skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its not a choice between a world of paywalls and a world of ads -- closed, for-paying-users services are going to exist whether or not ad-based services also exist. And, open services without distinct ads (which may themselves be ads, on some level) that are paid for by someone other than the direct user are going to exist. The real question is in what circumstances, and to what extent, are services with intrusive ads disrupting the main content acceptable alternatives to those other two models, not an exclusive choice of a world with one model or a world with one of the other models.

> I don't really want the Web to turn into a giant Apple Store, where every link, I must face the cognitive burden of paying for it before I know that I even want it.

Life is that way: even with "free with ads" content, you are accepting a cost for the content before you can be certain that the benefit justifies it. (Heck, there's an opportunity cost even with "free without ads" content.)

If you just mean the friction of active choice with each click, well, even in a payment model you could create a system with configurable passive thresholds and lumped periodic payments where the cognitive burden of an active purchase decision was avoided for people who preferred to do so.
It represents their nastiness. They were contacted and it was explained to them how their claim is invalid and those patents don't apply to Opus. But they refused to remove this claim, "just because" (may be they like creating FUD). You can ask Opus developers for more details on this. Qualcomm acted out of bad will here.
The solution, as always, will lie somewhere on the axis between allowing advertisers to run rampant on your page with obnoxious, harmful ads, and content providers charging you.

Perhaps we'll all agree to unblock a small part of our pages if we get promised that the content would be tasteful, and controlled. Perhaps I'll turn of my blockers if I know I don't have a dozen 3rd party cookies installed every time I read the news. But knowing advertisers (I used to work for your employer's competitor BTW) this will not hapen anytime soon.
Combine this with "no more Muslims get into 'merica", and I think Mr. Trump has now jumped the shark. Or maybe a better way to describe it is implode ala Ross Perot.
Could very well work, only you would need cooperation with one or more major payment processors/card issuers.

The way it would work is that shops are given hobeypot cards and asked to use them weekly for dummy payments. The moment one of these cards show up anywhere else than the shop it was sent to you can expect the shop has been hacked.

It is not failsafe and you will have to wait until a batch with this card is stolen before this tells you where.
That doesn't clarify what the OP meant. PHP does not allow you to issue processor instructions directly.
How to beat anyone at rock-paper-scissors, according to a Chinese mathematician
High Scalability: The Serverless Startup – Down with Servers
Because he's a very savvy politician.

Ballmer is certainly not an idiot, but his main skill has always struck me as being an arrogant asshole who won't be intimidated by anyone. He's not a brilliant strategist; he's the unstoppable force that pushes to implement the strategy at all costs. You want a guy like Ballmer on your side because he gets deals done. Whether or not those deals were the right deals is another question.

Contrast him with a guy like Steve Jobs -- Jobs was a brilliant strategist who understood the complex interaction between design, customer needs, technical capability and supply chain. He was also fired from the company he founded because he wasn't able to get what he wanted in a way that ensured the people above and beside him got what they wanted. Jobs had far more success when politics were removed from the picture -- he was a de facto dictator at Apple during their most successful period. He was an effective leader and a pragmatist, but he also had absolute power within Apple so he never had to negotiate internally from a position of weakness.
Love Codecademy and they're good natured about it and can laugh at themselves, but they WILL correct you if you say it as two words :)
"I don't see any reason why anyone should profit in this space."

Because there's still work in putting it together and maintaining it? And because profiting from doing this means they're less likely to take money from an ad company?
I actually did this in an app a few years ago, and completely forgot about it for a while. I only remembered when another dev sent a surprised e-mail. Ya gotta make time for fun...
We have much lower traffic than that and our Piwik servers, with paid support from the Piwik team, often struggles to generate reports etc. Not convinced Piwik is that easy to scale.
Drag and drop receipts to Slack
500 Startups Partner Uses Podcasts to Identify Investable Companies
I sold my four year old $1200 pc for $200 so yeah he's definitely wrong.
Author hardly demonstrates how nudges "hardly help". In fact, my guess is that nudges are extremely effective. Just the trivial 10c grocery bag fees (a "nudge", imo) can reduce bag use by 80% (whether or not bag reduction is good/bad is a different discussion).
"429 Too Many Requests" means YOU made too many requests. Retrying will only make it worse. Sounds right to me. You should definitely not simply retry on a 429 response.
The data show no significant long-term change after the BrowserChoice screen was introduced (in March 2010): http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser-eu-monthly-200807...

IE was dropping rapidly before, and it kept dropping more-or-less at the same pace. Firefox actually started dropping right around that time.

People want to believe, but where's the evidence?
"focus must be enabled in settings"

Where in settings is it enabled?
CLick on the uBlock Origin options tab and you will find a list of all the 3rd party filter lists in use ( & available by default). Most of these include a link to the source site.
I've read a little of both.

Regardless of what we label it as, would you agree that some recent winners (specifically I'll say Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, The City & the City, Ancillary Justice, and The Three-Body Problem) are in some sense alike, that they form a different cluster from the list of older winners in my previous comment? That these newer winners are more similar to e.g. older Booker Prize winners (so that we don't get caught up trying to objectively define literary) than the older Hugo winners were? That there are qualities that the older Hugo winners have that the newer ones lack?
Spideroak doesn't and cannot dedupe, since everything you upload is encrypted by a key held only by you.
Google likely (or at least theoretically) has the capability to track the user across all the sites that use GA. In-house tracking doesn't allow this.
> Its to reduce their maximum bandwidth capacity required.

They should be looking to partner with someone who has bandwidth problems in the other direction. By combining a backup service's upload bandwidth and a streaming video service's download bandwidth into one AS, you can get a more balanced stream, and qualify for free peering.
Title should be "iOS" instead of "IOS" (Cisco's router operating system).
If it were anything other than Mozilla, wouldn't that be a Con? Because then it'd be more likely that the maintainer would take money to let ads by.
Jukedeck – Create unique music for your videos in seconds
When you're a professional, there are certain rigid processes you have to follow. A lot of it involves significant governance, and every professional has obligations of due diligence.

A lot of programmers became programmers or enjoy being programmers precisely because of the lack of the aforementioned things in their profession. Besides a lot of programmers are self taught or learn most of their skills by themselves.

A professional (doctor or engineer) would have to go through rigorous schooling and a grueling examination process to get their license. They can't become self taught doctors or engineers. Hell, most programmers would drop out of school if they got a good job at a growing start up when presented with a decent equity.

As a programmer I completely disagree with this post.
It does for me if I have it in excess; say, more than 30 ounces of coffee in one morning. If I drink coffee or other caffeine sources too late in the evening and then can't get to sleep when I want to, that's stressful too.
If anyone is looking for a good blocker for stuff like this, I recommend ghostery. I set it to block everything by default, and whitelist the few things I want. It doesn't block scripts served by the site you are on, so it doesn't totally break your browsing experience, like others do.
I understand Stallman's dislike of SaaSS in [2], but I fail to see how it meets any definition of rent-seeking. People who provide SaaSS are using economies of scale to offer services that are desirable to some, because they're offered at a cost that is less than the cost of developing and maintaining their own private solution. There is certainly a loss of freedom in using these services, as Stallman points out. But rent-seeking, not so much. Users of SaaSS need to decide whether the cost savings of using SaaSS is outweighed by the freedom they give up. Nothing more, so far as I can tell.
> PHP gets so much love and money shoved at it, the Ruby programmer in me finds it unfair.

Popular has little to do with fair, and a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time.

And network effects mean that being popular can make something desirable for some uses even when its intrinsic features aren't superior. And, anyway, while Ruby may sometimes lose to PHP for this reasons, it (due to Rails) often benefits from this, too.
Open-Source Retreat 2016 grantees
I fully realize that advertising, whether is direct, indirect or second-order is what keeps companies in business and keep paying us. I'm fine with ads as long as they're static images and/or text. When you lose me is when websites keep loading up script after script of some CPU hogging bullcrap that tanks my browser perf; then we have a problem. Google is bad when it comes to this, but not as bad as the Taboolas and Perions who are so in your face that all you want to do is block these idiots from ever sending a byte over your network.
> Thanks to problems like these, the economist (and frequent Atlantic contributor) Teresa Ghilarducci has called the 401(k)

Is this true? Is your money better off in an IRA, even with an employer match?
Is this posted anywhere besides LinkedIn? Would like to read but am not willing to give page views to LinkedIn.
What I would like to know, and haven't heard talked about in any of these articles yet, is if it's possible to substantially alter the genome of an already living creature.

This article touches on it briefly at the beginning, but doesn't elaborate on the idea:

> This means it’s possible to create genetically modified plants or animals of practically any species, as well as to modify the cells of adult organisms, including humans.

But so far, I've seen every article go to great lengths to avoid a very obvious question. Aside from medical cures, is it possible to use this technology for cosmetic purposes? Will I be able to change my eye color permanently? Cure baldness in adult humans? Alter metabolism?
Am I right in assuming that the name is a tribute to John Allspaw's rec.music.phish posts from the 90s?

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/allspaw$20phriend%7...
Ah yes, thank you, that should have been 403. I suspect a 401 would still leak info, as the <img> or <script> tag will let you differentiate between a 200 and other failing status.
> Most large retailers only store the full credit card information for seconds while they process the transaction, when the transaction is complete it is discarded.

Couldn't work around that by having some device that attaches to a randomly selected POS terminal, and then executes a series of dummy transactions using thousands of "canary cards" that were assigned to the store?

They could perhaps set this up with the credit cards companies so any use of the canary cards are automatically flagged when they're used outside of the store that was issued them.
The IRC thing is such a nice enhancement that I wrote a relay bot for it (kind of a meta-bot): https://github.com/neckro/OCTOTROG

I'm part of a small sub-community of players, and we use it to filter the announcements so we only see the players we care about, run queries on the Crawl bots without disrupting ##crawl, etc.

(edit: oh hi grimgrin, didn't notice it was you :)
DNS only sees the host name, so it can't be used to see what URLs are being accessed.
Visualize and analyze data from MongoDB via online tool
API Reference: https://www.addgene.org/crispr/

Tutorial/Cookbook: https://www.addgene.org/CRISPR/guide/
IIRC, one of Facebook's motivations for sticking with PHP was that it was the easiest language for everybody new to learn, meaning that they don't have to consider language expertise when hiring.

FWIW, they have released cool open source projects on Haskell and ocaml, so it's not like they've never considered any alternatives.
I really don't think we need to concede the equivalence between restricting equity crowdfunding and outlawing gambling. Gambling is legal because, as marketed, it's an entertainment product. Equity crowdfunding is restricted because it's an investment product.

Similarly, GNC can sell all sorts of useless nutritional supplements, but the FDA is all up in the business of anyone trying to sell a new medication.

Reminder: you can take money from non-accredited investors; it's just so complicated that it's not practical to do so at scale and with strangers.
> Violence is no less typical in the UK

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

United States intentional homicide rate: 3.8
United Kingdom intentional homicide rate: 1.0

So, UK has plenty of issues with crime and is worse in many areas, they just have vastly fewer deaths.
Open Source .NET – 1 year later
Show HN: Build one file automatically
Precisely the type of ads we should be celebrating since they subsidize the content we consume. A lot of people either are oblivious to their actual importance, or just don't care. The internet simply wouldn't be what it is today without them. True, there has been plenty of bad (trackers, malware, etc), but the good that has come from that subsidization has lead us to where we are today. A vast majority of the innovation on the internet has been directly or indirectly related to that subsidization.
Everybody in most of 3rd world uses WhatsApp for everything.

The Brazilian Conselho Federal de Medicina (main medical association) published a memo telling doctors not to use it, but very few will pay attention.

As always happens in Brazil only a tragedy can make people notice a problem. A couple lawsuits, some national scandal and people will learn.

Besides, there is also a cultural element here: privacy is a lot more valued in anglo-saxon cultures than in Latino cultures. Brazilians, Italians and others are a lot less concerned about things such as personal space, body contact, exhibiting in a small bikini, going almost naked in a Carnaval parade, etc.

Edit: Just for HN to have an idea of how big WhatsApp is: since May, the number of cell phone lines in Brazil is falling. More than 10 million lines are canceled. Young people are giving up on voice services and using exclusively WhatsApp for communications.

Source: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
Apparently blocking ads is harder than landing on the Moon. :|
OK, hyperbole aside, if you really want or care enough to solve this problem, you should refuse to visit/watch content with ads. Support people who use alternate business models. Content creators are people who want to get paid; if you show them an alternate way to succeed, they're going to want it.
But isn't the same kind of data you could extract from Apache logs? Since from what you describe is basically a log of all your requests.

GA has many utilities, mainly is to follow the user and see the funnel they go and second to monitor the marketing campaigns. If you don't need this, then Apache log + webalyzer is perfect for everyone.
Stats on this article...

With uBlock turned on and JS blocked: 65 requests, 2,015 KB, 1.73 seconds

Without blocking: 391 requests, 7,354 KB, 54.57 seconds

In each case I can read the article. The latter case uses 3.5x bandwidth.

I hope news sites find that the reason their print ads fetch more money is because it's prestigious to have a newspaper ad. Web ads are junky. Sites should vet ads themselves or use a reputable firm and work with advertisers to place tasteful, inline, plain html ads.
Excellent points. I don't have all the answers to those questions. This is the best I got for now:

- I think the zip file size is nginx configurable and it's set to like 4 or 8 MB right now.
- I don't have any bandwidth limitation at the moment, but if someone has a very high bandwidth site or wants to use the service to host/share files I'd have to cap those users somehow or maybe just charge more.
- Right now they are public, but I'd be willing to explore basic auth if that's a requested feature.

In general. We are making a service that we want to exist and are trying to do the best for whoever decides to show up.

Thank you for those questions, I am too close to the product to even realize what people might ask, but those all seem obvious in retrospect.
I can't see any reason to accept the premise that equity crowdfunding investors are sophisticated. The entire point of deregulating equity --- which is what equity crowdfunding is --- is to allow unsophisticated investors to invest.
I'll do a more thorough write-up some time, but I do the obvious thing — use meta rules to generate the files using the appropriate tools.

I use Pandoc to convert to html and glue together the files. An index file lists which files go to the server. Some files are html only, others are also available as PDF.

Some of the things I do are less obvious. There is a rule to make the target «deadlinks» which iterates through the resulting html files and attempts to fetch the (first bytes) of each linke. The links which fail go into deadlinks.

There is also a target which lists spelling mistakes.

The deployment target is configured to fail if there are dead links or spelling-mistakes (there are also a few other sanity checks).
I didnl’t try that since my site is not a blog.

Some files on my site depend on others in non-trivial ways. For them I just use an index file of dependencies, and cat the index file in the dependencies list. It is a bit tedious to update the lists, but I have sanity checks in place to tell me when something is missing.
no one is 'stealing' anything and elevating the notion of adblocking from 'unethical' (it isn't) to 'theft' (which it definitely isn't) is exactly the sort of language-twisting that corporations attempt to employ and legitimise to where we don't even think about it.

as many others will explain on HN: i own my hardware; the code i choose to run or not run on my machine is my choice. got a problem with that? feel free to shut down your web site or put it behind a paywall. i have a whole shelf of books that i should be reading anyway rather than surfing the web. i won't miss your web site one bit. i promise.
Dropbox vs. Evernote
> The same reason anyone creates a browser for any platform. Because people use it.

I wouldn't use a browser that was crippled like most people... Actually, I'd move to a different platform.
The book is over 7 years old now, published just before PV prices crashed. Here are the citations for the 10% figure: http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_47.shtml

Overall I thought the book was excellent. Some of the numbers are slightly off but a lot of the calulcations are intentionally back-of-the-envelope. What were the other issues you had with it?
Who Y Combinator Companies Want
Chrome fails printing YouTube.com
My chrome is freezing while trying to generate print page for youtube. Try going to youtube.com and printing that page (ctrl + p).

windows, chrome Version 48.0.2564.23 beta-m (64-bit).
the moon isn't actively altering its surface and orbital pattern to prevent you from landing there
Imagine if you Twitter ask you to pay per post or per view. Will you still use it ? Would that still be the Twitter we know of ? Many startups have for in their early stage considered ad money as one of their essential revenue stream and have built on it. Imagine if you have to pay everytime a dollar if you want to do a search and a lot more.
Yeah, agreed. The problem is, you're limited to partners in the same DC as you (unless you're going to bite the bullet and start using fiber loops between datacenters to accomplish this). Backblaze (for example only) is only in one DC in Northern California if I recall, which limits them to whomever is in that datacenter.

A great model would be to parter with CDNs; they pour content out to eyeball networks, but you could run a distributed network of your storage system across all of their POPs.
The Human Brain Is a Vital Front-End Component
I don't understand why you bother with GA then.
> Clearly their intention here was profits and since they didn't see any - they kill it off. They won't do it so nobody else should try to safe email either.

Um, of course their intentions were profit? Dropbox is a for-profit company, nobody ever questioned their intentions as being anything else.

And it's not pure speculation; I've worked on enough internally-developed products to know it's not always feasible to open source an entire service offering after the fact. It's expensive enough to do between code scrubbing, legal reviews, etc. that you're generally only going to do it for strategic reasons (i.e. you know you can never make money doing it but want to commoditize the market space to hamper a competitor's growth, you want the community to help support your infrastructure, or your business model is open source + support).
Guide to the Largest Ocean Carriers in the World
> GitHub returns 404 instead of 403 to prevent these information leaks.

This behavior is explicitly permitted by the standard, FWIW: An origin server that wishes to "hide" the current existence of a forbidden target resource MAY instead respond with a status code of 404 (Not Found).

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7231#section-6.5.3
The web needs fewer people using "vitriol" to refer to any kind of criticism.
The problem with DNA 'source code' is not that it's hard to read, it's that we don't fully know how to read it. Yes, we know what protein sequence comes out but the chemical consequences are not particularly well known. With google's source code, you could, in theory, look at it long enough and have a working understanding down to the level of electrons moving around specific spots in the chips in the Google datacenter.

As a professional (wet) biochemist and also a coder, my personal feeling is that biology is much, much shallower. However, the knowledge required is broader but incomplete. If you're trying to, say optimize an enzyme, beyond molecular biology, you'd do well to incorporate knowledge from biochemistry (is this an active site amino acid? Maybe I shouldn't touch it. What sort of yield changes can I expect if this enzyme catalyzes the rate-determining step vs. not), cell biology (will adding this amino acid sequence send it to the wrong compartment?), biophysics (will changing this residue mess up the protein fold?), electrochemistry (is the electrical potential of this iron-sulfur cluster consistent with the process I want?) etc etc.

A lot of 'biohackers' are script kiddies that just ctrl-c/ctrl-v gene sequences and hope that it works. That's why you see a lot of gene synthesis companies claim a offer of "codon optimizing" a gene. It's something that sounds hard, sounds critical, and gets something done. The rest of it is much, much harder, and requires actual thought.