skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> A lot of innovation has been spurred from people's passions and their hobbies, but much more innovation has taken place as a result of people trying to make a quick easy buck.

I'm not sure I believe that, but I do believe a lot more pointless/useless/malicious garbage has been produced by people trying to make a quick easy buck than people motivated by their passion or hobby.

> Everything from your favorite news website to your favorite android app wouldn't exist (or likely wouldn't exist) if not for ads.

If making money from ads is the primary motivation for a site or app, then it shouldn't exist.

If they need to make money to survive they should charge people directly and honestly, rather than cynically whoring eyeballs to the highest bidder; if it's something genuinely worth paying for, people will pay.
I imply that the marketplace will never allow you to charge money for something which can be given for free and monetized with ads.
By 2035 anyone that is not OK with the AI running things I am sure will be sent to a reeducation camp, or killed.... so it is all good.
Adi Shamir: SHA-1 collision in next few months
If not consumption as the final purchase of goods and services by individuals is the goal (not a mean), then what is the goal?

Since the system is made of people producing goods and services for other people to enjoy (consume) what is the problem with feeding the system itself?

Absolutely, some sorts of production are destructive in excess of the consumption value of the goods produced, but most certainly aren't, so I don't see how that indictes the system as a whole.
Hardware is limited by resources, which are neither limitless or instantaneous. That said, I agree the cost of war will rapidly increase, as will the desire to control resources; China already sees this, though they're not good at fighting economic wars.
I think Google's "pay not to get ads" service is a good first step. Handling contnet at the ad-server level makes a ton of sense, given that they are already in the business of maximizing CPC/CPM. If users could "bid" on NOT seeing an ad against an advertiser bidding to show you an ad, you disrupt the content creators as little as possible.

Average CPM on a banner ad is $2.80. Let's say you can replace the four most obtrusive banners on pages by out bidding advertisers at a $3.00 CPM. Each pageview then costs you 1.2 pennies.

Of course, CPM's are going to vary wildly depending on the site, but the ad networks can determine this stuff easily enough and you could set your own CPM threshold.

A bidding war could be a scary scenario, but ultimately advertisers will be battling ROI as well and likely lose in the face of new competition.
I've struggled with this myself. A while back, due to linkage from here and other sites, I had used up my free allotment of free nytimes stories and thought, "hey, let me see if I can pay a bit to raise the limit, because I'm willing to pay a bit for journalism." So I checked out their subscription plans and could find nothing even remotely close to worthwhile for me.

There were disconnects between how they viewed subscriptions vs. what I wanted:

* They offered access to all of their content for a price that would have been fair if I would be reading some significant fraction of it. But I wanted to raise my cap from X stories/month to 2X stories per month and have it cost something reasonable. Or something close, like 5X stories. They need to get over the idea that the way people read news today is by going to a single site and reading through a fair amount of it, like people used to do with a physical newspaper.

* The subscriptions were for what I'd call "odd" time periods like 6 weeks. WAT. Why not 5 or 7 weeks, or multiples of 10 days? What happens when my 6 weeks is up? I start getting renewal emails? Quit messing around and quote a recurring monthly rate with discount for longer commitments.

Anyway, I went there intending to give them some money even though I only occasionally go over the free limit, and left without signing up, slightly bewildered.
Yes I do. It's oversimplified scenario to drive home the principle.

Money and perceived threat are big factors in the equation. But anyhow there is currently a limit on how much money you can throw at a Field army until you hit deeply diminishing returns. And numbers of enlisted limit how many field armies you can field. Robotics can push this limitation way further.
It's easy to charge 5 cents to read an article using Bitcoin. With processing fees, this isn't super easy using credit cards.
> I moved from the northern US to the south and I'm fairly certain driver education and lower quality of people in general plays a role.

Ya I hear you, I moved south and the low education and low quality of character definitely got to me.

Of course I moved south from Canada into the US, so all of you Americans are garbage to me.
These articles are really getting tired. What people seem to continously miss is that there is no objective "quality" standard. Value to YOU is not the same as to someone else. While we can all subjectively say stuff like celebrity news isnt as important as the latest scientific breakthrough, people are free to, and will, read whatever they want to read - and it's their actions that determines what content holds value to them.

Now, regardless of quality, all that content does cost money to create and advertising is a great system to subsidize those costs. It's fast, passive, egalitarian, and efficient compared to any form of direct payment (where funds are transferred directly from you to the site). Giving the reader the choice is of course the best option, but short of that, it's far better to have ads then closed access.

The problem today isn't advertising the system but rather the implementation - it's the low barriers to entry, weak standards, lack of regulation or any enforcement and misaligned incentives that has caused this massive proliferation of crappy ad networks with bad code, scammy ads, malware and fraud.

Acceptable ads is absolutely the right start, it just needs to be done by an industry group or even the FTC/government itself so that it holds some power. Not an adblocking company that is paid to whitelist because clearly this leads to a conflict of interest as can be seen in what is already let through. Combine real regulation with a vetted list of approved vendors who do the right thing that advertisers are only allowed to use and we can finally move on from this silly war between readers and ads.
This is a short-term issue, which is widely known; autonomous self-healing support and supportable units are a coming.
Ads have been funding content for centuries, and that includes newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. In most cases, people have never had to pay the full cost of producing the content they consume, which may well have resulted in them undervaluing content across the board.

When commercial content providers (newspapers, magazines, radio and TV etc) moved on to the web, they naturally brought their ad-funded business model along with them.
Scientists to drill at site of dinosaur-killing asteroid crater
I think arguing whether acceptable ads is an oxymoron is just about semantics. Is there a notion of acceptable spam? Selective consumption is a reaction to ubiquitous and obtrusive content. Ad companies have to come up with an adequate response, or face decreasing revenues, it is an evolutionary process and will correct itself.
I really liked the style of writing in this piece. The author certainly should consider writing a book. Reminds me of Malcolm Gladwell.
From my observations a major source of traffic clustering on 2 lane UK A and M roads is lorries overtaking each other. This seems to happen because some lorries drive at 50 mph and others at 60 mph. If all lorries were to drive at precisely the same speed they would rarely have cause to leave the slow lane and clustering of cars would be reduced.
I think it depends on whenever a person believes they have the right to control the machine(s) they own to behave in a way they like - even if this is about controlling of how third-party content is rendered - or not.

I do view ads as a part of the content. Whatever is served is the content. And I feel I'm fully entitled to control the UA that's rendering of any content (because it's my browser running on my machine). I make the tiny fonts larger, disable videos auto-starting, use "reading mode" if I feel like I don't like the design or contrast, and I tell my browser to render only what I consider necessary (by filtering out ads, social share buttons or whatever I don't care about). When I feel like my eyes are stressed out and I'm file with hearing some monotonous voice, I even dare to use TTS to read the content aloud.

From this viewpoint, ads are not something special in this scenario. It just happens that I find them anything from just unnecessary to maliciously noisy - so I instruct my machine to not bother to process those. As far as I decide about my machine's resources, it's fair - that's the idea.

That said, if someone had lost^W not gained money because I didn't do something they expected me to do - as long as I haven't promised (or was otherwise required) to do so, that's usually not my problem. One might say I'm ethically obliged to watch any ads bundled, but as far as I see, the opinions on the matter vary and I conclude there isn't any established "common sense" on this subject.

And, well, if some website owner doesn't like that they absolutely can ignore my requests - it's not like I'm entitled for their content: I've asked if I could get one, and they gave me some. Heard, Wired does this (I don't read Wired).
I guess the reason Bitcoin is used is because the payments are to be decentralised and without opt-in from the site's that are getting paid. As opposed to services like Flattr that require signup from the site's before hand.
Coworking spaces are on the rise – here’s why
This may be because their livelihood depends upon their driving licence.
Yeah, good tip. I'm not allergic. But just to be on the safe side I better start doing this too every day. Just to make sure I stay that way.
Spotify isnt really making money. The other music services have all failed.

Netflix is the only streaming service seeing some success, and they don't own or produce most of their content or the delivery systems. If they did, their business wouldn't be viable either.
Interesting; any Haskell users comment on how portable code is between pure Haskell and Frege?
Look up the current fees for bitcoin transactions; they're more expensive. Also much slower.
This is exactly what OP is saying - if you find the ads unacceptable then don't consume the content. That's completely fair.
Mmmm nope. Not buying into it. Sorry.
The general assumption is that real money means subjecting your business to the percentages and per-transaction fees taken by banks and payment processing companies, making micropayments unprofitable.
The suppliers take a moral view that execution is wrong and decline to do business with the executioners. Executioners thus have to find alternative suppliers of the various drugs they need, which gets harder and harder in well regulated places like the US.
Yeah, I would more or less agree with "people in general don't want to pay for content that they can easily and legally get for free with non-obtrusive ads."
I have found the book "Game Engine Architecture" a really interesting read, and a seemingly good introduction to the required concepts: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1466560010
Wat? There are plenty of civil servants on 40k, 60k, even 100k. People running large cities like Manchester are well into 200k and they are definitely not on first-name terms with the PM (although they do hang around in ministerial circles). MPs get less because they are lightning rods, which is a paradox but there you go. They are the exception, not the rule.

If you think programmers doing actual work in all sorts of businesses bring less value than bureaucrats hiding in quangos, I don't think we'll ever be on the same page.
The premise of a Western justice system revolves around protecting society by deterring crime, or punishing bad people, or rehabilitating bad people so that they will not commit more crimes. If someone didn't have an criminal intent to begin with, though, then they cannot be deterred by the law, they're not bad people, and they don't need rehabilitation.

Your proposal is a pragmatic way of making it easier to convict people you're unwilling to presume innocent - which is why you identify "banksters" as your preferred bad guys, where you can presume guilt.
Not buying what? I'm not selling anything. It would help if you had some objections that you could list.
> You can use these techniques to create a virtual version of an old operating system so that you can keep using some specific software, or for a more private online environment.

If kernel version is not in the way...:

For command line software, I find it much easier and faster to do debootstrap and chroot with simple script that can call particular sandboxed command and return resulted output, like for exemple publican for fop based PDF conversion from docbook.

I do the same for wine based games for the kids, like WOT.

It has instant start, then during exit, I clean up and umount all the /proc , /dev /sys...
Google exploited lack of regulation to become a media company
It doesn't. Does it need to?

I think it's up to the user to avoid click-bait. Possibly, knowing that they're directly (or very nearly directly) paying for visits will make some users think twice before following a click-baity link.

But TBH, I'm not convinced people in general hate click-bait as much as people on HN seem to. People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.
The very first words of the sixth amendment limit it to "criminal prosecutions." Deportation proceedings are not criminal prosecutions.
I agree with you. I enjoy straight espresso and good black coffee. If I want to 'sweeten' it I add some milk. When getting coffee at shops I have mistakenly received one of those super sweet caramel, sugar whatever they are called and almost had to spit out the sip.

I wonder if it is learned or if people who like sweets have different taste buds than those who do not. I also like really hoppy beer and bitter candy.
Original poster here. Those links are from last year, before the crisis started. Now situation is very different.

Anyway, I am not going to argue here, too many down votes. My point is irrelevant, I just live in Piraeus and my relatives work with refugees.
Rare Comedy Sketch Stars David Gilmour, Lemmy, Mark Knopfler and Gary Moore
I guess it's not a counter argument as much as disagreeing with the premise. If the outcome is good (a wide range of products available to the poor) then why declare the mechanism by which it happens (exchange of money) problematic? At least, let's focus on concrete problems.

The problem with declaring something "far from perfect" is deciding what perfect looks like. The fact that even the poor has a Walmart-sized vote in what gets produced looks like a pretty strong vindication of the system to me. Sure, there are always areas that can be improved, I'm not declaring the current state of things perfect, but I'm appealing to a focus on specific, practical improvement, rather than a yearning for an abstract perfect state that epistemologically probably can't be known.
The set of people willing to pay for online content is tiny. Intersect that with the set of Bitcoin users and you're now targeting maybe twenty people, ten of whom are against SSO because it has the potential to track their access to multiple properties, and another five of whom require instant access but won't agree to significant transaction fees.

Maybe there's a hidden market waiting to be tapped, and I'll look like an idiot when BitPass™ reaches a one billion valuation, but it looks to me like you have a good reason to wait instead of doing it yourself: it's real damn risky.
And when you click on the mini-player button at the lower right corner you get, you guessed it, a mini-player.
I am Completely Confused by the Cacophonous Cascade of Cryptic Cant and Catchphrases in this Comment.
I think this all boils down to whenever there's an implied contract between consumer and producer, that requires the former to consume the content exactly in a way producer had decided it should be consumed (i.e. with any ads bundled, kept intact - but not limited to this).

If you gave me a journal, can you expect me to read it in full? If you had sent me a video, can you expect me to watch it without skipping anything? If you had served me a webpage, can you expect me to render it as you expect it to be rendered?
I think to help decentralised it so that there is no "signing up" by any party involved.
> Racket (https://racket-lang.org/) comes with a GUI toolkit
> that was originally forked from wxWidgets.

The GUI was rewritten in 2005 and there are no signs of wxWidgets left (http://blog.racket-lang.org/2010/12/racket-version-5.html)

There are now native widgets on Windows, OS X, and, Linux.

> (Also, on my computer, at least, they don't quite cooperate
> with high DPI displays.)

There are support for high resolutions displays at least on OS X - maybe the situation is different on Linux?
The below is the projects own take on that question:

"Frege gives you the opportunity to use your skills on the JVM. Most idiomatic Haskell code will run in Frege unmodified or with only minimal, obvious adaptions. Even more important: you can bring your purely functional problem solution strategies to your Java projects."
Twin Towers
Because we are trying to have a rational discussion. And it's possible that "Nations act in their self interest" is often wrong, or is not well defined.

For example, if a Guatemalan dictator commits genocide against its own people and is benevolent to the United Fruit Company ... is that "Nation acting in its self interest"? It's not a clear cut question. Equally it's not clear that the behavior of corporations, dictators or governments regarding copyright at different times in history is simple "self interest".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1954_Guatemalan_coup_d'%C3%A9t...
An AI doesn't need to. An AI can wait, take the hit, then send in a fleet of tazer armed drones to subdue the guy, and another helicopter to extract him.
It was simplification. But yes, the real shit hits the fan when infantry can be replaced with robotics. See "combined arms approach".
Hmm, yes, that is true. But "science" doesn't pull explanations from the air (that would be religion or superstition, ya know).

Science first finds unlikely or unexpected correlations, unlikely or unexpected measurements, and seeks to understand from whence they came. Are they artifacts of the observation process? Tainting of the measurement process? Or spurious correlations, such as the one between height and spelling ability (both of which are strongly correlated with age, up to a certain point)?

This particular research announces an unexpected correlation and goes to pains to show that it is real, and not spurious. This is the observation phase, the oh, didn't expect that phase. Explanation will come later, likely after someone designs a more accurate and precise experiment to better correlate chocolate consumption and cognitive ability.
The reason here is Java EE and Oracle not doing much for it at the moment. Reza was the Java EE evangelist and a big proponent of the technology.

I can imagine his job being hard, still officially having to evangelise Java EE, while simultaneously knowing all his work is for nothing.

The problem is that it has been brewing for some time that Oracle is severely neglecting Java (EE). See

* http://www.infoworld.com/article/2987529/java/insider-oracle...
* https://jaxenter.com/oracle-and-javas-planned-obsolescence-1...

A little while earlier the Java SE evangelists had been let go:

* http://fortune.com/2015/09/07/oracle-cuts-java-execs
* http://www.infoworld.com/article/2980686/java/sources-oracle...

But, the infoworld articles mentioned unnamed former Oracle employees. And people brushed them off as being FUD spread by Pivotal (the Spring company, Java EE's major competitor).

But now we have for the first time I belief an actual name of an actual Oracle employee, and also not just any employee. He may not be as direct about it as we all wish, but IMHO it gives much credibility to the previous reports.

If you're interested in the topic, look at the various Java EE mailing lists, and look in the repositories for the implementation code. You'll see there's plenty of evidence of Oracle suddenly doing very little for Java EE:

* https://github.com/spericas/ozark/graphs/contributors
* https://github.com/javaserverfaces/mojarra/graphs/contributo...
* https://twitter.com/jms_spec/status/689762921988132864
* https://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/ec-public/materia...

And then look at the GlassFish 5 (Java EE 8 RI) builds, an automated zombie process with not a single Java EE 8 commit yet, and frankly almost none commits at all (see changes file for every build):

* http://download.oracle.com/glassfish/5.0/nightly/index.html

The story is the same for no matter what Java EE list or repo you look at, with the exception of CDI which is lead by Red Hat.
The same applies if you were sued in a civil matter. You won't get appointed an attorney, you either hire one or represent yourself.
Bitcoin? Uh, no thanks.

Just need a way of putting a little real money into some service, and then painlessly transferring a little of it into sites when they ask for it (and I want to pay it). "This page costs x" or "stream y minutes of video for x" or "24 hour access to this site for x" etc.

Sometimes the solution is out there but it's not been made simple enough or is not adopted by enough high profile sites or whatever. There's flattr, a popular one, apparently, although I've never actually seen it used in the wild. You'd need a paywall but where the wall is only a few pennies or a fraction of a penny high. My objection to a paywall is not the need to pay, but the need to sign up for a site ("great, another site i have to trust with my credit card details") and the high cost ("you want £20 now for a months access? I only want to read 1 article"). You'd not buy anything in a real shop if you had to pay up front, in each shop, separately, before you'd even decided you wanted anything from that shop.
That isn't true. The sixth amendment relates to criminal law and not civil proceedings. The Constitution applies to everyone in the United States. Plenty of cases of illegal aliens have been thrown out due to Miranda violations, etc but a deportation hearing is civil.
The general solution to this is that you buy credit in a single service and then it allocates that credit around. At the end of a billing period, that service converts credit to dollars for the content producers.
Micropayments have been the obvious - to me - solution for this problem since I got on the internet in 1997. Still never seen it employed anywhere. Yes, heard of flattr. Never seen a single site that uses it.
"We know this from explicit records, with Lilly Ledbetter being one example."

I'm not tremendously familiar with this case, but according to the gods of wikipedia, the evidence for discrimination consisted of nothing but evidence of difference.

Same old same old.
> Subscription models just don't work. Nuff said, really. There's 10+ years of data to back it up.

The subscription model has worked for 20 years in the adult industry, even though free online porn has existed since the invention of the GIF.
So then we have Haskell with Clojure.
I can't help but notice that the only news about Bitcoin that ever enter HN front page are some sort of drama, or "issue with bitcoin". There are a lot of truly great things going on in the space, yet these are carefully kept off the mainstream news outlets and even HN.