skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Is there any argument against autonomous guns, other than that they might go wild and cause a lot of unexpected deaths?"

Yes, that a robot always obey orders. In my opinion that is the most dangerous thing about this issue.

Anyway, it's only a philosophic question because this is going to happen. "We" can talk about it, but "we" are not deciding anything.

"They can't both be right"

Not, but they can both be wrong, that is what normally happens.
There are lots of innovative and imaginative folks all over the world.

...and ads are still the best solution to certain problems.
-) Other users paying for the premium version

Or rephrasing it a little, in a way that explain why it makes sense to let you use the free version

-) The x% probability that a free user will create a paid user (either my becoming one or by referring other free users that become one)
Even static images can be an annoyance.

Just because i occasionally browse gaming news do not mean i want a face full of glowing eyes or rotting flesh wherever i go.
I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4/month for access. I decided it was time to start putting my money where my mouth is.

I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. Even the content traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it.

I've got £50/month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy/able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there's a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I'm hopeful that we're seeing the start of the return to journalism.
Yes, a mix of 2) and 7) sites being run by hobbyists (like blogs) or as side-activities (like HN).
If advertising magically disappeared tomorrow, someone would solve micro payments within a week, and we'd all have jobs again.
I think with computers we can make a system that makes it easy for website to charge a small fee (per article or per website) and that notifies/promts the user in a simple way with the cost.
It doesnt have to cost much, since advertisers are not paying big amounts per pageview either.
You can build a strong paywall, or you make it a gate where visitors can easily go through.
7) The site closes and we have one less click bait news blog in the world.
"Adblock" that doesn't block ads is like a bank that looses your money. A fraud, pure and simple, no way around it.
Indeed! This is probably why there are some personally invested negative responses to the idea of removing ads.

It's a basic protection of investment.

That, and most "techies" here are just working in traditional business fields, selling stuff, producing products, marketing things.
It's a personal choice just like everything in life. Sometimes the pain is too strong where the outcome will never improve but only get worse.

Just like people are allowed to choose or deny any religion or any other preference in life.
I just made an account to say this is utter BS. If someone provides a service that costs them money to run, they have the right to make money off of it. If you don't agree don't use their service. Whatever. Or block ads and donate to the service. Just don't be a freeloader.
I find Charlie Stross' take on this in Accelerando interesting...
My commute into work is usually 17 mins. Going home I take a different but sane return route that is predictable and has less traffic but takes 25 minutes. I use my commute time to catch up on tech news and security issues via podcasts. I find this time very valuable. My wife works maybe 6 miles further intown than I do and her commute is 35 minutes in the morning and with no sane return route tends to be 45 to 65 minutes long.

My commute is good for me. Her commute wears on her. She is not tech focused so she does not listen to podcasts.

I would love to walk to work or ride a bike. But with olders kids and school choices being a driving force for where we live that is not possible yet.

We craft our day around the commute. We are up at 4:30 and at the gym by 5:20. We strive for 5 days a week at the gym. We probably average more like 4.5.

With the early rise I have to be in bed by 9PM to 10PM most nights.

Gosh now I'm thinking when my youngest goes to college I move much closer to work. Maybe even rent and not buy since I have 4 more years before I retire.

I'm also lucky at work. I have an office with a door. Power naps most days keep me productive in the afternoon.
Those deals require business development / sales to happen, which requires time and/or money. Those are expenses that many sites can't afford. Slapping on SSP tags, on the other hand, is cheap and starts bringing in money right away.
I pay for a lot of content, but individual subscriptions doesn't scale. I have subscriptions to Stratfor, The Economist and NYT. Nothing else has enough for me to buy in bulk. I would probably pay for 538 too.

There are Wired articles I would pay to read, but I don't want the whole corpus.

Micro payments cannot come soon enough.
Im not sure why George Osborne is going to talk about self-driving trucks in the Budget speech... Is he dropping phat-stacks of the budget on this programme to make the two related somehow?
This. I'd take OP's link seriously if it said something like this.
Did they really earn $4 a month per user when they used ads? I guess they raised the price a lot because they realised they would lose lots of people. One way to lose lots of people is to immediatly start with a high price.
It's going to be hard to get people back once they left.
if this discussion makes people who work in jobs dependent on ads to reflect on their choices then so this goes the initial step towards a change, even if it's a change in career from digital marketing to a technology company.
It won't work. This is the internet, it's not some single country or smaller community you can just push a transaction system onto at this point. It really just doesn't make sense.
Stretchable Electronics
Most companies charge people money for goods or services they value and gladly pay for. For them ads are an adjunct to marketing, not a business model. Some other people host stuff for free, some sell content slots (like the job ads here on HN), some give content away to attract other business. That diversity is great, and none of it is threatened by ad blockers. There's more to the world than ads, a lot more.

In contrast the rise of ad companies like taboola is actively degrading content and experiences and debasing previously respected sites. If you insist on showing intrusive advertising, users will go elsewhere. The failure of that business model based on ads is simply not the reader's problem to solve.
> if you enter into such an agreement you are actively misleading the other party and they may very well have cause to sue you personally if your gamble does not pay off and this will likely stick

True, but not necessarily misleading. And of course you may be subjecting yourself to a lawsuit (also depends on the juridical safety of the location you're in)

Selling before buying is pretty common.
I think both views can be compatible.

One can support income inequality, while also supporting a safety net for everyone.

Actually, I think a universal income plus free healthcare is desirable. But I also think rewarding people with more income for their achievements is key to sustain progress.

Hawking is probably concerned because the UK is getting a bit too capitalistic, while ignoring that many decisions are suboptimal for most of its inhabitants. For example, the healthcare system is struggling to cope with more patients and an ever decreasing budget. A subpar transport network makes shipping and commuting inefficient and very contaminant. An artificial limit on housing pushes prices up and extracts rent from the majority to hand it in to the ruling class.
What Have the Core Bitcoin Devs Ever Done for Us? (2015)
Consumption is the final purchase of goods and services by individuals. What other direction or purpose ("fuel") should a system have?

A system that doesn't end in consumption either doesn't produce anything, or produces for no reason, which seems wasteful.
"If advertising would magically disappear tomorrow, most of the people visiting this site would be jobless" but really this is just a silly presumption with absolutely no evidence.
Quite, I didn't read properly. That's not a very reasonable statement.
I use Privacy Badger and AdBlock and NoScript. But I feel like my secret weapon is self-destructing cookies.
There are clearly serious problems with wealth and income distribution. However, the size of the pie and the distribution of it are different problems (although not independent).

It doesn't follow that by prohibiting technological progress things would be more equal. I'm not sure what the relationship is between income distribution and progress; I think there are probably arguments both ways.

For example, would income inequality be rising even if technological progress was not happening? Probably yes, from my reading of Pikkety. Those with capital would probably continue to accumulate more. But it would affect returns to capital so perhaps it's not so clear cut.

Is income inequality increasing as a result of technological progress? Maybe, I guess? I'd be quite interested to see some real evidence either way because I don't think the answer is intuitive either way.
Asking about technology in 2075 is ridiculous. If you had asked people in 1916 about 1975, nobody would have gotten anything right.
In my opinion we should be properly scared of both, capitalism and robots. We don't want any of them out of control.

But the argument here makes not sense.

If "machines produce everything we need" then, by definition, there is not human labour. Without labour, it doesn't makes sense call it capitalism. I don't know what it would be.
The curious case of Baatna
I'm not convinced that subscriptions per property is the correct model, there's room for innovation here.
This is ridiculous. I'll be first to admit a lot of the advertising models are broken, but there are acceptable ads. Many of the advertising structures on iOS, for example, work well. There are websites that do simple advertising, without trackers, like Daring Fireball that are more than acceptable.

Can we stop with the repetitive anti-advertising FUD, please?
6 Attention-Grabbing Direct Mail Designs
Perhaps you could start by citing that law that requires CEOs to ignore morality and ethics and prefer profit as the sole guiding principle?
Startups as we know them would collapse, yes. Look at how many of the top apps on iOS and Android rely on advertising -- hint: it's all of them
Unfortunately, this gist is based on the same fallacy that the one it opposes is based on: the idea that visiting sites and consuming their content is a primary need for visitors.

The so-called "other ways of funding" are paywalls. If every blog, YouTube videos, online newspaper, start-up, etc, were behind a paywall, people would just nope out because it wouldn't not worth it, at all. Disabling ads wouldn't result in other ways of funding, it would result in people not working on creating content because they wouldn't be able to make a business out of it.

On the other hand, and for the same reason, content creator shouldn't complain that people block their ads. We don't need to visit your site, we don't need your content, it's a bonus. We don't care whether you make money or not. You chose not to make a paywall (and that's probably a good idea since nobody would pay) and hand over your content for free bundled with ads. We can technically cut out the ads. If you don't want us to do so, make them so that their annoyance isn't worth the effort of cutting them out.
Consider theguardian.com, you can become a supporting member for €49/yr (probably $49 in the US), even though you can freely access the content without paying.
Advertisers are willing to pay more money for the right to put an ad on a webpage than website visitors are willing to pay to view the webpage.

Until that math changes, ads will prevail.
Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that, as the majority of 'content' is complete rubbish. The web used to be populated by hobbyists who made their own websites not expecting compensation, and they were generally high quality. Now it's ruled by clickbait and ad infested contentless garbage, I'm happy if it all dies.
Brilliant find.
There are acceptable ads. But has the internet's sites overall used best practices remotely? Nope. They've used auto-play video and audio, performance and bandwidth hogging schemes, even malware, and countless other things. The trust is lost.

I agree that this _is_ ridiculous. The fact some ads are OK doesn't mean the pool isn't poisoned and users are done with it.
I use uBlock origin and love it. But I have a mental conflict. I run 135+ university web sites (for one university) with no ads and no flash. But we do use google analytics and include some 3rd party fonts on specific sites. Many ad blockers block google analytics and some block the fonts.

I haven't started counting how many users are blocking google analytics. I'm less worried about the fonts because the designers have accounted for that and they downgrade to something that is acceptable (at least to me). We are seeing a decline in new users to our sites but college applications are up. I'd love to know if that decline is false and is just because google analytics is blocked.

I think it is time to put some code in and see what the real numbers are for ad blocking on our main site.
In that context you are right. But in the context of ordering a large shipment of goods that you have no ability to pay for gambling that you will have the money by the time the invoice is due is going to get you looked at in a different light. Depending on the magnitude of the transgression you could be looking at anything from an honest mistake all the way up to fraud and deception.

It's important to know where the distinction lies, and as a general rule you should not contract when you can expect that you will not be able to perform.

And by your example your expectation to perform hinges on your suppliers ability to deliver and all things being normal you are actually able to expect this. That's a 'chain' of liability that does not end with you.
Not just prefer, require!
The Guardian is still heavily dependent on advertising and turning more and more to shady native advertising deals. They took oil money for example at the same time as they were running a 'keep it in the ground' campaign. Media Lens have a good piece on The Guardian here: http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2016...
This is crazy - which is to say, if the quotes are reasonably accurate, I would literally doubt the sanity of the person who said them.

"I can teach a three-year-old immigration law sufficient to represent themselves in court" is about on the same level as "I can cure cancer by hopping on one foot and squinting real hard" or "the Earth is actually hollow and the inside is inhabited by escaped Nazis".
Acoustic homing torpedoes.
It would be interesting to have a convergence of apps, community, shopping, and content. A lot of niches benefit from all those things but are separated across different platforms. Packing that together could make the combination feel like a premium product and justify a monthly payment (or gift subscription). It also requires less effort from the user to discover the various elements.
Through mail, search, youtube, android they control a huge amount of traffic. They also have a clever bids system for ads which encourages people to spend lots and gives them enough tracking to let them feel it's worth it. Mostly it's just the traffic though.

It's at the opposite end of the spectrum from taboola say, and is probably the most acceptable form of advertising I've seen. So both customers and advertisers like it.
Yeah good point.

I'll be sure to write, "if only the person that stabbed me in this dark alley had the deterrent of possibly being convicted and executed maybe I would still be alive" in blood before I lose consciousness or run out of blood.
I know the domain is shared with ycombinator, but this really is just a general tech forum, right? Slashdot for grown ups if you want.
Agreed. Never bought the argument from the NetBeans guys.
FWIW he doesn't claim you're American, he claims Americans do something and then claims that thing is also done in the OP.

Your response is gracious nonetheless. Some people really like longform writing though, the more meandering and reflective the better. Each has its place IMO.
I don't know of a single responsible bitcoin developer that wouldn't prefer using soft-forks to hard-forks. Bitcoin has had hard-forks in the past, but they have been done in response to a specific issue, and were done very quickly. What's most important, everyone agreed that the hard-fork had to be done.

The current attempt by Coinbase to force a contentious hard-fork is dangerous. There are many people that even question its requirement, let alone whether it can be done safely.

I'm not saying it's not going to happen, but it isn't going to be done quickly, and if it is finally going to happen, it'll be managed by the core developers.
> If ad blocking continues to grow, which we hope it will, other ways of funding will be found.

This is one of those ways, so not sure why you think our piece shouldn't be taken seriously.
I agree

Monetization of content is a business opportunity waiting to happen. Something like a network where you put, I dunno $10 per month and every article you read is charged for $0.10, as an example. Or unlimited during the month for $1

If news sites can allow us to Tweet or Fb an article it might be possible to 'coin' an article as well in a seamless manner
Both of them are opt-in.
7) you doing an MTurk-like task for every site you visit once per day (or per 6h), with an option to bypass by paying a subscription. Payment for the task goes to the site. Cloudflare already has the necessary infrastructure (requires Tor users to do Captchas, for example)...
There was so little high quality, original content even in the old days. It was mostly opinions, simplifications of scientific papers, excerpts from press releases and press conferences, or something someone (usually not a journalist) caught on camera.

With the communications technology we have now, it's hard for anyone to add significant value in the middle between the source of the news (scientists, inventors, politicians, entertainers, witnesses, etc.) and the public.

For example, 25 years ago the media spent a lot of airtime and ink on the beating of Rodney King, and indeed we only heard about it thanks to the media. Now, we can watch similar videos on YouTube, read court documents and the police departments' press releases directly, and hear thousands of diverse opinions on social media. That role of the old media is obsolete.

But I'd still pay for accurate, unbiased investigative journalism.
Hawkings doesn't use big words, but in the end, it does amount to "we should be afraid of Capitalism, not Robots".

What do you think "the machine-owners […] lobby against wealth redistribution" means? Machine owners are obviously the capitalists, who own the means of production. And they do currently lobby against wealth redistribution. It's only natural: they have wealth and power, they intend to keep it.

Linkbait, sure. But I don't see any misrepresentation of Hawkins' words here.

(Edit: Of course, I'm not talking about strong AI here, which is obviously much more dangerous if realised. I'm imagining dumb stuff like the Star Trek replicator.)
You are right, and it appears that even reading is hard ;)
Indeed, using an ad blocker isnt new either. Most people always channel-surfed or muted the car radio or TV when ads come on. The only difference now is that advertisers can tell you didn't see their ad.
On the topic about scaling, I'd give serious thought to a "Spotify model" for it if there was such a service that included enough sites.
Number ② might actually be feasible if micro payments can be implemented in a sensible manner. That is something I would like to see, but it seems hard to get right.

An option missing from your list is sites providing free access to the first few articles in order to generate interest in their paid offerings. Newspapers sometimes do this; on their own sites and at aggregate services providing paid access to the articles from several newspapers and magazines.
Could we move beyond adblocking and start blocking such sites directly? I don't want to even visit websites that only grab content from other sites. From bots making nonsense pages for getting in your search results to news sites grabbing a story from another news site and rewriting. I've seen plenty of sites that just copy Wikipedia or StackOverflow content to show it with ads and with no added value on top.
This isn't about DNA analysis, it is about staring through a microscope, comparing hairs. Quote:

"At trial, the prosecution relied on the testimony of the three informants as well as the testimony of Elinos Whitlock III, an employee of the Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department Crime Lab who had been trained by the FBI in how to conduct microscopic hair analysis. He claimed that he could make a “strong identification” that a hair recovered the crime scene was Bridges’s hair. He further stated that there was only a 1 in 1000 chance that two Caucasian people (Bridges is white) would have indistinguishable head hair."
I've ridden this - I now know why. The infrastructure required to elevate a hanging rail is immense. In Wuppertal they get away with it with large portions of the track hanging over the local river. Wuppertal doesn't seem to want to give their Schwebebahn up: they are replacing the existing cars soon.
SIM swap fraud cases force bank to improve security
I don’t have a problem with ads per se. I have a problem with profiling. Besides been scary, I also find it annoying. If I’m visiting a site about video games I’d rather see related ads, not an ad about a product I happened to search a couple of days ago. Just because I searched for shoes doesn’t mean it’s the only product I’m interested in. I also have a problem with web pages that load half a dozen ads that eat too much space and make readability a pain in the behind.

I’m not naïve to expect that a $50bn industry will just disappear. What I’d like to disappear though is the gazillion of sites that steal content from major venues and monetize through AdSense. Which begs the question why Google accepts them in the first place. In the long term I don’t think there will be tectonic changes in the adverting industry. If publishers start serving ads from their own domains the whole ad blocking thing will become obsolete, or we’ll have to think of more aggressive ways to block ads. I would though like to see some adoption of micropayments. For the time being no publisher seems to be heading that way, they all ask for ridiculous subscriptions of something like $1/week which if you read a couple of articles per month becomes too expensive.

The other thing that I also don’t like and I rarely see it mentioned, is affiliate marketing. I wonder if there’s a plugin to render affiliate links obsolete by stripping away the referrer part. I don’t like when sites become salesmen because it gives me the impression that the whole purpose of the content was to promote a product.
Parse dashboard opensourced
M-x tabbar-mode
Though having them to the echo area means more vertical space. Nevertheless, both are good for new users but not needed after a while. On the interface you're supposed to have only what you need at the moment.