skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Why do companies care about adblock?
This might sound like a naive question, but hear me out.

This operates on the (perhaps inaccurate, though anecdotally appealing) assumption that people who use adblock are unlikely to ever click on an advertisement, even if they did not have adblock available. So, no direct revenue loss.

Their views still count towards your statistics though, so you have more eyeballs and potential shares - great!

Most interestingly though, you get to skip serving ads to those who never would have clicked in the first place (or only accidentally), which translates to an increased clickthrough ratio (and increased conversion). So the ad space is worth more.

So tell me, HN, why do companies invest so much time and effort into policing adblockers, when it seems that the best strategy would be to simply ignore them?

Is it that adblock usage is actually such a large percentage of users in 2015 that it necessitates dissuasive measures? The last time I worked in a company that relied almost exclusively on advertising (2010), it was relatively small and static. We decided that, due to the above reasoning, it wasn't worth pursuing.

Are there people/companies out there who've seen a measurable uptick in conversions or revenue as a result of countering adblock?
> Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car.

To make the analogy accurate:

Running a business on AWS is like taking Uber to work every day. At some point it makes sense to just buy the car, hire a driver, find a good mechanic, lease a parking spot, purchase automobile insurance, remember to buy gas, deal with speeding tickets, schedule regular maintenance ....

At some point it makes sense, but it is way, way down the road for most startups.
The blog author got some QEMU devs to meet and talk then put together a video of it. The post describes who's there and links to these:

https://plus.google.com/101344524535025574253/posts/dz35k6aC...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWyCwnBbwC4
See my other comments but the short answer is that fat-jars often fail, and Capsule offers more -- and more versatile -- deployment solutions than native packaging (which is mostly used only by desktop apps).
Windows 10 Home edition doesn't allow you to turn off automatic updates (or at least I haven't seen an option to do so).

I did manage to turn off automatically seeding the updates to others, which I also find to be egregious.
I feel that the Gravity Light is the way to go because it can work throughout the whole night. It is totally independent of Sun or any weather conditions.
Political Reporters Cover a Business Candidate
The NoPhone Zero
Sentry stack traces for iOS doesn't support dSYM so we worked around it
I am working solo on a web app for food. I hope to launch a bare bones mvp in the next two weeks.

I tried working on two other startups with two different co-founders, but they had other priorities and could not commit enough time to make it happen.
Love it. Keep it simple. It is too often the case that writes assume their readers have the same knowledge as they do. Always assume your reader knows nothing.
Here's my variation on that: http://newslines.org/blog/not-this-time-y-combinator/
https://github.com/maxogden/hypercore/blob/master/include/us... - blerk, binaries in source control.
You need to check out Numberphile if you have even the tiniest bit of love for recreational math.
As long as MS gets paid, they will do what they want, so stop paying them. Stop giving them revenue directly, and stop giving them market share that that they profit from indirectly.

Anybody that continues to use their products is asking for more of this crap. Some may complain that their business depends on Windows; that's unfortunate, but why didn't they have a second source for all mission critical dependencies?
I created and manage hiTask, https:// hiTask.com the Team task and project management tool. Started as pure web application 7 years ago it is now platform with multiple components, google and outlook sync, apps for iOS and android.
Competing with companies like Asana and Basecamp that employ tens, hundreds of people.
Idea's are worth a nickel. Execution is worth millions.

(I can't remember who originally said that, but Ive remembered it. Might have been Spolsky?)
This is easy to say from Britain, since they cut all the trees down more than 100 years ago.
Who is smarter? The smart people or the dumb people?
It does has to burn. This is why we have prescribed burns, to safely burn the forest and reduce future wildfire damages.

The article says that the portion of the budget dedicated to fighting fires keeps increasing, giving less money to land management decided to prevent a lot of the fires we are fighting. Seems to me that continuing on this path will just result in ever increasing costs. We have to let it burn, on our terms.
Sunk cost fallacy. You're exerting more effort with no reasonable expectation to see it repaid. The work you have already performed is a sunk cost, it's gone. The unpaid invoices are money you are owed but they apparently have no intention of paying you.

For all you know, they're not paying because they're bankrupt and dead in the water. That means not only will you not ever see the money they already owe you, but if you do any more work, it's effectively pro bono for a lost cause.

If you're perfectly rational, there is no psychological disadvantage to continuing to work for them but it's obvious to you why you shouldn't in the first place. Chances are, you don't act as rational as you think you do.

If a major client skips payments, it's perfectly understandable that you don't want to risk burning any bridges by insisting on being paid. But this is the fallacy. Whether the client is big or not doesn't matter if they're not going to pay you. Unless you want to build a business on not being paid.
How about just stop building houses near places where they're going to light on fire? And stop building them on floodplains while we're at it. Or anywhere else that, you know, is a bloody stupid place to put a house. It's not like there's no room to put them in a more sensible place. If you know it's not just possible but likely that the house will be seriously damaged or destroyed within ten years or so, it's probably best not to build it.

Madness.
in most cases we're talking about people who build their houses in category 1 storm surge / 10 year flood zones and then expect a subsidy when inevitably natures does what it does.
Money and Ideas can buy engineering. Engineering and Ideas might be able to raise or make money. Engineering and Money may have a bad idea. Money and Ideas wins.
So if people don't want gigabytes of data downloaded they have no use for, they have to turn off an option that gives them timely security updates.
German/Turkish director publishes hir first good video
Prosecution Policies and Unicorn Worries
One of my favorites, the SETI Institute hosts a ton of seminars on astrobiology, physics, etc: https://www.youtube.com/user/setiinstitute/videos
Internet-Wide Scan Data Repository
Results of front end tooling survey 2015
> No, it will not be fixed. There is no vulnerability. … The only solution is to educate people to not plug hardware they don't trust into their machines.

“We just need to educate users about passwords”
“We just need to educate users about how to verify SSL certificates”
“We just need to educate users about how to install only software from trusted publishers”
etc.

This reaction is understandable but it's a non-starter if we ever want to make meaningful progress on security. The underlying problem here is that everything local was assumed to be trustworthy and that's not true and, thanks to reflashable firmware, not even something which can be assumed to stay true even if it happens to be the case when you start.

Fixing problems like this will require changes – X-Istence mentioned OS prompting for new device classes, which would particularly effective on devices like laptops (i.e. the default for most users) which could require confirmation on the built-in hardware any time an external device tries to duplicate built-in functionality (keyboard, mouse, network, etc.), but we probably need more ambitious measures like adding a public-key exchange for certain device classes or a hardware switch which controls whether a port is allowed to control the computer or provide block storage but not both.

The one thing which is certain is that the .gov / .mil security people who seal ports with epoxy aren't looking as paranoid these days…
Where are people supposed to live?

All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. Isn't it subsidising rich people if we allow them to live on the best land, while others contributing to society elsewhere observe no benefit?
Empirically I've found that point to be at approximately the $30k/month spend rate (somewhere around 4-5 years in--arguably no longer strictly a "startup"). Of course it's pretty context-dependent, YMMV, etc.
He's talking about federal flood insurance subsidies. Which do things like subsidize multi-million-dollar-beach-front-house flood insurance.
Thanks that good idea for help others ...
What are everyone's thoughts on natural disasters being overall beneficial for the environment?

Just because forest fires occur naturally, and would spread naturally without human intervention, does that necessarily mean they are beneficial for the earth?

If humans didn't try to put out forest fires, and perhaps by chance many lightning strikes caused fires all across the northern west coast within a small timeframe, would this still be a net positive for the ecosytem?

I don't know enough about the equilibrium.
Because there is no proof that your assumption is true - people tend to believe they aren't affected by advertising when they actually are. There is plenty of science out there to show the effectiveness of advertising, even if you never click on it.

And yes - growth rates have jumped and in just 2015 it has doubled. Some sites are experiencing 50% ad block rates (in more gaming and technical verticals).

It will become a problem for advertising reliant companies very soon.
BFD in 5 years everything will have a touch screen and camera, anyway. We'll use animated QR code videos playing on our digital watch faces and some law-enforcement/TLA/convnet goon will be required to approve every UAC request remotely.
Yeah, inflection is really interesting. Now I'm reading the examples for this programming language and putting emphasis on random words, lol
This link just leads to a page that makes you sign up and provide personal info to read the report. Since I don't want to do that, I can't criticize you on your methodology or conclusions, but the finding that MIT has the worst cybersecurity scores immediately raises questions.

In particular, MIT has at least 10X more public-facing IP addresses, did you normalize for that?
9 Companies You Wouldn’t Expect to Be Using DevOps
The problem here is that you have to agree with the implied assumption of this article. That a business negotiator is superior to a political one and can move into a political landscape and use business negotiation tactics and win. Both systems and approaches have been around forever so I'm not comfortable accepting the implied assumption. Otherwise I suspect we would see it more often but the opposite usually happens. Great business leaders more often than not become lousy politicians because they don't have the ability to coerce non dependent people to their POV.
The Coldwar Nuke That Fired Satellites
yeah, I remember dasher. Quite effective and pretty fun - agree a mashup of eyetracking and dasher could be worthwhile.
On one hand the author says that if you're running from a crime you will get caught. But then after gives tips to escape from someone with the ressources and determination to have skin samples from hotel rooms analysed and access to thermal imaging satellites.

Looks to me like the author doesn't know what people would be running from. I doubt the authorities would use LASER SURVEILLANCE SATELLITES for anything they intend to pursue with less zeal than a very serious felony.
Well, it's Elsevier. The fact that it only potentially exploited your system and didn't attempt to grab your banking password might actually be taken as a legitimate sign of improvement.
app engine, compute, containers and all their VM offerings seem pretty solid - I like them better than Heroku. great ui, etc.
That being said, I only messed with it for the free 2 month trial period, so ymmv
Also found via the course wiki - http://mininet.org/
Logging helps a lot too. I don't get why it's such a controversial topic, I don't advocate chopping down entire forests, but why on earth are commercial loggers not allowed to thin things out?
Perceived power tends to matter more than we like to think, too. Most power in Western society is "merely" perceived.

Heck, even currency only works this way.
If that was truly the reason, there is no reason to not make 32GB the base option. A few people would be saved hassle and it would cost Apple pennies and do their reputation good.

It makes a whole lot more likely that the base model is just to get you to upgrade to the 64GB at this point.
Try the Double Start Knot on Ian's page, it holds the tension better

http://fieggen.com/shoelace/doublestartknot.htm
What and where people choose to build in a given environment is a curiosity. I've looked at property east of the Cascades over the years. Probably never happen as I definitely feel the pull of the ocean more.

If I ever built over there I figured I would build a house like this guy's house. http://inhabitat.com/this-concrete-dome-home-survived-a-wall...
Q&A w/Leslie Mosier (owner of Doug the Pug)
This is really infuriating... Microsoft, what the hell?

I really hope steam machines take off (and stay relatively open). As soon as I'm happy with the number of games Linux supports I'm dropping windows like a rock.
The discussion here is about the availability of software for Pro tablets - specifically the iPad Pro, and the Surface Pro 3. You have correctly established that the Surface Pro 3 can run Android apps very well.

I was curious about why it's valuable to run Android apps on a Pro tablet, or whether it's just a curiosity for running phone apps. If there was an important pro app that ran on android tablets that was made available to Windows users via emulation, that would seem to be a meaningful advantage.

It seems this is not the case.
Well, fires have been happening for a long time, so long that some species have adapted to it (pine cones only opening up and releasing seeds when exposed to high heat being one of them), so I can only assume that the ecosystem has learned to deal with it.
I was under the impression that it was part of a regular fire safety program in all public schools (mentioned once at the very least) -- they're known as controlled burns[1].

Prescribed burning[2] has been present in forest fire management for centuries across the world, a practice which was largely discontinued in the US (and recently re-introduced).

NIMBY folks don't care for it because of the risk of outbreak (of which is minimal as those doing it are knowledgeable and it is done in a generally controlled environment) and the fact that it is unsightly and that minor smoke inhalation is unpleasant.

It's not a matter of letting small fires burn but rather continuing the time-honored tradition of proper forestry management. As mentioned, the US Forest Service discontinued this practice after enacting a policy of suppressing all fires.

I'm not even going to get into the issue of civilization encroaching upon nature and the risk surrounding it. Wildfires that consume large percentages of a given state (well above 20% in some cases) are far less forgiving than coyotes and brown bears.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn

[2] http://bcwildfire.ca/prevention/PrescribedFire/
Humans cause fires though. Do we know that all human-caused fires would still have occurred "naturally" if the humans hadn't been there?

On what do you base the statement that a fire is typically "slow-moving"? It can certainly be fast. Here's an example. [1]

[1] http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/09/the-speed-of-fire/
Most of the time when wood rots, it still sequesters CO2. If it didn't, you wouldn't be able to create soil through the accumulation of biomass. All the dirt would be mineral only, and no black soil would exist anywhere. The blackness of black soil is due primarily to carbon. Which isn't floating around in the air.
Logical faculties of the brain are the first to be impaired when one listens to conspiracy theories peddled by the Elite through the media.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: CloudFlare's 45th data center
The Most Misread Poem in America
The Moral Argument for Doping in Sports
I think signed firmware would probably solve most problems.

Hobbyists would have to run their system in an insecure mode, though and it's a whole new story if a certificate-based system would actually work in a market as volatile as USB peripherals.

So, I don't think there's one magic bullet but it's far too silent on that front!
Python course – a hand-picked series of videos
It can even emulate more than one device on the same port, and introduce new ones after arbitrary delay. This attack could be made stealthier by first presenting a valid mass storage device and adding the emulated keyboard later.
> Mostly because it would take a significant act of power to do anything about it, power which we don't have and even if we do, we do not wish to exercise.

It starts a step before that - awareness. Most folks aren't aware of the things that are done, and even of those who are only a minor subset consider these things to be a problem.

Lack of motivation to try to make change winnows out most of those who get past the first two problems. The unfortunate truth is that of the small subset who are aware and offended, most simply have higher priorities.
6000 Miles to Freedom
Sadly agreeing here. I'm a Mac person and the only thing I still use Windows for is game development. I do my game development on a mix of Windows and Mac, but the reality is just that some of the tools I need/use are Windows only.

The situation is much better than it was 5 years ago and it is certainly possible for people to develop games without using Windows.
I think this is how Enron did their books.
Turbo Pascal was originally written for and targeted the (8-bit) Z80, unless Wikipedia has it backwards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal#CP.2FM_and_DOS_ve...

The Turbo Pascal compiler was based on the Blue Label Pascal compiler originally produced for the NasSys cassette-based operating system of the Nascom microcomputer in 1981 by Anders Hejlsberg. Borland licensed Hejlsberg's "PolyPascal" compiler core (Poly Data was the name of Hejlsberg's company in Denmark), and added the user interface and editor. Anders Hejlsberg joined the company as an employee and was the architect for all versions of the Turbo Pascal compiler and the first three versions of Borland Delphi.
This article is referring to Windows 7 and 8, not 10.
Not saying I agree with MS's decision of what constitutes an update, but if a user grants a company the option to automatically download and install stuff to their computer, they're kindof writing a blank check.
We can't perfectly suppress fire on a natural landscape. And the act of trying increases the risk that when a fire does start it will become huge and uncontrollable because small trees and forest undergrowth—which would have burned in a small fire if we’d not suppressed them--act as kindling that speeds the ignition of mature trees.

More frequent removals of biomass through controlled burns and selective timber harvest can reduce the risk that a hugely catastrophic wildfire occurs. Hotter and bigger fires consume disproportionately more carbon than a series of "normal" fires, particularly in the soil. So more regular and controlled burns improve the landscape's ability to act as a greenhouse gas sink.

I worked with a forester in Oregon on this issue (at the time my work was focused on greenhouse gas accounting). It all gets a lot more complicated and messy, but there's good progress going on right now to try to move toward a more sensible fire management regime rather than the pure suppression. It's also better for animal habitat and human safety.

http://www.oregon.gov/ODF/BOARD/docs/2011_March/BOFATTCH_201...
Wow! Spot on!

Its funny, at the presentation they mentioned the cover and how the magnets transfer input from the keyboard to the computer as if it was a revolutionary idea. Then again, it is Apple. They can come out with a bottle water product and swoon the masses.
People on the left-side of the bell curve are the most impressionable to advertising and are are also the least likely to install adblock. so not a problem.
Deploying Containers in the Real World: Part 2 of Grammarly's Docker Journey
I've actually been looking to explore this for literally ages... I hope to play with this sort of thing someday at both ends of the spectrum, to get a bit of a practical education on how architectures have developed over the past two dozen years or so, and hopefully to have a bit of fun.

On the one hand, I'm really, really interested to understand how the pieces fit together such that it was possible to have supersmooth sidescrolling on the 4MHz CPU in a Game Boy.

On the other hand, I want to learn how to best optimize for the CPU/GPU targets in current- and next-gen desktop and portable devices (PCs, laptops, phones, tablets, etc). It might sound bizarre to want to get the most out of even a 4k-core GPU just for 2D (with maybe some fancy parallax), but 3x4K is going to be a thing more frequently than not going forward... and a pixel-perfect 144fps sidescroller would look truly amazing on something like that.

I want to understand both sides of the coin in-depth so I can optimize for each but also maintain a sense of balance: the majority of game engines are overwhelmingly future-oriented, and when presented with older hardware something like Unity will invariably choke or at least stutter, and Box2D likely would as well.

I do at least realize the complexity in building a game engine from the ground up - like I said before, this is purely for fun and education - but I have no idea where to actually start, no knowledge of older architectures (and their quirks), I still need to learn assembly language (!!) and machine code (it's on the todo list... has been for months...), etc etc.

Advice will truly be hugely appreciated.
Also a good idea if you live in the woods to trim back from the house & wet things down when a fire's comin your way...
> interim sole-source feeding

It is not meant to be a meal replacement for long term.
Data Lovers... it's a great issue of Data Elixir this week
Just on the first point, I'd heard a couple of years back that CPI/CPM was on the decline due to lack of measurable impact. Does that ring true?

It does sound believable that serious saturation campaigns would work, though I'd wonder at the cost effectiveness.
That would require an active intermediary, but yes, it should be possible.
I originally read this as suggesting that The Cyberiad was inspired by GEB; but, of course, chronologically, it could only be the other way.

Not that I doubt you, but do you know any reference for Lem's fondness for GEB?
and what happens if your keyboard and mouse break? You'd then have no whitelisted HIDs and no way of allowing new ones.
It's worth considering that this angle is frequently and aggressively pushed by parties which want to discredit all environmentalists for various reasons.
They have correspondents in the US.
Brand new 5K iMac with maxed out specs so, I don't think it's my machine. Happens on all our machines unfortunately. :-(
Come on, I expect HN posts to be much more thoughtful...