skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not really. They do seem convinced that the model is workable and dismiss criticism out of hand.

Then, funnily, they offer this analogy: "Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us."

Imagine running a restaurant where the food is free, and your business model is getting a cut of the mariachi band's tips.
May I suggest what we do Fnid?

We give a price for Royalty Free Licensed version of the code (that's actually exactly the same thing we use for it), and for "Work for Hire" as the other IP arrangement. We charge more for the WfH arrangement (~40% more for hourly contracts, and somewhere like 100-250% more for fixed fee contracts). On the work for hire contracts, we don't reuse that code (and we write all the code from scratch). 90-95% of clients take the RFL version and the higher rate allows is to disallow RFL for esoteric stuff we have no reason to expect we'd ever look at again.

For some of our early clients, we just gave them the license grant when it was all over (not out of sneakiness, just because we thought we needed to do that to get him into the clear absent documents signing over rights), and one of them flipped his shit. So now we do it this way, and people know what they're getting into upfront if they choose the cheaper method, and we can go into how they get great savings from doing the RFL version.

(And we "Just say no" to patents).
Michael Moore's Open Letter to Obama
Absolutely. I would not block ads if they did not degrade my reading experience.
> While `$('div').fn({...})` will bind the behavior to all divs, calling `$('div').fn('foo')` will only invoke `foo` on
the first `div`. This may be changed in future releases.

Love the plugin, but this behavior seems counter-intuitive. Hopefully they decide to change it.
The problem with this is that in reality you will be missing the "ShowDonationOptions();" and the "offerDegradedExperience();" will be "offerNoExperience();". Plus, adblockers will likely find a way around "user.usingAdBlock()". Ultimately, you can't force someone to consume your propaganda unless you physically restrain them and pin their eyes open.
Whole brain emulation roadmap
I would recommend elance. From the other side of the fence - We hire a lot of people off elance (currently spending about $6k per week). I think it's a great way for people from lower-cost countries who are competent and with good english to be able to earn money. It also works pretty well for us with what we do.

From a supplier point of view, there's two options - either going for fixed price bids for projects, or for bidding for stuff on an hourly basis.

In terms of rates we average about $20 an hour for top quality C++ stuff, about $17 for good Django/Python and about $12 for web-design/HTML. You need to subtract elance fees. But if you're good - it wouldn't be hard to earn a lot more than your target without having to work too hard.
Given that they are in fact exchanging his privacy for money, I'm not sure your assertion holds... perhaps the poster is being over-dramatic about it, but I don't see how they're not selling privacy to some extent.

Selling people's privacy is part of an ad company's revenue stream. Ad networks pay sites to post ads. Sites make money, in part, from selling their user's privacy.

One can quibble whether or not this is a big deal, but I don't think one can say it simply doesn't happen.
That's pretty much what this article is about. ArsTechnica experimented with blocking their content to those using AdBlock, and this post is in response to the backlash.
Slight error: Berkshire Hathaway is currently 4th at $206B.
Darchinyan vs Guerrero Live Stream Online | Watch Live Boxing
I remember a few years back when everyone was asking this questions and then we got Adwords and Adsense. Those worked great for a while, then we ended up almost back to where we started. It'll be interesting to see how thing go this time around.
I definitely get a degraded experience from blocking ads. Missing content (e.g. images) and broken layout, and time spent having to work out how to block ads. But it's better than flashing pictures in the corner of the screen.
And with voting, I don't have to say "I second this" to everything I strongly agree with or that I find very insightful.

But in case PG doesn't look at scores,
I second this.
No they're not. Anything too similar to an apple app gets the boot.
Make sure that you are not violating their TOS tough.
Yes, hate it when that happens.

I think a very nice aspect of reading on a touchscreen with drag-to-scroll is that this doesn't tend to happen. It makes things feel continuous and cohesive rather than chunked.
>My experience with people that know math and finance is that they do all their work in Excel

We are not talking the same sort of people. We're talking the type of people who require huge super computers to run their algorithms.
The privacy police is there. If you don't agree, move on.
It would seem to me that he is arguing from conjectures and logics. I think that deduction is a valid investigation technique, because mostly we can't investigate everything using induction.

As for your argument in that post regarding Google, I would still say that even if a patent is non-frivolous, non-obvious, and innovative, it could still have a negative overall effect mostly because of the privileges that is afforded to inventors and innovators to silence the competition who may have come up with equally groundbreaking work.

Innovative, non-frivolous patents still poses a danger to the open source software industry, which does not relies on patents to make their money.

The patent system make us choose a kind of inventor and entrepreneur over the type that open up their secrecy to the world and become wealthy from it.

That's the choice we're making if we choose the patent system over the market solution of intentional openness.
They can pay for referrals (or purchases if they don't trust the referrals, purchases are difficult to fake). People generally don't block paid Amazon links, unless they feel they're being tricked into following them.
Berkshire is 5th with $194B (the A shares that is) http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=brka&d=t
I doubt it's possible to fix. Advertising is by its nature an attempt to manipulate people, by grabbing their attention, bombarding them with information, and eliciting emotional responses in them. Unsolicited advertisement is inherently disrespectful to the people being advertised at. There's no way to do it nicely, you can only hope people are too apathetic to complain about it.
Well then enjoy: http://careers.bankofamerica.com/JobDetails.aspx?SearchPage=...
It doesn't really happen though; to sell privacy you have to remove a portion of it to sell.

Now we can argue the semantics of whether the act of visiting a website is considered private knowledge. I'd argue not - it's like walking into a shop, the shop has the right to say "hey you know who was here earlier?". But at the end of the day "they are selling my privacy" is over dramatizing what is happening. By visiting any website you run the risk - how do you know they are not selling the IP logs directly etc.

Visiting websites is just, within reason, public knowledge.

I also wonder how many advertisers actually use the data to target ads - and how much of it is used simply for numbers tracking (I dont know either way but it would be interested to see). I mention this because, when I run w/o ad blockers I don't really see anything actively targeted at me.

This incessant use of the word "privacy" in contexts where it doesn't really apply frustrates me: because it dumbs down situations where privacy is actually affected.
Killer instinct: the key to startup success
Even if the site isn't using a CPM model, getting paid by views, ad impressions still count towards getting better ad deals. For example when dealing with private ad-sales.
some people also use ad impressions to count pageviews, for example with Adsense, if you have 3 ad-units on one page, they count as one pageview.

Although, having a huge technical audience who doesn't click any ads will greatly decrease the CTR which will affect the eCPM the publisher is getting paid.
If you build for appengine, you have options. Take a look at http://code.google.com/p/typhoonae/.

PS. I'm sure you know what you're doing, but from my experience the gae stack is really bad to build anything search at this point.
Prime example: the evolution of Evony's ads. http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/07/14/evolution-of-evony-...
For sufficiently small values of "many". I don't think that's a very common practice, and those are the people who are treating the sites they enjoy unfairly.
Andreessen’s Advice To Old Media: "Burn The Boats"
A small number of boutique advertising networks have successfully tackled this challenge and are making quite a lot for their trouble.

For instance, The Deck (http://decknetwork.net/): 30 ad spots per month, currently $7,900/ad, equals $237,000/mo (and they're always booked solid.) This doesn't even count their "roadblock" ads which are an additional $7,900/day. The best part about their ads are they're good. I've found quite a few excellent products through them over the years.
I love requestpolicy, because it DOES let you say "ad company X's ads only display if they're being shown on Y.com"
Thanks! :)

I have found a really great strategy for reading books - read one chapter (or 1/nth of the chapter if it's really lengthy) as the first thing in the morning. Gets the books read in a reasonable time.

This strategy can be probably generalized. If you wish to write an article - write 1/nth of it in the morning. If you wish to learn a new programming language, write a program every morning, etc.
Blocking ads selectively is ethical. Blocking ads indiscriminately by using a provided block list isn't.
Berkshire's market cap is $204.655B
http://online.barrons.com/public/quotes/main.html?symbol=BRK...
> Cost was the No. 1 concern - generally, if you were the low bidder, you won - and when mistakes were made the supplier was fired

This was a legacy of Lopez when he was the chief buyer at GM and later VW. Most companies followed that style of squeezing your supplier's nuts as tight as possible (then clamping a visegrip onto them).

The NUMMI venture with Toyota had potential, but I think GM flubbed it continuously as the managers didn't really want to change GM's culture as much as needed to be done in order to save the company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NUMMI

Direct link to the story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/business/07quality.html?pa...

Disclaimer: I used to be an engineer at GM.
A bit of an astroturfing title, don't you think?
No, this is precisely how we can force them to rethink their approach. I don't want Google to know my every move on the net. Its that simple. Beyond that, I couldn't care less if someone wants to stick useless bits on their content to make money; I generally ignore it.
Yeah, whoops. Copying.
Compare relevant ads which get submitted to tech news site and discussed...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171648
These descriptions reminded me of horoscopes... I saw characteristics of myself in each one.
"We do not believe in censoring the Internet. Rather, we should censor it."
CINT, a REPL for C/C++
After 1900, when so-called artificial ice became generally accepted as safe, mass quantities were produced at ice plants and delivered to homes.

That's so bizarre. I would have thought people in the past preferred man-made ice as soon as it was invented. Who would want ice from a frozen lake? Lakes are full of all kinds of gross stuff.

I guess I'll have to remember that fact when people argue about the superiority of naturally-derived products.
I consider attempts to subvert my unconscious mind to be the human equivalent of privilege escalation exploits - they are malicious hacks, I have no tolerance and no sympathy for them.
Amazon Associates is a pretty good program that you can integrate into any consumer-facing site. When the Facebook app platform first came out a few years ago, I whipped up an app that integrated with Amazon associates in about a week's worth of time. Almost no maintenance since then (save for changes to reflect Facebook UI/platform upgrades), and it probably averages ~$40-50 a month, and makes several times higher during holiday season.

Amazon's Product Advertising API provides access to lots of their data, so if you so choose you can make mini niche shopping sites with significant dynamic data.

The only thing I'd be concerned about is receiving payments if you're not in one of the Amazon locales. Don't know if you need a valid tax ID or something. I think you can choose to get paid by checks though, if that works for you.
Imagine publishing a newspaper funded in a very large part by classified advertisements, embedded advertisements, and obituaries. Imagine me, and a lot of other subscribers, reading only the news in the newspaper and not reading the classifieds or obits.

This model actually worked well for hundreds of years until the advertisers found that online advertisement could be cheaper and more effective than printed paper advertisement.

My habits have not changed. I don't tend to read the ads in papers or online.
A lot of the comments seem to be pushing Titanium Mobile or other schemes to avoid dealing with the nitty-gritty details of Obj-C. Does anyone have any comment on that? I'm a couple weeks into learning iPhone development, coming from a (mostly) LAMP background, and I'm really enjoying the new direction. I tend to view things like Phonegap and Titanium with skepticism, as it seems like a way to avoid learning hard stuff, and you'd end up giving up a lot of control, performance, and flexibility, but is this the case?
Is there actually a practical way to that though?
If ads are discreet and respectful of the viewer then I'd certainly be prepared to stop blocking them.

I can only speak for myself but a solution does not seem that far off (at least not to get me to see your ads). While I agree that some sort of code of conduct may be a good idea, I don't really see it working out in the long run what with everyone always being willing to sacrifice good will for a quick buck.

That said, I use NoScript in Firefox and I run it for other reasons than blocking advertisements and I don't have an ad-blocker installed. If I white list a website it means I made a deliberate choice to trust whatever it is going to throw at me. The most important thing here is that I did not allow any third party to serve me some random code (plain markup is fine). I have no way of telling whether the site I just white listed in fact knows what their external advertisers actually serve. And this is proven again and again by how site owners expect visitors to contact the site when they see an ad that is intrusive so that they can "nuke it". This to me makes it a no deal.

To kill two birds with one stone: Serve your advertisements from your own servers and if I want to read your content I have to make a choice whether to trust you and your webserver(s). If you violate my trust then I will go elsewhere and I am no longer a waste of your resources and you are not a waste of mine.

If I have for some reason decided to not let you run dynamic content on whatever device I am currently on you simply have to respect that or I leave. You still have the opportunity to serve me static ads, surely that's got to be worth something. You don't know my reasons for not white listing you (as this article states as well). What surprised me about this link was that I did not see a single advertisement on the page. This means they are all using JavaScript or Flash. Sorry, your loss. And eventually my loss as well since the website might not live to see another day due to lack of income.

Incidentally, easy white listing [of script execution] for sites is also the only thing stopping me from switching to Chrome today.
Would you prefer that they charge everyone instead? What alternative business model are you suggesting?
It's Back Layar's Mobile AR Browser Relaunches On iPhone
Nice to see some other people from Lincoln on HN.

The cost of living here is fantastic.
1) Install an ad blocker.

2) When an ad annoys you, enable your ad blocker for that site.

3) If you actually enjoy the content the site provides, you should let them know why you're blocking their ads so they can fix the problem. Otherwise, if everyone does what you do, the site will cease to exist.
Ask HN: How dangerous is Clojure's immutability assumption?
I'm a long-time python programmer, thinking of learning clojure because I want to play with my droid, and java drives me nuts. I've been reading Learning Clojure[1], where it talks about data immutability as a fundamental assumption of Clojure's model. It says "Watch out for cases of mutable Java objects stored in immutable Clojure collection objects. If the mutable object changes, this won't be reflected in the collection's hash." This sounds potentially horrendously difficult to debug.

I don't want to start a language war, here. I'd be interested to hear people's personal experience with this issue, and also of any tools or language features which mitigate this issue, either by making it a very unlikely mistake, or making such cryptic mutability easy to detect.

[1] http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Learning_Clojure
Columbia/NYU launch startup summer intern program+hackathon
Look at the article that was linked here. I'm not blaming any of this on her. The guy who added this and the people who upvote it only did so for one reason.

There is hardly anything informative in this article that hasn't been said a million times over. EDIT: I shouldn't even be calling it an article.

Your idea that its hard being a woman in a male-dominated industry such as this...that's a whole other argument for another time.
I'm not saying we cut her slack but let's hold her to the same standard we do for posts by men here on Hacker News

That's exactly what the post you're replying to was suggesting.

Their point was that if any other (male) developer had made the exact same post, it would not have made it to the front page of HN.
I'd use a list in Adblock that whitelisted sites that only ever showed adverts that never moved, never poped up, never used flash, never showed me body parts and never tried to sell me something that was obviously a scam.

Currently that list would effectively be empty I would expect, since the only sites that qualify would have no ads currently
Ask HN: Can we help each other?
I just found this topic - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171520 - and it got me to thinking:

I have an audience and a fan base. I am a public figure who is well-known in my city. I have an online presence: twitter, Facebook, blog. I know I don't get the traffic I should, but can on that.

How can I monetize me? How can I generate revenue without appearing to 'sell out.' Currently, I make zero, so even a few hundred a month is more than I make now.

But here's the big picture: If I can make just $1000 a month being me, and I can find 9 others like me who can make the same amount ... that is $120K per year. What if I can find 50 others?

I don't have the time to do the work to make it happen. Maybe some of you have ideas / suggestions / proposals? Maye we can work together and everyone makes money?

Just thinking out loud ... would love to hear thoughts!
That seems like an excellent piece of advice. I already practice a variant of this—I read a book on the bus every morning—but perhaps I'll try getting up a little earlier and getting some reading done before I even leave the house.
Get paid for doing open source code. It'll give you good karma and internet points. Definitely give you the 400 a month you need.

We just started our open source task site but there are two notable tasks for the languages you listed:
Fix Audio Sync against Video in live555.cpp, $500
http://nextsprocket.com/tasks/fix-audio-sync-against-video-i...

Nokogiri pure-Java version for JRuby, >$600
http://nextsprocket.com/tasks/nokogiri-pure-java-version-for...

the nokogiri problem's been around and people are dying for a good solution!
I use RequestPolicy every day. I'm amazed that no browser provides this functionality built-in. Blocking all third party resources by default offers some strong protection against XSS and tracking sites. That it blocks ads and causes pages to render more spartanly is merely a bonus and exposes poor designs. Since everything that's blocked is accessible with the click of a button, I don't find it that inconvenient. I just wish more sites would serve all of their content from within their domain (including ads).
I would love everyone who has input on this to take a look at my topic ... which I created after reading all the great comments here.

Thanks!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1172170
However, the market cap is the A shares plus the B shares.
100,000 free bottles of Vitaminwaters new flavor: Facebook Connect
2) I don't think AdBlockPlus lets you do that

3) You surely know that, that is a waste of time, 1. they already know, 2. they won't respond or do anything
Ah that's the issue. Yahoo gives only class A (and doesn't show class B); Google just merges them.
I'm not sure anyone should get money just for being themselves. "Selling out," a.k.a. having a job, is kinda how it's done.
"I would expect that to be met with a pretty harsh backlash, though. Even though it's a small minority of people who use adBlock, they are a vocal and persuasive minority."

So this group decides to block ads and when the content producers decide to degrade their content (which is their right), they get pissed?

It sounds like a bunch of entitled kids. It reminds me of an article I read recently about the new generation of kids...
How do you perceive the culture of the groups you'd be working in?
finally got around to creating a HN account. IMHO "unintended acceleration" is the penis panic of the west.
Many of the adverts are in Flash, if I don't have Flash installed am I stealing too?
That doesn't work when the 'right' choice depends on user preference. The designer can't make a single right choice, because there isn't one in the vast majority of cases.

I am reminded of Malcolm Gladwell's talk about tomato sauce. Some people like chunky. Some people like plain.
Why would you trust them? It seems like a good business decision to not cause any problems for him, but it doesn't seem like there is any reason to trust them.
JavaScript/CSS still happily leak information. https://panopticlick.eff.org/ and CSS click tracking (can’t seem to turn up links right now)
I deleted my AdBlock Plus easy list entry and started only manually blocking irritating ads.

It turns out that only about 20 rules covered 99.5% of the _really_ annoying ads, whilst still leaving the OK ones. Adding those rules wasn't difficult, or annoying, or time consuming - just click and block when irritated.

The nuclear option (easy list) gets everything - even ad words - despite the fact that I don't mind them very much. The ABP developers really shouldn't make that the default, because I don't think people realize what they are signing up to. I don't object to them having the option, but it shouldn't be the default.
Make that "HTML5+JS+CSS is easier to develop" and "the devices are faster". Much of my consulting work is making iPhone apps faster. People seem to forget that the iPhone and iPod hardware is slow and has limited memory. I'd imagine the equivalent Android/etc hardware is about the same.

That said, if the iPhone/iPod/iPad drive mobile CPUs forward the way the iPod drove battery technology, then there's an exciting future of powerful handheld devices not that far off, and HTML5-based mobile apps will be a lot more competitive.