skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
1) Advertise real products or services. Seems like 3/4 of the ads I see on facebook are scams or vapor. Carefully vet your advertisers to make sure they're legit.

2) Make ads relevant. I'm a happily married stay-at-home dad. I'm not interested in dating ads, but ads for better bottles could get my attention. Keyword-driven or site-demographic-driven ads are a start. As dpcan suggested, browsers could allow us to tag ourselves and our interests, which would be even better.

3) Get rid of common annoyances: flashing ads, ads that eat CPU and grind my browser to a crawl, ads on sites I might visit from work or with my kids that aren't safe for work/kids, popups/popunders, ads that block my view of the content I'm looking for, and misleading ads. (Again, if you're a host, vet your ads!)

4) Do not compromise user privacy. Don't track my browsing; base ads off of the site I'm on or information I voluntarily tagged myself with.

Many of the webcomics I read use Project Wonderful, and they seem to have a pretty good model. I regularly see interesting ads, and almost never see offensive ads, scams, or CPU killers.
Facebook, for better or worse, has become fundamental to the social lives of Generation Y. There's certainly churn among older users, but I think it's almost an accident that Facebook has become so popular with an older crowd. The core users aren't going anywhere.

Facebook is on track to become the #1 most visited web site. I don't think it will hit that milestone only to fail.
You know, amidst the ad-block debate today, I actually see an opportunity ripe for a start-up.

A system that lets willing participants opt out of ad-viewship for direct micropayments. Wait a second, I think what I'm describing is close to the new 'Flattr' -- but still not quite it. Let the users choose between micropayments or ad-viewership.
I would.

Of course, every website in the world would have to support it and micropayments don't work, so... it's not realistic.
Some of the sites already do that.
Mixpanel (YC S09) New Feature - Funnel Trend Analysis
Not so sure, I guess browsers have become smarter. I don't think they generally load images that are invisible. At least I seem to remember having experienced that, don't remember the exact circumstances, though.
Can you explain how this web-ified Magic 8 Ball is viral? I'm surprised not to see any Twitter / Facebook / Digg links anywhere..

Also, is this $500-1000 / mo sustained over a long period of time, or is it more like the flash-in-the-pan Facebook apps that briefly go viral, peak, and then collapse after a few weeks?
Strangely, I haven't noticed. I guess they won't be missed.

I saw a few of these sites back then when the discussion flared up the first time, but haven't seen any since.
we've got a lot of interest from chicago and the midwest.... however, i'm not sure how robust the angel market is there.

might be better moving the company to a more established technology city to be honest (at least if you want an angel network at scale).
Ars just did this, apparently. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171927

Some people whitelisted, some subscribed, some boycotted. Besides, at best, you can only make it hard to hide ads / content. If data is transferred, data can be manipulated, and data can be ignored.

I'd suppose the end-state of adblockers is something that does a rendered-page analysis to detect content, rather than looking at code / origin of info.
I have a question. With the backtracking parser, does this mean that you can rewrite parse-number like this? :

(def parse-number
(domonad [sign (optional parse-sign "+")
[type digits] (choice parse-integer
parse-float)
_ eof]
[type (apply str (cons sign digits))])))

The fact that you can fail on the eof and backtrack into the choice (if it is possible) is the main advantage. It lets you lay out your parser in a logical way.
apparently Something incredible is happening..
http://twitter.com/vidly/status/10098033744
> often there is over an hour of ads

Uhm, what?! When I go to the cinema there is maybe 5 minutes of ads, then 5-10 minutes of new movie trailers, then the movie starts. And you can come in after the ads & trailers if you want (but not many people do this).

I don't understand why people go to the cinema if they have to watch an HOUR of ads, especially because you can buy the DVD and watch ad-free. The cinemas should have an option to pay $x to skip ads.
I'd love micropayments. The problem currently is that there's no good way to do them, as there are no microtransactions that aren't just paying into the transaction-manager's pockets.

* looks at flattr * will have to poke into that.

edit: why not a combination? Micro-pay at a minimum value (say a couple cents) to get no ads. Click more than once to add more payment % to that site.
Personally I would feel differently about circumventing their block than about blocking ads. If they want to block me, I would accept it.

Maybe there would always be people who "steal", but are they really so many that it would hurt?
Google does more right and contributes much more to the world than facebook.
It's 19% of worldwide electricity generation.

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/wuhy.html

Furthermore, hydropower may be throttled up and down, such that the combination of hydro + wind and solar can hit penetrations near 50% before more energy storage is needed.

Also, wind power is less expensive on a kwhr delivered basis than coal. http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Ia.html
Contenture tried just that and they couldn't pull it off.

http://searchyc.com/contenture
James Watt: Monopolist
There's no reason the ideal market couldn't be a combination of the two approaches: Services like Google and Doubleclick offer a 'catalog' of ads, along with bids and targeting data, and a site can pull ads that meet their criteria out of Google/Doubleclick's ad catalog. This could even be highly automated like it is now, where the catalog available to you would be based on the nature of your content and the catalog could provide you with estimated rates based on historical data.

In my opinion the key distinction is that you're directly serving ads as part of your content, instead of embedding some arbitrary external content into your pages. If you wanted to, you could just proxy Google/Doubleclick ads through your own webserver - except right now, they won't pay you to do that (even though it might get more impressions!)
All attempts at filtering information will soon be technologically infeasible.
We've got a big demo we need to finish in March. I suppose we'll give it a shot.
Note: We're totally awesome enough to win. We just have a lot of other commitments ;)
The new IBM follows the business model you just mentioned though they do not venture outside technology. They no longer invest in building anything ground up. They buy a reasonably successful technologies ( Lotus, Rational, etc) and use an army of salespeople to upsell the new technologies.

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

The reason IBM does not get outside the technology sector is because the profit margins are one of the highest when it comes to software. They have sold most of their non-software business's in recent years: They dumped the loss making Thinkpad for a hefty sum to Lenovo, got rid of most of their semiconductor business and are a software sales company today. I guess the same reason will apply to MS for not getting into any non technology sector.
We're all parasites of society in some sense. If we didn't have a technologically complex world, Ars wouldn't have an audience. Maybe they should be paying us for having anything to write about at all!

I think community sites and subscription sites will be there to fill the void when ad-driven sites go down in flames. Apparently Ars is still in business though.

I won't shed any tears or feel any guilt if sites fail, because I think people will produce content for free. I think creation and dissemination of information is a basic human drive for a sufficient subset of the population to keep all of us "parasites" well fed. If you can figure out a way to get paid for it, good for you, but don't think you can demand that I experience the world through your ad utopia. I refuse to live on your terms.
> I would like to also have the option to get a discount for just clicking on the Ad from the vendor, if you want my attention offer me an incentive.

AdSense doesn't allow sites to do this. I don't know about other services.
revenue from impressions is a speculative hogwash remnant of the print medium and needs to go

The idea one makes money from ads simply by having it displayed is copying a highly speculative advertising model of print (where the effect can hardly be measured) to the web (where you can measure it be by actual clicks) put simply its vaporware of the worst kind, and a business that hedges its revenue on this model is hedging its existence on speculation alone.

The premise of advertising on the web is highly informed by age old print models that have failed that industry and put into doubt the efficacy of anything that is uttered in them.

users have a choice. You want effective Ads on the web, offer the users something,so they wont block you. or go away. effective Ads on the web are to be about incentive.

I own the delivery device, i can manipulate it as i will. This is not a newspaper, i control it, not the vendor. i will do what i want with it. the business owner need to give me a an incentive.
It's rare (outside IP law) to see the word "innovation" used by someone who isn't very unplugged from how technology is actually developed. This is a refreshing exception.
I would consider subscribing to Ars technica if the offer me an ad free experience as well as their pdf formatting etc...
Separate 'valuable/not-valuable' voting from 'agree/disagree'. It is the disagree-downvotes, which also carry with them a slight sting of censure because they share the same gesture, that inject the bad feelings.
Two minutes into the video I lost interest and moved along. The entire first minute can just be cut. A lot of the video looks like a test script on your site vs a demo - do I really need to see you enter your CC#? I also don't need to be told what a picture or a description are. Why not just completely cut all that and just run the demo while explaining to me why I don't just search google maps on my android phone?
This is an excerpt from the book, Against Intellectual Monopoly. You can read more of this at http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/againstfi...

The book is free so please read it!
There's a UI advantage to that handshake, too. You get the drive icon showing up on the desktop as a Time Machine drive instead of a standard USB disk, right?
This looks promising, especially since you can use existing nagios-plugins.

Anything that improves Nagios configuration is a good thing.
I share this sentiment completely, I like to have the freedom of being treated like an animal when I choose so alone.
Its in the right direction, I remember learning qbasic on dos it was a great way to get started and then sadly I graduated to visual basic. Which was a good place to start ;) I can't even read it these days but we all start somewhere.
I won't need to, technology will naturally evolve this way.

Sites will just make a simple technology switch and host ads from their own domain rather than from 3rd party ad servers in the same manner as they host content.

-The sites will make more money as there is no way to block the ads.

-The sites will make more money as they will not allow low click through spam.

-The viewers will have a more pleasant experience. The site will be less likely to host malicious ads, scams, and annoying attention grabbers on their own servers.

In conclusion, AdBlockers are a disruptive technology that are actually making the web a better place.
CouchDB 'joins'. Some NoSQL design considerations
No, he didn't.

He used an analogy that involved theft to illustrate a moral point about the potential versus actual results of actions and the conclusions we can draw from them.

Apparently this was too subtle - and I'll admit I had to stop and think for a moment, so perhaps the analogy was confusing/unclear - but I'm fairly sure that the intent was the moral point, not comparing loss-of-revenue-via-non-shown-page-views directly to loss-of-revenue-due-to-theft-of-physical-product.
But Microsoft's not really trading at an inflated price.

On an EV/EBITDA basis the company is around 10x.

Conversely, Apple is around 15x and Google is about 16x. Both multiples imply some pretty rich growth prospects whereas MSFT's 10x does not.
As many people love to point out, it's companies' fiduciary duty to screw people, impersonally, as much as possible. The distance and amenability to machine automation that technology adds makes it easier for customers to treat companies in a similar way.

What if the technology wasn't visible, wasn't in browsers, but instead was in our heads? What if we had a perfect ability to selectively filter out what we see and not let it affect us consciously, subconsciously or unconsciously? What if our awarenesses were so under our control that advertising could be scientifically proven to be useless?

Would this ability to focus our minds, free ourselves from distractions and pay deliberate attention only to what we willed, be morally or ethically wrong?
Just because it's technically feasible doesn't make it right. Consuming resources without contributing anything back makes you a leech, nothing more. That the internet is involved is merely semantics.
Although I agree with all of these points, I think relevancy is key. If it's determined by some means that I like "Antique Butter Churns", I'm hardly going to field like the ad to the "Antique Butter Churn Store!" website is actually an ad. I'd consider it a helpful recommendation.

If an ad platform could approach a point of such relevancy that users wouldn't see the ads as advertisements but friendly suggestions, that company would change the way the web works!
"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)."

Unfortunately, the advertiser then has to trust the publisher on how many users visited the site (or come up with something less intrusive that counts views).
More companies like Red Hat (and perhapes Canonical). When it comes down to it, most issues require corporate muscle to affect change. So apply to YC and become the next publicly traded open source company. :)
You can outsource what you suck at, but its a bad idea to outsource to someone who sucks at it as well.

I think what the post was getting at was that most people buy fashion magazines for the ads, because the ads are well crafted and made by the best photographers in the field. Some of them are pretty damn close to art. The ads are actually part of the magazine and not just a money-maker. You'd think this type of integration would be easier on the web, but no most sites would rather just throw a banner on the sidebar, another on top of the navigation and call it a day.
A better phrase, especially in connotation, might be "the well has already been poisoned". After abusive ads have prompted you to install an ad-blocker you're not likely to look back. Nor are you likely to have sympathy for a site like Ars Technica that admits they serve abusive ads ("sometimes we have to accept those ads").
I highly recommend "The Red Queen" by Matt Ridley for a really interesting look at what might have caused our species to develop this way. It is not as simple as one might think.
That's as good an explanation of the pattern as any that I've seen.

The group I'm looking at are all mostly in their 40's or older, my 'sample' doesn't extend far outside that.
Yeah, if you want to put MSFT into runoff, then this would be the appropriate approach.

But, if shareholders would rather MSFT survive, they should look into hiring a savvy CIO to handle that end of the business.

Either can work, it just depends.
The trick though is paying the right price for acquisitions. Studies have shown that acquirers tend to overpay on acquisitions, so it is important to have someone in place that has the discipline necessary.

IBM might have someone like that in place, but I'd imagine Microsoft does not.
I'd like to know too. My primary personal account is on Google Apps.
I've said this before on HN - what we online call 'advertising', print media call 'remnant advertising'. The space that gets sold through third parties is the crap that your own sales team just couldn't manage to sell. Most print publishers would be horrified at how little attention is paid by web publishers to selling advertising. All print magazines have in-house ad sales teams because they can get higher prices and attract higher quality advertising. They understand their own niche and can establish ongoing relationships with advertisers. Advertising online is just done incredibly poorly relative to real advertising.
Absolutely.

Amazingly this trust has worked well enough for television and radio (and its advertisers) for decades.
This discussion reminds me that the only site where I haven't minded the ads so much (and I think I might have even bought something from an ad there once), is Penny Arcade. The reason is that they carefully choose ad campaigns to be tasteful and only advertise stuff that they themselves consider worthy of purchase. I still don't like them enough to turn off adblock specifically for that site though, so I guess that counts as collateral damage.
That's exactly what you get when you subscribe to Ars Technica:

http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/

You also get full-text RSS feeds and the occasional bit of content exclusive to subscribers, as well as some other (less noteworthy) perks.

(Disclosure: I'm under contract with Ars Technica, working on a projected unrelated to any of this.)
Most DVD's include some forced advertising.

Anyway, I still go to the movies a lot. If you show up early to get a good seat you end up watching generic advertising while getting popcorn etc, then in the theater before showtime you get the same generic advertising. Then, at the stated movie start or a little after you get 7-10 minutes of higher quantity advertising, then 5 to 15 minutes of movie previews then the movie.

So, if you show up early enough and you really can watch a full hour of advertising before the movie starts. However, if you don't mind sacrificing a good seat or just go at an off time you can avoid most if not all of that.
Project Wonderful (http://www.projectwonderful.com/ ) already does a lot of what you've suggested. Advertisers choose sites, bid on them, and site hosts can approve ads individually so they always get relevant, unoffensive content.

But you're right, there's no reason they couldn't expand this sort of model to allow site hosts to pick ads as well.
Myths About Raising Capital 
Let’s start by dispelling some myths about raising capital.

Myth #1: That because you've started a company, someone ought to fund it.
Or you can go to an art-house cinema where the movie starts at its schedule timed with no advertisements.
This is a problem in Java too. Any object can mutate, effectively breaking any ordered collections that hold it.
Honestly? You sounds a little bitter.
Feels strange, and frankly bitter, for folks to take her apart like this. If you don't like the story just skip it.
When I was a little kid, I wrote programs in Commodore 64 BASIC (a version of early MS BASIC), and my subroutines couldn't even have names. GOSUB 1060 was an example call, and if you wanted arguments, you put them into globals; and you had two (count 'em, two) significant characters for your variable names.
I just started this book on friday!
Congratulations on the fast turnaround. I have the dubious distinction of writing the somewhat snarky top-voted thread on your previous post [1]. While I'd still like a better understand of etact's privacy features, not having to enter my Google password is good enough for now. I've signed up.

1. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144606
I won't use an ad-blocker as I think advertising is legitimate, and provides support for many great sites and potential for important startups.

I do use flashblock/click to flash (which has the side effect of hiding the most offensive video ads). But any site that becomes unbearable with ads, I move on, and don't go there again. I would suggest it is time to avoid those sites.
I'm personally tired of these armchair "experts" that know exactly how to fix one of the biggest market cap companies.
Isn't that the same thing zenoss is trying to do?

/not really familiar w/ zenoss but I know their founder spoke at pycon a couple years ago
My use of ad blocking came about the same time viruses came to a head and I decided to shut them all down to solve the problem. Maybe what's needed is a more intelligent ad-blocker that can discriminate against the more intruding ads and leave the "see and click" ads alone..
You can crash on my couch - email in profile!
I love when examples / high-visibility content has visible errors.

Another one, about v0.8:

The eigth and newest installment of Small Basic...

Granted, "eighth" looks ugly too.
Looking at webkit's inspector, at least, they are still downloaded. At least with my use, but I've only ever hidden entire divs.
The Porn Identity (2006)
A couple of comments/ideas/suggestions/feel free to ignore me/etc...

1. The lack of sign in button is confusing (this can be solved by simply renaming 'Go' to 'Login')

2. I've been waiting for etacts to finish importing whatever it is importing for almost 6 hours, and with no ETA / status bar / email update I'm inclined to feel that it's either not working, is heavily bottle necked, or something went wrong

3. Assuming the system is actually just busy doing all the processing on my emails, as an end user I would prefer it to do all this in the background, in a manner that is oblivious to me.

4. This means you could/should display 'incomplete' information, as long as it comes with the warning of 'We've still got XXXXXX emails to process' or something similar :)

I really just wanted to see what the interface/experience is like, regardless of exactly how much information you've processed (i.e. I'm ok with seeing a 'last contacted 3 years ago' message, even though I contacted them yesterday, because I realize you're still processing the information, but I want to see it now, not five hours from now :)

You do a great job at a very simple one-click login/signup, but having to wait forever to use this will (imo) lose a lot of people down the road who just "want to try it" (one of the best quotable comments I've heard a few weeks ago was from one of the founders of BackType -- "Your biggest enemy is the back button")

Anyway, I do look forward to using it asap :D
Empathizing with Customers [pdf]