skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your sentiments about advertising. I haven't had a TV in my house for five years, mainly for that reason. When I go to my parents' house and watch TV ads there, I find them ridiculous and wonder how anyone could take them seriously. Then I realize that most people watching them don't even notice, so their brains must be somehow conditioned by watching them. That's the part that disturbs me the most.

I don't agree with everything in your blog post, though it was an interesting read, thank you. Specifically, I don't run an adblocker, but for most sites I don't seem to even notice the ads. I'm not sure if that's because I'm conditioned to see them as normal, or because I'm just not seeing them. I would hazard a guess that their impact is much less than TV ads though.

Regardless, I do sympathize with people who run websites that offer useful information or services, but don't have a viable revenue model that doesn't involve ads. I get a lot of value from these sorts of sites (for instance, the sites of open source software projects), but there are too many of them for me to want to pay a subscription to all of them. (Perhaps there's an opportunity there?) However, most of these sites that I get the most value out of are not about screwing money out of people, just paying for their hosting costs.

To compare this with TV, I generally don't want what's on TV, even if I can download it for free, but I do want the content on many of the sites supported by advertising. For the moment, I see it as a fair trade.

EDIT: Clarify last sentence of third paragraph.
Even if you were right (and I have no idea if you are), this is a pretty poisonous form of ad hominem. Is a few too many people upvoting her posts such a bad thing that it justifies making a comment like this in order to correct it?
If you don't feel like living in "the pit," you could just get a full time job that isn't all-consuming. Working an hour or two a night, finishing a first draft of a book only takes a few months. You should then end up spending six months to a year or more revising, especially if you're waiting for readers to get back to you.

For most people the challenge isn't money or time, it's sticking with the project for the year (sometimes several) it takes to produce a manuscript worth submitting.
Hey, at least you had a method. That's more strategy than I put into most of my college papers:-)
There seem to be two schools of business; one that tries to beat customers over the head with things, and one that tries to respect the customer as much as possible.

Historically, most web ads seem to have the first view. "Why, of course! All I have to do is treat the visitor like crap: store 75 cookies, throw up new windows, flash some animations, play loud noises, and trick them into clicking on things. Then they'll surely want to shell out cash for my products!"

The problem is, after seeing a few of these, I'm not going to spend time weeding out the good from the bad: it's like junk mail, after awhile it's just thrown away, and it doesn't even matter anymore if there might be a hidden gem.

I can only assume that a scam is being pulled: that there are ad managers who create annoying systems to meet artificial quotas, and then show their employers how many "millions of clicks or page views" they received. That way, they can demand huge sums of money for all the "exposure"; in reality, I'd be surprised if the ads do much good. If a site is "dying", it's not because visitors block ads, it's because companies are falling for the scam and paying advertisers who are essentially being offensive and misleading about their numbers.

Here are examples of effective ads:

- Hulu, because they made reasonable compromises to respect visitors. For example, they have far fewer commercials than an equivalent TV show, and an ad is often displayed "up front" to minimize interruptions later.

- Google, because they make plain text ads that stay out of the way. Not irritating? Good, now I'll actually read it.
the people who block ads are never going to click on them anyway, so it's a moot point. it isn't ad blocking that is devastating sites, it's ineffective advertising.
First I've heard of etacts. Aside form their actual product, I'm more interested in them as a Ycombinator company, because I can't imagine what the growth/exit strategy for this type of company is. It seems to me that YC is looking for smart people that can crunch a bunch of data. In that sense, they are competing directly with hedge funds for talent.

So if you're smart, know some stats, and crunch a bunch of data for a few years, I'll bet you can then turn your collective brain power and IP and any problem you choose.
> Google does well because the ads shown on search bring forth some form of utility.

As far as my personal experience goes, I can't remember a time I encountered a Google ad that was useful for me, unless I was searching for "Amazon.com" and Amazon.com shows up in the sponsored links.

But to answer your question, ads can not suck by simply being perfectly targeted. Even though perfect is impossible, that should be the goal of all advertisers nonetheless. Get as much info about people, and send them only ads you know will be useful. Advertiser wins because they got the word out about their great thing, consumer wins because they got a great thing. The only thing this ideal wouldn't help is a shitty product. Shitty products aren't great, so if they get undeserved attention, they just screw over more people.
JavaScript Modules, Proxies, and Ephemeron Tables, Oh My‼
I'd narrow it down a bit—live in a cheap part of Brooklyn so you can actually meet your agent face to face because they almost invariably live in Manhattan. Even better, live in an artist warehouse in Bushwick so you have other people around to inspire you. Then again, it's all about what works for you.
Your post is the weaker for its grammar and spelling errors. You would do well to fix them, because people notice.
You don't have to say "I second this," even without voting.

If someone says something you like and agree with: congratulations, you have found a kindred soul, enjoy this moment of warmth in an otherwise dark and unforgiving universe. If someone says something you dislike or disagree with: if it's not worth posting a rationally and carefully written rebuttal to the post in question then it's probably not worth your time or effort, the internet is full of people who are wrong.

In general that tiny number next to posts is more an indication of things other than the quality of the ideas expressed in posts. In fact, I'd say they're not well coupled. Usually, it's more correlated with political alignments or writing quality.
everything new is old again. great read, for those of us with a libertarian persuasion mises.org has a ton of really fantastic articles.
On the "single wisest" line:

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”

I wholly disagree, given the ridiculously-simple debugging tools we've got like GDB, and what's in Eclipse and Visual Studio. Certainly, some things are harder to debug (intermittent errors, multiple threads / processes & their problems, etc), but more careful programming around those areas is a good idea anyway. And if you're over-stretching what you know, it could be that the problem is harder than you think it is, not just that it's hard to debug.

It's also that many people spend years learning to program, but far far less learning to debug (if any at all. print statements, anyone?). If that's not a hint at difficulty, what is?

The rest of the suggestions are overall very spot-on, though, and if nothing else are excellent advice for almost any programmer (as so many violate so many of these).
You know how easy it is to install and use Adblock for Firefox? That's how easy it would be for most people to use the anti-anti-Adblock extension that someone would write within a week.
Am I screwing PBS if I watch one of their programs and don't give a donation?
I found it about three weeks ago (after some other blogger convinced me it was worth reading) for less than $5.00 at Amazon.com. So I would say give it a little time and you should be able to find a cheaper copy.
While I agree with the spirit of the statement, honestly, I'd rather hire the guy I was able to lure with the company culture than the guy I was able to lure with money.
At my university (Carnegie Mellon) the buildings are unlocked during the day. Just walk in.
I think it comes down to specialized, targeted advertising outlets. A perfect example is what FusionAds is to the developer community. I enjoy clicking those ads (although I think they should allow more websites to display the ads).
You know, I'd like to not block adds. I really don't want to. But some sites make me.

I didn't block them until a few months a go. But there were some adds that were just so obnoxious. The worst were these ones that played really loud sounds -- they made me keep my speakers mute, because I didn't want my computer to spontaneously start playing music and wake people up.

One day I was just utterly fed up. I went to Mozilla's site, downloaded an add-blocker, set it to the default settings, and voila! Everything was much nicer.

I'm going to reinstall my OS soon -- I find using apt-get to upgrade break things -- and I'll use the Internet without an add-blocker for a few days. If things are as bad as they were, I'll use one again. Maybe try and find a list that only blocks obnoxious adds, though.
Opera is the most popular browsing platform on mobile devices. That maybe one of the reasons.
I can't imagine what the growth/exit strategy for this type of company is

Here's a related puzzle for you. In 1975 a company appears whose product is a Basic interpreter for a cheap microcomputer used by hobbyists. What is their exit strategy?
Dan Ariely's take on the NY Times Pay Wall
Agreed. I'm just about to build an iPhone app and am bookmarking little snippets like this all over the web. She mentioned a couple of things I hadn't even thought about yet. I know that she's gotten crap in the past, but from what I've seen she is an entrepreneurial programmer who may not have the highest technical ability but makes up for it with her ability to communicate and with her contributions to a variety of projects.

The people who complained about this post making the front page because the author also happens to be a cute blonde (let's show some spine if we're going to insult somebody's intelligence, boys) just come off as bitter know-it-alls. Go get some sun.
People please, stop being so goddamn politically correct and admit that most white men just don't consider black women all that appealing.

I know I sure don't. Seriously, a black woman has to be Naomi Campbell to pique my interest, and even then she'd need to be.. less black. Halle Berry? -To use an annoying expression: "meh".

That's just how it is. This is not racism, we're just wired this way. It's lame to wax poetic about what could theoretically be "wrong" when we all know the deal.

White women are desired by men of all races, just like Asian women. Black women are mostly desired by black men.
In fact there is an entire sub-industry of behavioral targeting information brokers out there, reselling your history to ad networks who don't have enough data about you in their own logs.
Three Personality Traits of The Ideal Co-founder
Very relevant is the phenomenon of simultaneous invention (which if correct throws serious doubt on the usefulness of patents) discussed in a fascinating Gladwell piece about Intellectual Ventures Laboratories. I'm far from a fan of Gladwell, but this article is very interesting:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_...
This seems to imply that ads are not served only on the forums. i don't care about the forums. or rather, i want an ad free option on the entire content of the site, not a segment.
The solution to this is reserved seating theaters. There are a couple in my area, so my friends and I will reserve seats online a few days before and show up right when the movie "starts."
A friend and I developed a proof-of-concept system in 2006 to address this opportunity. The central concept was that publishers would receive offers via our advertising marketplace, and then use their own selection algorithm to select ads to display (publishers could choose to use our hosted selection tools, use our open-source selection algorithms, or build their own). This would allow the publisher to use any combination of factors, such as ad format and perceived relevance -- not just eCPM. It is a flexible system that give the publisher the final decision to display or veto an ad.

If anyone wants to read the whitepaper, feel free to send me an email. The truly adventurous can check out the patent application (#11948995).
Some good ideas here. One note - WooThemes is making money by being a host for theme makers. Big difference.
When was the last time animal crackers flashed an almost pornographic image at you while your boss or your kids were standing over your shoulder?

When was the last time animal crackers told your daughter she was fat, or wasn't wearing enough makeup, or wasn't dressing slutty enough?

When was the last time animal crackers tried to take advantage of a person who had financial problems, by trying to convince them that they needed another high-interest credit card, a floating-rate mortgage, or 'debt consolidation'?

Should I keep going?
How to convince any C developer to dump gcc and use clang
Personally I use ad-blockers because flash is broken and inevitably will break all modern-browsers at one point or another, especially newspaper sites that seem to think there's no such thing as too much flash.
No reason for the bit.ly link.
http://thirdyearmba.blogspot.com/2010/03/three-personality-t...
If by killer instinct you mean the value of focus then I agree. But I find most startups succeed more on their ability to negotiate win-win outcomes with partners, customers, suppliers and less on "winner take all" models.

Most markets look more like stag hunts where teams of cooperating players outperform "go it alone" firms. If a startup team sets high standards of excellence for performance that's great. But you face so many competitors, including the 'status quo' that a focus on "winning" leads to you to overlook opportunities especially in the early market. Take a look at Saras Sarasvathy's "What makes entrepreneurial" at http://www.effectuation.org/ftp/effectua.pdf in particular two excerpts:

"Expert entrepreneurs [...] are actually in the business of creating the future, which entails having to work together with a wide variety of people over long periods of time. [They fill their future] with enduring human relationships that outlive failures and create successes over time"

"This is largely ignored in our entrepreneurship curricula which tend to focus on market research, business planning, new venture financing and legal issues. As far as I know no entrepreneurship programs offer courses in creating and managing lasting relationships or stable stakeholder networks, nor on failure management."
Has there been an announcement on general availability of Gmail OAuth? Found the techcrunch article about an expected announcement, but no announcement as of yet.
Are you sure? On the same page, they say:

"Banner-free browsing on Ars Technica means no distractions, just content. Better yet, the ad-free pages are optimized so there are no "holes" where ads used to be. It's a tighter experience."
hi, is #2 taken?
More than a decade ago, I was good with debuggers. Today, I can't even use the relevant variants.

That is partly because I'm doing scripting languages these days (no memory overwrites, etc) and partly because I write my code so it'll be simple to debug.

IMHO, I'm more productive. And I'm happier, laziness is my favorite virtue.

Disclaimer: I'm doing too little web stuff, otherwise I'd probably be using Firebug etc all the time.

Edit: One thing from the book I really agree with, is "Parenthesize to avoid ambiguity."

I put a marker in my beloved C book ("C: A Reference Manual" by Harbinson and Steele) on the page with priorities for built in operators/functions. Much later, I removed the dog ear and decided: If I had to look up the parsing priorities for some built in functions, then I should use parentheses instead -- for the people reading (including myself).
There are Bootstrapper Breakfasts (http://www.bootstrappersbreakfast.com/ ) in Silicon Valley four times a month, and twice a month in San Francisco as well as monthly in Minneapolis and San Diego. I think the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem is richer and much more complex than the queue at Sand Hill Road. And that similar opportunities for serious conversation with other entrepreneurs exist in many cities around the world.
No ads anywhere on the site. It's fantastic. :)
tl;dr use geometry.
This isn't quite splitview, but you might find my Hacker News OnePage extension for chrome useful.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plldnnbdlbgbiknj...
It's impossible to make ads not suck. Fifty years ago, perhaps ads didn't always suck, before we had Metacritic and Amazon reviews and a million professional critics and reviewers writing online and social media telling you your friends' opinions about everything. All of those things are way more useful than an ad, no matter how well you target it. And soon, with augmented-reality stuff, they will be easier and easier to see whenever you are thinking about buying something.

With all that, what the hell is the point of ads? They're just wasting the time of the people producing and consuming them. They do nobody any good at all.
I started with gw-basic and remember thinking how awesome it was in qbasic that I didn't have to use line numbers.
It's a broader philosophical issue in the history of ideas, also: when should an inventor get credit for inventing something, and how much credit, and how do we know? Some inventions were truly amazing insights, where if the inventor hadn't come up with them, the world would probably have been without that invention for decades, if it ever got it. But many inventors essentially anticipate history by only a few months or even weeks: they get to an idea that, given progress on subsidiary technologies, was getting to the point where it was obvious to anyone in the field, but they get there just ever-so-slightly earlier than everyone else, so win the race, but don't really change history much as a result.
My first assumption would have been that there was some sort of algorithmic trick behind that, like what you see when you google names of famous people. But that does require a fair amount of sophistication to suspect that.

Googling my real name used to turn up a lot of text porn, written by someone using my real name as a pseudonym (I admit, "Rod Ramsey" is tempting for that purpose). I just lived with it, didn't see that it really hurt me in any way.
No, the advertisers in radio and tv are in the same boat as the stations themselves... no one really knows how many people really saw/heard an ad. They just both choose to trust a third party (neilson/arbitron) to give them the ratings. It just isn't possible to know for sure how many people saw an ad from a broadcast. Cable/sat and DVRs make it a bit easier, but only a bit.

On the web though, it's ridiculously easy to verify each request that there is no need for the trusted third party.
I almost agree with you about the speculative nature of CPM based ads, but there's value in running branding campaigns, particularly for the kinds of companies that advertise on our site (I work for Ars).

It's awfully hard to measure that value in any kind of meaningful way, but brand awareness is worth spending money on in many cases.
Microsoft shows off single game running on Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox
Part of being a C developer (or C++ template) developer is in fact understanding what the compiler spits out. So, this did't convine me enough because "two or more data types" made me skip right a head to the definition of Point. :-)

My point is Clang is good but friendly error messages is not the only reason I would change to Clang.
I actually wonder if they would do this. It's technically possible, but it is really a 'nuclear option' for a website.

Then again, Ars is one of the few sites that will actively ban your account if you use ad blocking. But so far, I think they've only removed accounts for comments/forums, not the whole shebang.
Pandora does a pretty good job of integrating ads into their site. Youtube had some nice ads (one for Wario game) that were disguised as regular videos, but ended up taking over the whole page. And CollegeHumor has done some similar things.

I think new media sites are getting better at this. And if the iPad (and the webapp-style magazines it was created for) ever takes off I think we'll see this sort of thing more.
His first language is obviously not English. For anyone whose first language is, I don't think it's that hard to get the message. Cut him some slack.
An even better reason to use clang: it supports Apple's new syntax for blocks. I'm trying to think of a new project to write in C now just to take advantage of the simple anonymous functions and closures that are possible.
The 2-Minute Opportunity Checklist for Entrepreneurs
What about voting/rating ads? I've seen it in a few places, and it seems so simple -- someone has to have information on how it worked out in practice.

I would expect that having an easy, obvious rating meter on each ad would work in two ways. First it could improve targeting by having the user reject ads on a case-by-case basis. Second, ads that get rejected by a wide range of user types can be determined to be bad in general (ugly, offensive, annoying) and thus removed from circulation, automatically.

Does anyone know why this isn't in place more? (Or perhaps I just haven't noticed it?)
What other verticals can you apply "thedeck" model to?
I have implemented a skip list library that stores all nodes of the same "level" together in the same file/memory map.

This fixes the cache locality problem.

Skip lists also lend themselves well to concurrent multi-threaded access, especially update and deletion.
How? Don't serve ads.

Frequently on HN we get a lot of people who are great at building stuff but fall when it comes to finding and growing a userbase.

We then have people that are great at developing a community, have a popular niche blog or forum, and are itching to monetize their community.

Serving ads to solve this problem is like strip-mining for gold - ridiculous sediment to gold ratio.

So what if we concentrated on the affiliate model. Rather than serving ads to your community, you vet actual products and services that your community would actually use and genuinely endorse the product openly. You could run a drop-in type of "marketplace page" for your endorsements. It would be clear to your community that you receive (large) commissions on these sales, but I reason happy users would want to help your site. I'm talking 50%+ commissions so you can easily profit share in terms of offering a better price than they'd pay going directly anyway.

For product and service providers, I can't see a downside. They pay only from actual sales. The product is seen in a positive light (endorsed) rather than overlooked as an ad. And product providers could/should work closely to community moderators to iterate on their product.

As of now this seems like wishful thinking I know, but this could definitely be worked out, and provided it was dead-easy to get started from both ends, it's worth testing.

Make dropping in an affiliate marketplace easy for content providers. And make revenue sharing, management, and tracking easy for product providers. Develop community around connecting the two in a vetted environment. Profit off transaction fees.
IBM's business relies on low-margin, hard to scale models like selling consulting hours or selling hardware.