skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The author gets one thing massively wrong. So do the reddit commentors they quote.

The quote:

"Ad blockers could end up saving the ad industry from its worst excesses. If blocking becomes widespread, the ad industry will be pushed to produce ads that are simpler, less invasive and far more transparent about the way they’re handling our data"

Oh? And how are you so sure they won't go the other direction? Because that's where I'd place my money in a heart beat.

Adblockers rely on blocking requests to known ad networks and affiliates. If the ads are instead served up locally, from the site the person is visiting itself, it can't block the ads. Ad blockers are 100% ineffective in those instances. A company like google or any other major ad network just needs to create some sort of back-end, plugin or server side program that serves up ads from the domain you're visiting. The ad blocker wouldn't know if it's a picture of a cat or an ad for Netflix since it's all coming from randomsite.com

Several smaller companies have already started doing this and it could very well signal the end of ad blockers if it becomes widespread and adopted by the big players (specifically adsense).

The one thing I don't see is ad companies becoming more transparent & open. That's silly to even think about since it's less profitable alternative. The companies that don't do this will cannibalize the ones that do since they'll be shooting themselves in the foot. No, I see ad companies becoming more clever.

As far as content creators go, I don't even know how this is a debate. Just how entitled are people nowadays? Is this why they call millennials the entitled generation? If someone creates content, and wants people to see an ad for Pepsi before you can consume that content, that is the creators prerogative, not yours. End of story. There's no further argument here. I don't know why people think everything should be free. Nothing is free, everything is subsidized by something.
I just tried it, actually. It looks kind of nice, but doesn't seem to support any real organization, beyond maybe color-coding notes. The lack of support for text formatting isn't great, either.

Seems like it would work well for day-to-day tasks or reminders, but it's lacking the power that Evernote or OneNote have for structured projects.
We don't have humans in the loop for issuing certificate; this can and has been exploited for fun and profit, with fun attacks like getting a cert for "citibank.com\0.mydomain.com" which used to trick the C strcmp in most browser certificate checking routines. Moxie has an entertaining talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFol6IMbZ7Y

Your problem would be getting people to "thecitibank.com." Chrome, Firefox, and GMail would all eventually figure out it was a phishing site and warn users about clicking through to it.
> Bill Gates and Madonna are both college drop outs. It doesn't appear to have hurt either of their careers.

Bill Gates was also born with a million dollar trust fund, so make sure you have a safety net and starting capital like that as well before dropping out.
Actually it's automated in most places, simply requiring you to confirm a request via an e-mail address associated with the domain you're getting an SSL for (typically admin@ hostmaster@ webmaster@, though it varies between certificate providers).
What on earth is this trying to say?

Evernote, located in Redwood City, CA, and directly on the 101, is a bit north of the tech companies that dot Silicon Valley and far south of those that have headquarters in San Francisco. In other words, Evernote isn't exactly on its own in terms of tech-oriented neighbors that it competes with for talent.
It's microsoft, of course they won't lose it. They could just ask the NSA for a copy.
Thanks for this. I was not aware of Uber's investments in the field, and I didn't want to compare Uber in particular. By "perverted culture", I meant the high-tech world in general, where Facebook buys Instagram and WhatsApp for billions of dollars for ... uhm ... important reasons. I am not holier than though myself, I participate in the crazy spending myself. But seeing the numbers here just made me think.
A valid certificate only allows you to have a secure connection without errors and warnings popping up all over. It does nothing to guarantee that the domain is "legit". You can already set up thecitibank.com and get an SSL certificate for it without any problem. What you can't do is get the EV (green bar) certificate where indeed you need to go through a human. But I'm pretty sure Let's Encrypt won't be giving away EV certificates.
I wish Digital Ocean handed out reasonable prefixes instead of the 16 addresses they allocate per node.
> kids could explore "real" software such as (just listing some of my favorites), Scratch, iPython Notebook, Arduino, etc.

Go to any UK school and you'll see this happening as part of the CS Curriculum. It's probably less relevant to an English Lit lesson on To Kill A Mockingbird.

Some software that provides large banks of questions for students to work through (particularly in Maths) is actually extremely useful. Not for instruction, but for assessment. It is an automation, but it saves the teacher a huge amount of time in marking and analysing results to identify areas of strength and weakness within a class and further inform teaching.
What services do use instead of Evernote?
This comment is the exact perception about HTTPS that we need to change. It's not the job of HTTPS to say whether a website is safe or unsafe, good or bad. HTTPS should be the default communication protocol for every website, and lets encrypt move us a major step towards that by making SSL certificates free and trivial to set up.
If the ads are instead served up locally,
from the site the person is visiting itself,
it can't block the ads.

Why not? I don't see why an ad blocker couldn't identify and block certain URL schemes/patterns, common scripts, or element structures.

Also -- doesn't cross-site tracking rely on third-party cookies from a shared (separate) domain?
Just because you can't gain efficiency by changing the speed of the plane, with no other changes allowed, doesn't mean you have no options :

1) reduce weight (fuselage, engine, wings, have the passengers diet first, ...)
2) increase engine fuel efficiency, displace more air for fewer hydrocarbons
3) (in the article) reduce drag on surfaces that don't generate lift
4) lower cross section (a longer, thinner tube), of course, still needs structural soundness

The lower cross section would have the additional advantage that it would make the plane fly faster.

So in a way, the article is "wrong". You can make a faster plane, assuming you can solve all the issues that the obvious modifications bring : longer, thinner and lighter fuselage and wings, combined with similar efficiency engines (of course they'd have to have that similar efficiency at higher speeds).

Another way would be to fly (much) higher. But then the cost of climbing high would start to offset the gains from flying faster.
I posted this last week [0] but got no traction. Nothing to worry about, but it is the same exact URL and I thought HN was deduplicating entries. Isn't that the case?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202196

Edit: added link
As the article mentions, 40% of NY Times' revenue is still provided by advertising.
Only when you perform a security check about the passwords you storesñ
New API for directory picking and drag-and-drop
Yes, the regulators want to. The people actually doing the research want to be able to focus on the components that are in marijuana, because some of the chemicals that are produced in small quantities seem to have substantial effects in certain conditions. A simpler organism, like yeast, means they can minimize the variables, and provide better research and better quality.
They should have just said, "just South of Oracle".
First, "found no evidence" is in no way a conclusion that no one will die from aftereffects of Fukushima. If you actually click through to wiki's citation you'll see that the study repeatedly cops out and says "more data/study is needed". There are other studies [1] that suggest the risk runs as high as over 100 deaths from cancer.

[1] http://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/TenHoeveEES12.pd...

Second, there's 9 plant workers that inarguably died from the event, the fact that they may not have died from radiation seems not all that important, do we write off the coal miners who died due to mine collapse and only look at lung cancer, etc.? Grandparent claim of "Fukushima killed zero" is simply a 100% false claim.

Third, similarly, there are non-radiation effects on general populace, described in more detail at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disa...
You can set up automatic backups on OneNote.
Ad blockers already have element rules so yes, you can block ads served from the same site. As long as it's possible for an intelligence to distinguish ads from content, it'll be possible to remove ads. It might get more difficult, but you're simply wrong to say it's the end of ad blockers.
I thought what it was saying was the talent pool they're competing for is sapped both by SF-based companies and Valley-based companies. But rereading it that doesn't make sense either...
Crooks are abusing Google Search Console to remain under the radar
It's about more than just THC. It's also about cannabidiol, cannabidivarin, tetrahydrocannabivarin and other substances that are also produced and much lower quantities. THC seems more like the proof of concept, with the lesser-known drugs being where this will really shine.
That's definitely what I was thinking of, but it's not entirely suitable as a list of domains not to issue certificates for, unless you're happy to accept you won't be issuing certificates for domains like blogspot.com or flynn.io.
Firefox 41.0b9: "Support for your browser is coming soon.
Check out Notion on Google Chrome desktop, Safari, or iPhone. "
> Can I skip the ad, go straight to the article and not be paid? Maybe content providers could decide.

I think the content providers would argue that you getting the content is your form of 'payment' for seeing the ad. So if you skip it, why should they give you the content anyway?
A United States of Europe? Good Luck
Is there a self-hosted option? I take it it's closed source?
No. So long the code is executing on an uncontrolled device, then you cannot guarantee it'll execute how you intended. So if you make a device, like an iPad, seal it to prevent hardware tampering, and ensure no user-triggerable bugs exist, you're all set. There's also remote attestation, like Intel SGX might start to bring.

But on existing general-compute devices like PCs, it's a hopeless battle.
I love the mantra of "the web is supported by advertising" that every one of these sorts of articles at least quotes. It's not. Shitty business models are supported by advertising. There are plenty of us who provide non-advertising driven services that are profitable and can afford transit costs.

As for blocking, the technology allows it so I will use it. If it doesn't allow it, I have no ethical qualms about breaking it until it does. If I'm paying for the portal device be it tablet, desktop, smartphone, TV, I will be in control of it. If it's subsidy-driven, their funeral.
Reader mode seems to work fine on this blog.
iOS has pretty restrictive sandboxing; it's unlikely that an attacker could get at LastPass's data without root and unlikely that an attacker could get root in your iPhone in the first place.

It could, however, mean that your master password is in a cleartext or Apple-recoverable iTunes (local) or iCloud backup of your phone.
I use WorkFlowy (YC S10). It's not as robust as Evernote or OneNote and updates are lacking, but it's pretty flexible and works for my needs. Text-only.
This is why I encourage all the people I know, who aren't great with computers, to use adblockers:

http://i.imgur.com/dzwaKhI.png

Saw that ad for what is borderline malware on a fresh install of windows 10 while trying out Microsoft Edge to see what it's worth as a browser. It's a google ad (you can always spot them through the X button), on a popular website.

As long as google doesn't do any real policing on what is permissible in their adnetworks, it will always be a user's right to protect himself. Television and newspapers have higher standards for ads, at least in my country.

This was also a reminder that Edge will not be a real browser until Microsoft adds the possibility of using an adblocker. No extensions, no deal.
Show HN: Playing with the Google Charts API – Trending News
I'll never cease to be amazed at the hoops people will jump through so they can feel cool and say "we use the cloud".
Doesn't it seem nasty to claim that a large established company may go out of business? Just the claim can hurt their business.

Evernote is fairly useful. I pay the minimum amount above the free tier. I enjoy the product but I only use it perhaps 10 minutes a day, on average.
Yep. That is exactly how modern ad blockers work. :)
Content providers (from ad networks to movie studios) need to realise that you can only go so far. Ads have become more than ads. They track you wherever you go, not just online but offline too and people are starting to realise how intrusive this is. Most people are reasonable. A lot of articles have been publish about how terrible ads are but if you show them in a tasteful and a non-intrusive way (meaning that they don't track the user), they can be very successful.

Podcasts have been getting more and more popular everyday and I listen to a lot of them. I almost never skip any podcast ads even though I've heard most of them before because they feel more authentic (mostly because it's read by someone whose opinion I trust) and they're not intrusive at all. It seems like a good trade of to listen to them while getting great entertaining/informative content for free and I might get a good deal on something I might be interested in (since they mostly offer promo codes). If I'm listening to a podcast on technology, I get to hear Hover's ad spot, for example. That's interesting to me because as someone who's interested in listening to a podcast about technology, it's possible that I already manage a couple of domains and I might not be happy with my registrar (then again, who is). They're generically targeted ads. While on the websites, cookies follow me wherever I go, sometimes even when I delete them and my information is sold by companies I trust as a user because they're greedy and some other party want my information just so they can put ads in front of my face. When I try to block these, I'm called unethical because I'm taking food off the table of the writers.

There's a middle way here but I don't think ad networks ever going to realise this the same way movie studios haven't realised you can't solve piracy problem by adding more and more DRM. Don't be intrusive. Don't fuck up the UX. Don't bother me. I don't mind removing my ad blocker and see ads if that means I'll support the websites I visit. But ad networks are greedy and I fear this is only going to make them become more intrusive because of how easy (and now probably widely reached) ad blockers are going to become. And even if they do realise their mistake and make ads less intrusive both for privacy and UX reasons, no one will be there to realise that because everybody will be using ad blockers.
Show HN: Why Text Messaging Industry Is Completely Broken
i'm using evernote with the web-browser extension Clearly, this way its useful to me..(as for example, if i want to clip an article for later reading etc..)
ha. To clarify my point. The end game of a runaway greenhouse effect is far more terrifying than thousands of nuclear accidents. Sure the local effects of a melt down are scary, but it takes the worst earthquake in the Japan's history to cause that kind of disaster on an obsolete, ancient reactor.

Every generation of reactor get safer. Even if they weren't, we learn from every accident. Fukushima could have been prevented. In fact, Onagawa a nearly identical reactor under similar circumstances was spared by the heroic efforts of its operators.[1]

[1] http://thebulletin.org/onagawa-japanese-nuclear-power-plant-...
I'm amazed they still haven't fixed the syncing/conflicted copy issues. We switched to OneNote pretty much right after they Mac/iOS versions came out and the "just works" live collaboration was a breath of fresh air.
Most of the reputable CAs have some practices in place to check for keywords related to big brands and auto-reject certificate requests. (So you can't get a certificate for "login-facebook.com" or whatnot, for instance.)
Don't worry so much. In addition to the videos of each class being posted online, consider this:

I also spoke with Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, one of the best-known providers of first-step seed money for tech start-ups. I asked him if any one school stood out in terms of students and graduates whose ideas took off. “Yes,” he responded, and I was sure of the name I’d hear next: Stanford. It’s his alma mater, though he left before he graduated, and it’s famous as a feeder of Silicon Valley success.

But this is what he said: “The University of Waterloo.” It’s a public school in the Canadian province of Ontario, and as of last summer, it was the source of eight proud ventures that Y Combinator had helped along. “To my chagrin,” Altman told me, “Stanford has not had a really great track record.”

http://nyti.ms/1Dez9WQ
As has been said, existing domain-validated (i.e. basic) certificates are automated anyway.

The type of certificate that banks etc use are EV - Extended Validation. This means the organisation details are verified as well, and as such the browser displays the verified organisation name in green in some cases, instead of any host/url at all).
What are the possibilities for this in areas that are far too hot/dry for crops? Underground growing retains water and can be more easily temperature controlled.

Given that photosynthesis does not use the full spectrum, how efficient do LEDs and solar panels have to be before you have a net gain on solar energy converted into photosynthesis?
Vote By Switching Lamps On And Off
Tell me more about your experience as a junior developer last year.
OneNote was great before but for me on Mac and iOS it seems like the basic text editing has gotten clunkier and buggier (most of the issues revolve around mixing roman and CJK languages I think)
Thanks for sharing this. I learn a couple of new thing with that.
And this is a problem because devs in SF don't want to commute south and devs in the Valley don't want to commute north? I really doubt this is in the top 10 reasons Evernote is (apparently) failing.
Some content providers may choose to allow that, because it's in their interest to deliver content to more readers, be more popular. Let's not forget, the whole point of journalism is to reach out to more readers. How the journalist's job is paid exactly is secondary really, as long as it's legal of course.

So let's say 1% of my readers choose to view the ad, get paid for it and get the advertiser pay me too. I might be fine with that. I'll have more readers then who'd spread the word about (and directly link to) my awesome blog/magazine.
Ad networks use real-time bidding to auction banner ad space as the page loads. (I imagine that's part of the reason it can take so damn long for some news sites to load.) Why can't the user (or their user agent) take part in this same auction? If I'm will to pay $0.02 per page view on nytimes.com, but advertisers are only willing to pay $0.01 then I should be able to win the auction.
Maybe it changed at some point (8?), or my memory's fuzzy. I haven't looked at it in several years.

Either way, trusting a root CA generally looks far less threatening than the self-signed certificate warnings.
The point is that lots of cents make up a sizeable income. The problem is that processing 'a cent' or a fraction of one costs more than you'll end up getting and nobody - to date - has been able to create a functioning micro payments system with associated wallet to gain sufficient adoption to make it work. It's a combination of a technology problem with a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
In a way.

An extreme could be not loading content until the ad is loaded, and there is some type of check to verify that it did actually load (not blocked).

If someone is determined enough, they could simulate the ad being loaded (eg, maybe it actually IS even loaded, but the DOM element is hidden in one of dozen different ways which the ad-loaded-verification code doesn't check for).

Essentially the problem boils down to running code (HTML, Javascript, CSS, and even Flash) in an untrusted environment (the user's browser). The site sends the user bits of data to be displayed, but there's ultimately no way to know if the user's browser ACTUALLY displays those in the browser window, let alone to the user's eyeballs.

As a content provider, you can get very, very clever, but you can never get to 100%, and there will always be a motivated user to work on an adblocker that circumvents everything.

It's really not any different from DRM (as someone else in thread pointed out). The movie/music/TV/games industry has spent billions of dollars coming up with various schemes of DRM, yet you can still download basically anything (stripped of its DRM, of course) within days of release, if not earlier.
> After a survey of our customer base, we determined that more than 99% of our customers’ websites are locally available in China today.

Since they censor most foreign website, I bet average chinese users doesn't even aware of the existence of overseas website
Have we hit peak ads? [1]

[1]: http://peakads.org/images/Peak_Ads.pdf
The mantra? This is how the majority of the web is monetized. It's not a mantra, it's a fact. People contribute content to the web and you pay with viewing ads. I don't know how you can rationalize that as being a "shitty" business model just because you purchase a device that is capable of connecting to the internet.

If what you really mean to say is that it's a bad business model because people like yourself can install ad-blocking software and consume content without paying for it, then I see what you're saying although you come off as entitled and naive.
I'm using it daily for several years now and I don't mind it doesn't have tons of new features. I don't need tons of new features, I need it doing what I use it for - organizing and storing random bits of information.
With the risk of sounding bitter, I am truly not, I always wondered why does it take close to 300M and 400 employees according to Crunchbase to build a note taking app, even at scale.
AWS Free Tier Unknown Facts
I should probably have added a "and right now you have no idea which one it'll be for you" to the end. Because I'd never image I'd be once more writing data center automation tools just 2 years ago. And, when I started, there was no such thing as a data center.
Facebook Works with Google to Let Mobile Users Get Push Notifications via Chrome
Such better ads are not patented, and switching to pleasant text ads like the industry leaders leaders did would make ad blockers a marginal phenomenon.

The risk is that advertising would also become a marginal phenomenon.