less obscenely popular and rich. He's likely interacted with enough primadonas to know famous people become sheltered, surrounding themselves with buffer layers of assistants and staff to protect their privacy/ego/time/etc.
It's not me, it's the people around me who are being manipulated, and even if they enjoy it, it annoys me.
Ask HN: Start date is set, but I got another offer. What to do?
So I accepted a job offer two weeks ago and am set to start next wednesday. However, a company that had flown me out to PA last week just offered me a role. Of course, it's conditional on various background checks (i'm a felon)

What is the right course of action is these situations?

The base pay is equivilent, but company B has significantly better benefits and growth potential.

Company A:
start up/small, good people, laid back culture and dress, limited benefits and no 401k, they offered me job after one 40 minute phone interview, in midwest

Company B: big corporation, casual dress, good benefits and 401k match, better growth opportunities, hiring manager is awesome, in east coat (PA)

What should I do in this situation?

a. Start at A and then go join B in two or three weeks

b. Turn down A and wait for my conditional offer to be finalized

c. Turn down B and commit to company A

d. other

PA does have legislation, Pennsylvania Criminal History Record Information Act, which should make it harder them to retract the offer after doing the background check
My biggest mistake was choosing my already established carrier( I am a medical doctor). All I wanted was to write code and make cool apps. :(
While true, the main concern I have with tech companies becoming too powerful is their access and control of personal data. This becomes even more concerning when they're so big they have significant data on individuals who actively avoid their services.
This is actually typically against the ad networks' terms of use. In all AdChoices ads, you'll see a small "X" in the corner. If you click it, one of the first options is to report the ad obscuring the content of the page. I'll admit I don't know what the result ends up being, but I'd hope that they get in touch with the implementor to tell them to fix their ad.
I wonder what their response will be when low income people are the hardest hit by the lack of well-developed public transport? "Sucks to be you?" is what it's sounding like, but I hope that's wrong.
Few deliberately block Bing specifically, it's just a sloppy attempt to block unwanted crawlers, like the billions of crawlers running on AWS and DigitalOcean boxes. A quick-but-not-great hack is to have an entry blocking * by default, and then specifically whitelist GoogleBot to avoid getting delisted from Google. You could also whitelist other search engines, but that requires you to know and care about them, and for a long period Google was the only engine people really cared about, since it drove >95% of organic search traffic. I do feel we're past the peak of that period, however, and site owners are now getting more cognizant of non-Google search engines having at least some value in driving traffic.

Related, "Please Don't Block Everything but Googlebot in robots.txt": http://danluu.com/googlebot-monopoly/
The constitution is what grants them that power. The executive branch is charged with enforcing the laws of the legislative branch according the main body of the constitution and the 16th amendment says they can tax your income. Taxing bitcoin is something the constitution says they can do.
Its more general than that. Media production in general, and the tech press included, seem to be married to Apple as their tech supplier. So when Apple do something it is suddenly new, even though it has been going on for years or even decades in the larger tech sphere.

Never mind that as the western world has been in a slump for nearly a decade, companies has started to reevaluate their spending. And in the process has come to question the impact web ads have.
I don't think it's a great point, I think it's a point that shows no understanding of context. This thread is about ad blockers. Ad blockers don't block blog posts, books, or any of the things he brought up. If you know what "ads" means here, it's not because people need to define what ads they are talking about, it's because you're not paying attention.
How many people on this thread make their living (directly or indirectly) and feel the cognitive dissonance to their experience as users/consumers of free content?
You would not, by definition, be much of a venture capitalist without any capital to command. Perhaps a better title might be "How to raise your chances of some day being a professional VC, slim as they might be."
Adverts have been know to have malware payloads for drive bys embedded in them...
"There are more good enough artists than ever."

also more bad ones.
HN has a bunch of people with great advice about changing career. Moving from a doctor to programmer is definitely possible.
Quite simply because law doesn't work that way. Laws apply to future new things as well as existing things; being new doesn't make something exist outside of current law and law doesn't regulate things with technology, but with law. The ability to jail people is how and why law works and you can't tech your way around that. They don't need to technically be able to stop something because they have the means and ability to enforce these things socially.
There are plenty of examples of this, look at some of the software that is open source but have sales around them.

nginx, redhat, surgarcrm etc. There really are a lot of examples. Once you find a few, look at the different license types they use, GPL has different versions that allow for different things, MIT is probably the most permissive and probably wouldn't be the choice given the description you gave. Then of course, you can always have a license written that fits your specific requirements.
> Why not just believe what he says?

for example because Ghostery is owned by Evidon, a company that collects and provides data to advertising companies https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=10240483&goto=item%3Fi...

that's at least suspicious...
Or Bram Cohen's IPLayer: 49C2E772BFDB18686FC3384B363F4A544F549150
Quantum Computers
The regulators come just when natural forces are eroding a monopoly - Microsoft, then Google, next Apple.
In the time it takes for light from this (your) screen to reach your eyes, this (your) CPU just carried out a dozen instructions.

Why is light so slow?
And again the issue is PAM, not SU...
So it's more out of ignorance than maliciousness. That makes sense.

Odds are the more troublesome scrapers are probably ignoring robots.txt anyway, so I wonder how useful it is.
Here is a well deserved plug for Cam Davidson Pilon's excellent book called Bayesian Methods for Hackers: https://github.com/CamDavidsonPilon/Probabilistic-Programmin...
Solar right now is hundreds of billions away from being ready. For a medium sized country

Cant give a source, but the figure ive seen is 150 billion € in Germany, for nearst future.

You need to install overcapacity and service it.
You need to rebuild the grid from the ground up, overengineer it massively.
You need to add storage, at great expense and huge drain (batteries tend to become worn out in a few years)
Some of the most important I can think of:

- Watch the documentary called "Pandora's Promise"

- Don't throw away aluminum or other metals if you can help it, and don't litter

- Support organizations and companies that are good members of society, at least as best as you can tell

- Encourage and persuade other people to care. Coercion is not going to work better in the long run because any scheme will eventually fall apart and at that time we will all be a lot better off if people have some kind of internal understanding of these values.
it's the san Francisco bubble.

anything really small that happens in SF gets blow out of proportion here and in the circles we belong.

and since IOS is a driving revenue source for start ups aiming for fame in SF in the hopes to get funding/exit, then anything apple do will drive people crazy here.

it's mostly irrelevant anywhere else, we just happen to drive the ephemeral tech press
Everything does travel at the speed of light. It's the only speed that exists. When you aren't moving relative to the space around you, you are traveling at the speed of light along the time axis. As your speed increases through space, your speed along the time axis decreases to compensate, ensuring that your total speed in space-time is the speed of light.
Instaviral – Create+Share Images on SM
There are many different empirical results that lead to current consensus of climate sensitivity. The consensus is the consequence of these. A good summary is at http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-sensitivity-advanced... in figure 4.

> And Plass definitely missed at least one non-linearity.

AFAIK he only included CO2 and water vapor (as a feedback) in his calculations. There are many more both positive and negative feedbacks, such as methane or aerosols. But they pretty much cancel out in the end, as more complex models indicate. And Plass was completely ignorant of climate history, which is also one of the important sources of climate sensitivity estimates.
Sure, but from the frame of reference of the light it takes no time at all.
> People get angry because their mind, consciously or subconsciously, detects that anger will be beneficial to them. Period.

I disagree with this, I often get angry even though I know an angry reaction will be detrimental to my cause.
One of my first questions was "What are the motivations for a language over a library?" After reading more, I see that Stan has both. There are integrations with R, Python, Julia, C++, Stata, the command line, and more.

To ask an intentionally over-simplified question: if the key value add of Stan in the functionality and approach -- why bother with the overhead of an external DSL? Why not use an internal DSL -- e.g. borrow data structures and/or syntax of another language?

Arguments for an external DSL are, hopefully: cross-language portability and domain-clarity for people.

But how does this play out if you want to support multiple languages and interop?

Let's say I'm using Python, for example, and want to build up a model programmatically. The example at https://github.com/stan-dev/pystan shows using a heredoc. That's simple and easy to start.

However, a big downside of a plain-text DSL is that it can be hard to manipulate programatically. To do that, each language implementation has to be 'business' of converting to and from text. This reminds me of the 'SQL' problem ... many language SQL wrappers spend considerable time munging text. Ug.

Given my bias towards data-oriented programming, I see another approach: why not use a rich data structure language (other than plain text) as the foundation?

Why not edn, for example? If the LISPy nature of that is not preferred, then why not something else? (Does the C-community have some kind of generic data description language? I wouldn't recommend JSON necessarily but that would be better than a hand-rolled DSL, in my opinion.)

Here's why I recommend starting with 'rich' data as opposed to parsing text...

I'm not saying human DSLs are bad. I'm just saying they don't have to be the foundation. If you want a human external DSL, great -- but why not convert the human DSL to a canonical data structure? Then build everything around the data, rather than build everything around the text format?
Game of Life Game
Content Blocking Primer
Maybe. So what? Even bad musicians are better these days, because of improved music technology. In terms of recording, production, distribution, learning music you can do with a laptop today what Beethoven and James Brown couldn't dream of.
Texas hits leak researcher with Civil Investigative Demand
You can try honing your skills by first taking on some freelance projects! Or still working on cool random apps on the side! Build something for the medical industry perhaps? :)
Can anyone explain to me briefly what Stan actually does that's different from what I could do in Python without it? I don't want to have to read the entire research paper to get a description in layman's terms.
Browser extension generates free amazon gift cards when shopping
You don't join a startup/small business because of the best traditional benefits like a 401k, you join because of the challenge and chance to make a huge impact. You need to figure out what type of environment you are best suited for, a startup or a larger enterprise. They are extremely different, so that is really the decision IMO.

As far as switching after accepting one position, it generally burns a bridge, as would being there for 2 weeks then jumping ship. At the same time, employers have very little loyalty anymore, so if I felt it was right I'd change my mind, but with dignity and honesty to the parties involved. e.g. I wouldn't do it without being up front. Your reason can be as simple as you thought it over and felt that the small/startup business wouldn't be the right environment for you personally at this time and it wouldn't be fair to them either if you wound up only being there for a few months, so you have decided to continue your search... Or something along those lines.
I already code a lot for the past 10 years but finance obligations, lack of good programming positions in my country(Greece) and "obstacles" like family and age(I am 37) are making the turn a little bit hard.
3-4 months ago I started applying for jobs and didn't received a single reply. You see,when your whole life you study for medicine and residency it's quite hard to persuade others that You love coding and designing apps.Being a doctor and a developer don't make a good match in third world countries like mine.
Right, I agreed that there are some cases of malware on Google Play. The apps you linked don't look to have the number of users affected by this latest App Store scare. That's why I said overall Play seems safer than iTunes.
U.S. And China Seek Arms Deal for Cyberspace