skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Human survival and wealth depend on voluntary production and trade. That is already baked into the evolutionary cake. If human behavior ever became "all about screwing over" other people, initiating force, and taking property without consent, then the human race would die out. Of course, a small portion of humans can and do live that way, but that is an aberration. If it ever becomes the norm, misery, illness, poverty, and death will prevail.

[Ed. note: As expected, "red in tooth and claw" is voted up, and "people need to cooperate" is voted down. If that's karma then I'll have no part of it.]
That's like wishing for all cars to be as good as Porsches. While I share your sentiment, The Deck is high-end advertising for a small batch of high-end advertisers.. people won't/can't/don't want to pay those rates everywhere.
I think http://www.crikey.com.au/ fulfils your criteria
Not yet, waiting on Chicago chapter to get formed
That's kind of sick. (And I mean sick as in bad)
The alternative will be payola. Paid content. If advertising fails as a revenue method, why not sell mentions in the actual content? Why not write articles for pay? It'll happen. I bet it's already happening and in the best cases we can't even suspect a thing..
I have no problem with a site denying content to people using ad-blockers. That's their right. If ad-viewing is mandatory to view their content, I'll abide (by not going back, or paying real money if I think it's worth it). If it's not mandatory, why should I abide?

I have no problem with sites that have subscription models. I have no problem with sites making money.
A lot of the ads I see that "suck" are for scam. Most, if not all of those ads are driven by rebills. If we can get rid of rebills, we can get rid of a lot of the crap ads.
I'm personally fine with most ads, even the irrelevant ones. What I don't like are the animated banners, and especially Flash monstrosities that pop up over the page you are trying to read and start making terrible sounds. They are the minority, but they are the reason I run AdBlock.

I put sites I like (and that have tasteful ads) in the AdBlock whitelist. I really wish there was a way to only block the annoying ads. Sounds like an idea for an AdBlock subscription list actually.
http://reddit.com/r/ads is great for this
Hey Jacques.

I think it was Patrick that first suggested that ads in fact function as a micropayments service.

This was thought of independently. But if Patrick is thinking the same way I'm even more convinced it's a good idea :D

> I don't think it will fly, people that go for freebies are not going to be turned in to people that pay.

The thing that sparked this thought is that a lot of people here defending the ad blocking practice (me included to an extent) claim they would happily pay for content they enjoy - just dont like to be intruded with ads.

I realise that it is most probably an excuse in many cases and they wouldn't follow through. But would enough do so to make it worthwhile?

As I said: as your not monetizing those readers anyway is it not a net positive to give them the option?
Does NaCl enable languages like OCaml to be used instead of JavaScript to manipulate HTML pages? Or is it like Silverlight, which has its own non-HTML UI widget library and runs within the browser?

You can do it either way. Most of the demos draw the UI in NaCl itself (Flash/Silverlight style).
We should be able to tag ourselves within our browsers.

When I install FF, I should be asked what applies to me (tech, baseball, family) and then all advertising can look to this public info first and display what's relevant only.

THIS should replace ad-blockers. Then we don't have to destroy our favorite sites' revenues and I don't have to see any prescription medicine ads.

And get rid of ads I have to "skip", ads that "pop-under", and ads that cover what I'm supposed to be reading.
Sorry, I don't buy it. Advertisers do not expect to get a purchase for every view, they're just trying to get your attention so they can pitch you their business idea. If they're able to get you to listen, and you think that the advertiser's service adds value to your life, you might pay for it. If not, your lack of a purchase is a statement to the business that, yes, you understand their service, but it's not helpful to you. If everyone does this, the advertiser's business model probably isn't very good, just like a brick-and-mortar store that lots of people walk through without buying anything. This is the way business works, if you can't get a profitable number of people interested enough to spend money, your business fails.

OTOH, every time you load an Ars page without loading the ad, you cost them money and deny them revenue. This time, Ars is the business, and you're confirming that their service provides value in your life, but you're refusing to pay the cost that goes along with this benefit: allowing an ad to load. It's definitely not stealing, but it doesn't seem that far off to me. Comparing this to "hurting" businesses by just not being interested in the product they provide seems ludicrous.
considering cheap Android apps, that is cheap as in 2 week dev time, are easy to do..that may be an option to consider.. or as someone else has suggested take a well known CMS and start developing themes to sell for it..
Bring down the editorial/advertising wall. Seems to happen a lot online but I think it's going to explode even in the established media once the efficacy of advertising tumbles. More payola, more "product placement", more links within the actual content to advertisers..

Industries tends to find a way to win (or at least fight hard). Our content is going to get a lot worse rather than the advertising better, IMHO.
If it doesn't work out, I already have a place picked out on AirBnB. I'd just like to hang out with a HN reader if possible.
It's true. Googlers openly use competitors' products and services when they are perceived to be better. There are lots of Flickr users at Google, for example. Googlers choose iPhones and blackberries if they want. They use PayPal. They would riot if google tried to give itself an artificial advantage or sabatoge a competitor. Competitors are embraced.
I wish this were possible everywhere. Most of my final exams were worth somewhere between 30-50%. Taking this will only guarantee a maximum of failing the class.
Would anyone like to sponsor me to write an updated version of this book?
The CSM is a really interesting case, as they did seem to transition from old media to new. But, after looking around their site for a minute, I noticed this subscriptions section that offers a weekly print edition. I wonder how much they make off of that - http://www.csmonitor.com/About/Subscriptions

Relatedly, Politico, a US politics site, makes a lot of money from its print edition - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politico#Distribution_and_conte...
I am emotional about advertising in general, not those ads in particular. I am not frothing at the mouth over a single ad, no.

Are you OK with a bunch of marketing guys sitting in an office thinking "How can we manipulate people's sex drives to maximize profit this week?" Razor commercials: Hunky guy shaves; heavily-airbrushed, scantily-clad woman looks on longingly. Implication: Buy our razors, get laid. Flashing lights and "power words". Repeat over and over until you can't forget it. What's the difference between commercials and any other form of propaganda? Commercials are more mundane, but use the same principles.

Sorry, but I feel mildly insulted by this. I feel like I'm being treated like an animal. After the ten thousandth attempt to have such a thing drilled into my brain, I start to become annoyed. I'm amazed so many people happily imbibe and internalize these things without any complaint.
So, everytime you read a blogpost from start to end, you should send the blog writer some compensation since he had ads and blocked them screwing him out of the money he thought he was making from you reading the article.
Except if you follow this guy's suggestion, you now need your own sales team to sell ads for your site rather than relying on Google's/Doubleclick's/etc. And to pay for that sales team? You need to sell more and higher paying ads.. :-)

People outsource their ad sales to Google, Doubleclick and similar providers not because they can't rig up systems to audit and provide metrics, but because they can't actually sell the ad space themselves.. (it's the "outsource what you suck at" thing)
You know what I find annoying? All those Netflix ads when I already am a subscriber.

Same with any other company's ads when I already use their products....
Choogle Search Uses People Powered Advertising
The point is not a single visit to a single site. When you have a large ad network advertising all across the web, they are serving you ads on all kinds of sites. A big enough ad provider (think doubleclick or google) gets to see every site you visit and what order you visit them in. They know what times and what days you browse. If that's not an invasion of privacy, then it's at least akin to stalking.

Regardless of what you call it I'm not comfortable with it, and I'm not going to disable my ad blocker any time soon. The only reason I even went to ars technica was to read this article; I'll be happy to not return.
"Again, if you'd read Ars' post, you would know that they are paid on impressions, not conversion rate."

I read that, but as I said, if they have a higher conversion rate, they should be able to negotiate a higher fee for the ads anyway.

On the other aspects, I guess we just disagree (why is it worse to screw advertisers than ad pushing people)?
Not very likely, as the project itself got wiki and ML only in January... But the architecture seems better than Nagios tbh. More distributed and with more options for redundancy.

Also the roadmap doesn't look great so far: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/shinken/report/2

But if someone started writing a drop-in Nagios replacement, I hope they know what the problems are and how to solve them.
That's fascinating... I've never even heard of livecoding. Definitely going to have to play with this a bit. And it's motivation to learn Lisp.

As to the video, I really wish the music was louder. Hard to hear when the narrator's voice is so much louder. (I've also got background noise to listen through).
I think you are monetizing those readers, you just don't realize it.

People reading and talking about your content are a large part of the engine that drives the 'buzz' around a website. If you would cut those people out and be only left with the people that are prepared to pay in some way then suddenly your website wouldn't be half as interesting.

I don't completely go for the 'eyeballs' theory, but I think that there is no such thing as a user that is not worth having, even if they never pay in a $ sense. They're paying with their time, which is worth a lot more than that click, if you can get them to be productive in some way that is 'free' to them but worth something to you you also come out ahead.

Wikipedia is a nice example, HN is another, I use people on my site to supply me with an endless stream of content and in return they get stuff that those that don't have to pay for.

Shifting the game around like that makes it possible to create value without having to take money from the pockets of all (or a large portion of) your visitors.

I think the whole ad blocker discussion is focused way to much on ads being the only way to 'monetize' a user, if there is any exchange at all between a site and a user and you have a feeling that you get more from the user than what it cost you in bandwidth you're under way to solving your problem in a much better way than to worry about a few ad impressions being lost.
From screenshot:

"Press to stop game"

Funny how much sense that makes in a twisted way. I was thinking that they had some kind of functionality that had you attach text to a keyboard event to explain it. Alas.

GraphicsWindow.DrawText(x, y + 320, "Press to stop game")

It's just a ... feature.

Edit: and the key they hooked up "stop game" to was not space, it was escape :(
1. Get rid of scam/cheating ads (rebills etc) and also pop unders

2. Don't autoplay audio/video on the ads. Heck, autoplay is bad for content, its super annoying for ads.

3. Increase relevance

4. There are sites where I need to search the content inbetween ads. Would we tolerate if just 30% of our TV screen was video, and the rest were ads? (text, scrolling text etc). Maintain decent ratio between content and ads.

5. Most websites don't even bother to experiment with other ways to make money, like subscription etc. quizlet turns off ads for a donation of 10$ (donations get some more features). Seems like a good experiment. May be others can try that? this could also be an option.
The reason for that is that advertising is market driven, those that make the most money off a user are the ones that will pay the most for a spot.

Rebills and upsells are a way to make a lot of money from a single signup so that's why those advertisers pay top dollar.

And as long as the credit card companies allow scammers to operate this will continue.
Android phones do too. At least if you are root. I don't know if there is an official app because I just wrote a script. Just use the standard Linux bluetooth utilities.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP...
Adblocking is Missing the Point
Some things to consider for me:

- Don't put ads where content should be, I hate when I'm scrolling and there is an ad where I should be reading (unless it is displayed at the end of an article)

- Put ads in a designated area, and stick to that single area

- Only display relevant ads if your site is about web design I don't want to see ads about belly fat or ebay

- No flash or animated ads, this is so annoying and probably makes me leave sites the most because it is just distracting from both your content and my train of thought

- Don't display too many ads, this is also a major problem and just makes me assume that there is no real content and you just want to make money (news sites seem to do this a lot)
This is £23 (used) on Amazon.co.uk. That's a lot of money.
The grammar on that post makes it borderline unreadable in places.

"I'll cite an example, Friendster, what did they do that people are
closing their accounts and flocking on Facebook. "
Ignoring ads doesn't hurt anyone. Ads have been ignored for centuries.

If you think a site you enjoy has a business model that sucks, shouldn't you tell them? Passively making their business model even less effective will make them less likely to exist in the future. It is a dumb thing to do.
I call BS, you can ask questions without being logged in. Second of all is it really that hard to make a fake account somewhere. Third use a openid provider like myopenid it allows you to setup as many different persona name\birthday\email combinations as you want.
on that final point, we can agree.

And you're right, we must be somewhat disparate in our thought - If I were the architect of the world - I would have it that material property is the only sort that qualifies, and that nobody can make a living except by their work (or by the services they work to offer).
Imitate The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/). They produce beautiful, low impact, relevant ads which I frequently consider carefully and often click-through on. They do an amazing job and I've deliberately reduced the power of my adblock blacklists to see those ads.

An example ad: http://hivelogic.com/

They're clearly not even attempting to scale, but they have the ideas that -- if brought to scale -- could make advertising less sinful.
I use hyperbole to emphasize a point. I don't cry myself to sleep when I see an ad, no. Sometimes I become mildly annoyed. Life is generally OK.

Likewise, ad-blocking isn't really "devastating" the internet, is it?
Who is code wanderer?
"Does that mean that there are the occasional intrusive ads, expanding this way and that? Yes, sometimes we have to accept those ads."

Then I'm going to run an ad blocker. I visit how many sites a day? What percent at any given time are in their "sometimes" phase?

You run annoying ads, I get annoyed, I do what I can to stop being annoyed. Don't run annoying ads, I don't get annoyed, I don't take action to avoid the thing that isn't annoying me. Done.

The fact that you picked a business model that relies on me being willing to be annoyed isn't my problem. Stop serving me content if it bothers you so much - I'll survive, I promise.
Gotta love subroutines without explicit variables, causing comments like:

ValidateMove() ' in: ypos, xpos, h, moveDirection ret: invalidMove = 1 or -1 or 2 if move is invalid, otherwise 0

If I were a little kid, that would look like Greek to me.
That is an idea - start building garages - allow internal teams to release whatever they want regardless of whether they step on each other's toes.
That then begs the question, 'Why should they do it?'

If you want shares in a holding company, you buy Berkshire Hathoway shares or something similar. You want Buffet on that job, not Ballmer. MSFT should (and do) give this money back to shareholders to invest in 'businesses that offer nice, steady returns, in areas outside of tech' themselves. They don't need Microsoft for that.
This would all be very well, if I cared enough about the majority of sites. For example if HN would start popup ads, I might communicate. Most other sites first have to make me like them enough, and they don't do that by pushing obnoxious ads.

For what it's worth, I wish all those people complaining would indeed just block their entire site for people with ad blockers. I don't even want to see their sites anymore.

Or at least they should have a warning splash page: "warning, if you proceed to this site, you are stealing from us - OK/Cancel".
I normally write at least one article a month for ~$100 each, I could easily write more if I felt like it, but I'm not really in it for the money, since I have a well paying day-job.

An article for an online programming 'zine normally takes me between 4 and 8 hours to write well (2000-4000 words).
NaCl can talk to the DOM/JavaScript, or can draw things itself using a frame buffer. All demos I've seen use the latter technique.

As far as I know, there are currently no standard widgets. http://nativeclient.googlecode.com/svn/data/docs_tarball/nac... has a good overview of the APIs available. I had thought that at least a little OpenGL was available as well, though I don't see it enumerated there. I'm unsure whether that's because I'm wrong, or because it's simply not in the generated documentation. At any rate, given that the API is based around framebuffers, it'd be pretty easy to port GDK or a similar system to run in NaCl.
Apparently there are 60 new reactors in the licensing process right now.
Microsoft Courier's Devolution [video]
Interesting. I've been considering a digital nomad lifestyle for a few months now. Watching your video has just given me another nudge.

A few questions. Your Reliance Wireless Broadband stick.. What speeds can you get upto on it? Can you stream youtube videos smoothly?

About your 4hww model. If you're outsourcing all your writing, editing, seo marketing.. does that leave any profits left for you?
Buying stable businesses would signal to the market they don't intend to innovate and so it's overinflated stock price would plummet.
I think that advertising is indeed devastating to our collective well being, but not for the miserly reasons you enumerated. I think that advertising conditions us to associate happiness with things or circumstances external, rather than from a place inside ourselves. Which is fundamentally fucked.

To the author: I think that if you cut the paranoia, you would actually be wealthier in spirit as well as material "net worth".
OK, a thought experiment: what about an ad blocker that downloads the ad, but doesn't display it? Because the argument seems to be that it is not necessary to look at the ad, only to download it, so that the site get's paid.

I am pretty sure such an downloading ad blocker would be considered a kind of click fraud.
Your argument is like the defense of a man who steals an unpopular toy from the shelf

Yeah, you did try to say that. With an analogy.
Then remind me again, why don't the advertising sites just block people with ad blockers?
"The idea that I have a moral obligation to stare at an advertisment, the thought I have an ethical obligation to voluntarily annoy myself for the sake of a company's profits... it would be hilarious if it wasn't so repugnant."

The author seems to be saying that he is entitled to take from the creator of content without having any obligation to give something in return. I believe that this misses one of the most basic principles of our economy - namely the idea of a value-exchange. You get, you give. I believe it's morally wrong to get, get, get, and not be willing to give.

No, he has no obligation to stare at an advertisement, but if he's not willing to stare at the ad he should look at other ways to compensate the creator of content or else not feel entitled to view the content.

Not that it matters, but the author's post is obviously link-bait also.
The vast majority of sites that I visit, I visit from aggregators such as HN, from Google, or from 3rd-party links in my Twitter stream or RSS reader. I don't have any numbers, but I would imagine that nowadays that's how a large number of people consume their content. When you say "don't visit these sites anymore", how exactly am I supposed to keep track of who I can and can't visit for fear of offending?
$50 a year is the price of 2 books (or one more expensive technical book). Every year I buy at least a dozen books I don't read. So I wouldn't say that $50 is an unreasonable amount if they content is good.
Well, any CSS `display: none` trick does this. I've been using it for years in my own minor-tweaks, because hiding via CSS with a user stylesheet is easy compared to hacking something like AdBlock.
I used to actually like the ads when I went to the cinema. Not anymore. They have just become offensive - often there is over an hour of ads, even though I paid for a ticket. And the ads are stupid. So I consent with the post.

Also, I suspect ads work better if people actually like them.
I up-voted both your comment and this story because I think this is the right conversation to have and the people who come up with the right solutions are going to make a lot of money while making the world a better place.

The Deck perhaps a good example of one of a new breed of advertisers that work together with the sites they actual advertise on. I can't wait for this to get more common.
Advice for new writers: Live somewhere cheap
How do you know if the site has changed if you are using adblock? What about people that are using a computer with adblock already installed?

If, for example, your site has a community and ads are indeed "of legitimate interest", your community will discuss interesting ads. I have seen this happening on MetaFilter and Reddit.