skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Buying access to stuff online with a credit card is totally inconvenient, and even worse, you have no privacy then. I guess this is part of the reason why sites financed by advertising have become so prevalent.

Personally, if there was an easy and private way to do so, I'd much rather pay for content than getting "free" stuff financed by ads. Inevitably, sites will be extremely reluctant to write anything negative about products from companies that buy lots of ads. For this reason, I consider many of the reviews on tech sites, for example, kinda worthless.

So, I'm glad to see this ad financed business model break down. Buying access to content with a cryptocurrency could be real easy (and relatively private). But it does not help that many governments want you to calculate capital gain/loss everytime you make such a purchase.

I think governments ought to make an exception in the capital gains tax for small personal purchases. Maybe promoters who loudly proclaim that cryptocurrencies will soon replace "legacy" government fiat currencies are part of the problem. No wonder governments are so negative. But I don't think cryptocurrencies necessarily will replace fiat currencies anytime soon. Cryptocurrencies work great for small purchases online, but I wouldn't want to put my lifesavings into one - oh no! My computer got hacked - my life savings are gone!

Edit: replacing the entire capital gains tax with a wealth tax would probably be even better.
People thinking they have a good solution when they don't is an interesting problem. A good technical example of this is parsing xml with regex or generating xml with string.format, I've had to explain to colleagues why this is bad so many times and many of them are stubborn and wonder why we should change something that "works". Initially they think the difference only carries academic significance, such as claiming i++ is faster than ++i. Usually you have to show them an example of valid xml that fails the regex before they realize that it is a problem. Kornish wrote a comment above about how important it is to know that certain problems have known solutions, in the same way its equally important to know what is not good "solutions" to certain problems.
"Where a year ago we served 375~400K pageviews per day, we now register just over 200K pageviews a day. That's right, nearly 50% of the readers are blocking ads."

I'm not saying ad blockers had no effect on their business, but I find it extremely hard to believe 50% of their visitors discovered and started using ad blockers in the past year.
The usual process is to conspicuously red-line a contract, so your changes are clearly visible (traditionally, highlighted in red ink), along with a notification up front that you're sending back a revised contract.

From the article it's not entirely clear to me what form his modifications took:

> [He] scanned it into his computer, altered the terms and sent it back to Tinkoff Credit Systems.

By this do they mean he did something like "photoshop" the scanned contract, producing a result that looks as similar as possible to the original, but with some parts digitally modified? That would be a bit more misleading, if so.
Why not build a generic system where ads are served to the server serving the website (which maintains a cache of relevant ads and serves them appropriately)?

That way you can get the benefits of a network + the benefits of serving from the same server that is serving the content
Web developers have long been familiar to the "Never trust user Input" principle.
> The unix way is also a different incompatible implementation of regex in every utility and a thousand interesting and dangerous modes of failure in the event of whitespace

Then_stop_using_whitespace_and_that_problem_is_solved_for_some_values_of_solved_;)
I guess the Swedish government could borrow a lot of money to lower their taxes on income. That would look great in your stats, but the national debt would quietly sky rocket behind the scene, just like in the US.
I'd be okay with ads on the web if it looked like newspaper or magazine ads (and with the associated cognitive load). But not auto-play videos that pops up in the middle of the article or blinking GIFs on the side.
Do you have anything for me to read about falling piracy rates ? (e.g. gamasutra)
Generating xml with string formatting? I suffer with you.
On Hacking MicroSD cards (2013)
Predict the startup success with math
I think this is what annoys me most about systemd. All of the advantages you list seem extremely niche to me.

I mean network interfaces that don't change names? I think in over 15 years of using Linux I have never had a problem with this, and if I did I'm guessing it would be a) obvious b) trivial to fix. Same with the other stuff.

To get these niche features we need to install a very complex, opaque, fragile and verbose set of tools that throw away most of what I've learned in my 15 years. Blah!
Not if you are writing a software based switch, especially one designed to be scriptable.

Which the author is.

Context is everything.
Dude,

Just charge money. Have we all forgotten how commerce worked for ~5000 years before the ad-supported model came along?
The patch author works for Google.
I'm curious where we reach the point where ad blockers tip the scales here.
I think we really, really need cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.

Or just something where I could pay, say 10 Euro per year, and every website that participates gets a fraction to my number of visits or reading time.

As far as I understand, Google is trying to do this. But it does not provide a 'no ads' guarantee and there are other ad networks with even more obnoxious ads.
> If the only revenue stream you can rely on is ads,
> then probably there is a problem with the stuff you
> offer not being valuable enough to people.

Not quite.

What people are willing to pay for has a large social/cultural/conditioned element. It's a crux of the entire problem.

The vast majority of people still attribute zero cost to ads. When you start charging $1 for your offering, now you're the one site among your competitors that's charging money. Maybe some HN nerds will care. Whoopdee doo. Nobody else does. The rest of the world isn't going to take their credit card out of their wallet when they can endure a banner ad instead.

Oh wait, they can just install an ad blocker the day they actually do care. Or maybe when their kid or significant other or buddy installs an adblocker on their browser like I did for my parents and they won't even realize the trouble it ever saved them.

See, I think that we will be soon on the cusp of a shift that needs to happen before we can replace ads at all, and it's more than just something a website can do by themselves by adding a paywall or whatever solution that doesn't work for most websites that people seem to conjure up in response to these issues.
This is an interesting view on russian discussion culture. How did you come to this conclusion?
Would the concept of thousand be a mistake since it does not represent a hundred hundreds ? Or it did not really appear with the same needs as million ?
Yeah, I'm sure Adsense will let you proxy requests through my server soon or release some similar offering.

It would come at the massive expense of high-quality tracking and thus incur a massive reduction in ad revenue, but it's an imminent trade-off that beats unconditional adblocking.

I think everything is just waiting for the actual tipping point that forces everyone's hand like we always do. Adblockers are still the minority.
Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger.

Not only is it not private but it also will not scale for microtransactions on a massive scale.
I agree with you, except that the USA very much did win the war. The problem with winning wars is that the victor gets the learns that military power violence is a solution to problems.
Another is Hammer, https://github.com/UpstandingHackers/hammer
Here is a good report on Troposphere V launch (in french):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrlKWtkce5I
A note: The original post is correct in what it says. It is saying if one draws N independent samples from an exp(1) distribution then the minimum is distributed as exp(N). This is true. Because of this, for any finite sample there is a systematic 'bias' by your metric if the sample size differs between the two groups. However, you are correct in that this difference vanishes as N becomes large and further that one can make controlled statements about the expected size of this difference, given the distribution.
That's true! I stopped watching TV somewhere around the high school age, which means I react to it just like small children do: if I'm trying to have a meeting where there's a TV running I turn into almost a drooling idiot.

My brain is simply not conditioned to flashing colors and quick cuts that aren't important. It requires practice to read a text bylined with blinking animations, and I simply don't have the cognitive power to do that. Most people that cope with it probably doesn't realize how much practice they've had.
sysvinit provided me with so much excitement that now I will take anything that just isn't sysvinit.
There is no actual "word" for million in Chinese.

百 is a hundred, 萬 is ten-thousand. A million is 百萬. But also I'm guessing 400萬 could be understood as the same as 4百萬/四百萬.
Sucks that it's being delayed
systemd is NOT making the change to manage cgroups from PID1. Kernel is - systemd is just the first (and currently the only) one to comply with this change.

Legacy cgroup API is going away.

It is the same case for the /usr merge [1]. systemd is not forcing the change, but it is complying with the changes required and is getting blamed for it.

[1] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/TheCaseForT...
But better than it failing when it starts
Many of the "best possible treatments" are expensive crap, barely better than a cheap generic or even than no treatment at all (especially cancer treatments).
I wish this was just a web problem.
Classic ad hominem. Do you have anything substantive?

FTR, I understand "linux"[1] better than most and I'm very happy with systemd. So there. It's by no means perfect and could probably stand to be revisited architecture-/design-wise in a few years when there's even wider community experience with it -- but that can come as incremental improvements.

[1] Whether you meant the kernel or user-space. Both as a user, administrator and developer.
1. i think that assumtion is right.

I mean rate limiting stuff that comes from anywhere is needed. not cause of the fact that systemd does it.
I mean if I could write a userspace tool that crashes the kernel.. is somewhat aweful.
On a similar note, English outside the United States used the long-scale billion (10^12, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales) until the last few decades.

When numbers on the order of 10^9 started to become a thing that needed to be discussed regularly, everybody grudgingly switched to the American short-scale "billion" on the grounds of it actually being useful.
I hate ads for all the reasons you cite and because some are hugely distracting.

But small websites are not in a position to change the state of affairs, and if nothing changes and people keep blocking their ads, they're going to be dying in large numbers.

As a result, everything will be locked into app stores with even less privacy and with many restrictions on the type of content that is allowed.

The sort of answers I am looking for are the ones that do not pit small websites against users.
>If you're on minimum wage with dependents, you made some bad decisions.

Maybe 15 years ago. These days bad luck is all you need.
> I have no use or sympathy for those people for whom ignorance is a choice.

He said, without irony, to end a rather ignorant rant.
This how I understand this:

Look back at decisions you have made under various lenses and learn about your decisions and what biases they have, so that you can avoid them or amplify them (if positive) in future.
> Bitcoin stores every single transaction that ever happens in a public ledger.

Ok, I admit I'm not a Bitcoin expert. But if I buy Bitcoin with cash, or mine some myself, is this really a problem?
You're kidding, I hope, if not, try visiting some non-US jurisdictions and see how they do it. The US has very weak protection for employees - the "At-will" employment practise being a striking example.
I think the way you did. Many things in systemd aren't as good as they should be. However it's working and does his job.
The issue that raised up here is definitly a problem in the kernel. I mean it's not a good practice that other programs could flood yours. However the problem whey they argued that so hard is caused by the fact that both parties trying to fight a political war over the linux ecosystem which is just bad, kay sievers also said it.
They make a project that can only be good if all parties, kernel, init, gui, are playing together and not fighting against each other like childish politicans.
I do think it's a good option, as I only need another 6 subscribers to the top end plan to reach profitability. In fact I've recently been trying a cold email outreach campaign, so far I've only sent about 90 emails, 50% open rate, 12% clicked through, but no sign ups. There will be more about that in part 3
Sorting long lists is a good one. Filtering of various kinds.
Here is wiki article about his rockets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troposphere_%28rocket_family%2...

I am rooting so much for this guy, his determination just made my day. Also all his quotes and paraphrases are hilarious.

"Despite Troposphere 5 being equipped with an escape chute, Kavira(rat) was never found and was officially reported to have died in the name of science."
> ...network interfaces that dont change names when you swap hardware...

I assume you're talking about udev's "Predictable Network Interface Names". [0]

That's a feature of udev, and -IIRC- has been around since shortly after udev's repo got merged into systemd's repo, but quite a bit before it became obvious that the Systemd Cabal wasn't going to put much -if any- particular effort into making it easy for folks to use udev without systemd.

While -due to inertia- I do use it on my systems, it doesn't provide value on systems that don't have more than one network interface of a given type. [1]

> ...to making it damn easy to file crash bugs...

I've been doing exactly this in KDE since... KDE 4.1? 4.2? So, this would be back in the ~2008->2009 time frame. I have fuzzy memories of a crash reporter in KDE 3, but -back then- I didn't build my systems with debugging info or frame pointers, so the backtraces were always useless and -thus- went unsubmitted.

> ...to checking what services have failed...

rc-status --crashed

or

rc-status --all --crashed

does the same for me on my OpenRC systems. Every sysvrc replacement that's not a toy provides this functionality.

> ...to a more secure graphical desktop...

I'm very glad that the Wayland folks are making good progress with their work.

> Deploying web-services on systemd is so much better...

Can you be specific here? There are a whole host of service supervision systems out there of varying quality and feature sets.

[0] http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/Predictable...

[1] After all, you can name your single wired ethernet NIC eth0, your single WiFi NIC wlan0, and your single USB-connected cellular radio usb0. That's far easier and more predictable than reading the output of lspci to figure out the name of your NIC. (If you get the urge to point out the cases in which the NIC-physical-path-dependent naming scheme does help, please carefully re-read the 'graph to which this footnote was attached.)
This November in PHP: PHP 7.0.0, Symfony3, EZ Platform and Drupal 8
> Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things.

This. The whole Linux community seems to be paranoid. It has to be a grand scheme, a plot to take over Linux, a conspiracy to kill "the UNIX way". Maybe it's just a group of guys solving their problems.

I don't see how anything of this is really Red Hat's "fault". Seriously. They develop a piece of software which solves their problems. They also incorporate projects they already maintain to improve functionality and make developing things easier. It's their projects, they're allowed to do that. The code is still open. It's not like everybody (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc) didn't have the ability to fork udev.

Yet all these projects chose not to fork the projects incorporated by systemd. Reason (1) might be it solves problems for them as well. There's no need to fork something that perfectly works for you. Reason (2) might be they don't have the resources. But that's a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole "Linux is built by community volunteers" thing. The people advising against "corporate influence" are not able to do anything of value in modern computing anymore (I'm well aware this is over-simplification, please bear with me). Requirements for software have changed. It's not 1970 anymore. And while the "old-school" users and devs are complaining about systemd & co, the "youngsters" are busy changing the ecosystem.
Obviously nobody does that.

My favorite example is when you see a popular github repository with a donate button (Flattr, Bitcoin address, etc) only to realize they've made a whole $14 in the past year. Wow, thanks world!

It turns out that ads worked because the user didn't actually have to do anything. They didn't have to get their credit card out of their wallet, something they rarely do on the internet.

And when they do, it's to give money to a large corporation like Netflix or because Jimmy Wales managed to beg for donations in a more invasive annoying way than a banner ad ever was. (You know, I never once had to see the face of the founder of AdultFriendFinder in one of their ads.)

I hope we find a next-coming middleground that changes the culture of what people are willing to pay for and how they do it. But the fact that giving your credit/debit card number to someone gives them (and anyone else) unlimited charge license on your account is not helping.
From talking to economic grad students, it appears hard to obtain enough data for typical machine learning approaches. Basically all parameters end up being set from "theory" and "intuition"
Whenever I read something like this I feel really bad and turn off my ad blocker, as soon as I do that I'm usually greeted with 2 minute long unskippable ads, sites re-skinned with ads, targeted ads, ads that are just straight up spam, ads that play in the background and ads that require me to fill out a survey. I want to support these websites but online ads don't pay nearly as much as TV, radio or print ads but that are 10 times more annoy, detrimental to my privacy and if I ever click on them I know their almost certainly going to be some sort of phishing scam or virus from eastern Europe. You know it sucks that people are blocking ads but online ads are the absolute worst, if online ads functioned and payed as much as print advertisements than I don't think anyone would have a problem with seeing ads but we all know they don't. Only thing I can recommend is that these sites change their business model or at least augment it with a mixture of merch, internet begging (patreon), premium memberships and being more choosy with what ad networks they choose to partner with.
Online Tool for Mauritius to Measure Greenhouse Gas Emissions Launched
That's precisely the sort of thing we have courts, and vast quantities of precedent, to decide.

Don't make the classic programmer's mistake of expecting everything in the law to need to be as well defined as things are in mathematics. Judges will quite happily decide what a term means on the fly, consistent with precedent and reasonableness, to stop you getting away with anything completely ridiculous.
Deep learning works well when you have a ton of data and don't care about interpreting the parameters of your model. My understanding is this is pretty much the opposite of the typical situation in econ research.
Your premise discriminates between two groups.

It's not clear how you can assign a candidate a 90% chance of graduation. That probability must be a subjective assessment that has come from some (biased) source. In truth, an individual will either graduate or not.

In your example, you can assign 0% and 100% probabilities in group A, but you can't in group B. The most plausible mathematical explanation for that is that you collected insufficient relevant information about candidates in group B.
Scopolamine is not the worst drug that plants or animals can create, but is an evil one. Herbivore starts eating a plant, plant first do that the animal forget that was doing, and if persists finally put it at sleep until carnivores arrive. The remains of the corpse feed the plant. A master move if you think about it.
> I think in over 15 years of using Linux I have never had a problem with this, and if I did I'm guessing it would be a) obvious b) trivial to fix.

I have run into this. Two wired Ethernet NICs in a system. After a kernel upgrade, the module load order of each NIC got swapped, and the name of each NIC changed. Took me a while to track that one down. :P

For 99.9% of desktop users (and -I suspect- many servers), this doesn't ever matter, and the "predictable" names are substantially less predictable and discoverable than 'eth0' or 'wlan0' or whatever.

Additionally, if you move a NIC in your system to another expansion slot in the system, its name will change. So, there's that to remember about this particular scheme.

NOTE: I'm not trying to claim that it's not helpful! The "predictable network interface" naming scheme solves a real problem. It's just that it -like most things- creates a few unique problems of its own. ;)
Efficient heat transfer just means using a big exchange surface versus a small material thickness and/or good heat conductivity of the material. But the problem you probably have in mind is that the vapor can't drive the boiling as for the vapor to transfer its energy it has to be condensed, at which point the question becomes why would the vapor condense and boil the water on the other side versus simply boil itself. The answer here should be a pump, so as to make the pressure on the condensation side higher than the pressure on the boiling side. The pump will need energy to maintain the cycle, but it will be (much) less than the energy needed to boil off water in the absence of the pump and condenser. The question becomes open again, I think, why would this be less efficient than reverse osmosis?
Researcher shows that black holes do not exist
Why don't they send already signed copies?
Greenland Is Melting Away (interactive Article)
While it's good to correct the Hollywood version of WWII this idea has to put it into the perspective of the resources the USA gave to both the USSR and the UK.[0] The USSR was very nearly defeated by the Germans, if you look at the numbers in the Lend-Lease article below it's hard to see how they'd have kept hanging on or launched a counter-attack as strong as they did without that aid. Deaths are the most important thing in remembering sacrifice and the horrors of war but they are not the only thing that's relevant to actually winning a war.

Furthermore these discussions also fall for the eurocentric trap of not discussing the rest of WII. I am continually amazed at how little sense European people have of not only the scale of troops and resources sent to Europe from elsewhere, but of the scale of the conflict in the Pacific.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease#Significance