skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After using clojure as my primary environment for ~ 18 months, and leaning heavily on existing Java libraries for a lot of foundational stuff, I'd say that this is a non-issue. Of course, you can get yourself into a lot of trouble in any environment, but (at least for me and other experienced Clojure programmers I've worked with and whose results I've looked at) it's rarely nonobvious where unrestrained (i.e. Java-related) mutability is in the mix -- and in those areas, you take all the usual precautions that you would if you were using those mutable libraries in Java.

The upshot of this is that if you're using a Java library, you'll generally want to either:

(a) build a clojure wrapper API so as to enforce some sane semantics on it (see clojure.contrib.http.agent for a good example of this, where HTTP interactions are wrapped in clojure agents and a good set of convenience functions that make working with the JDK's HttpURLConnection and friends way more pleasant than usual).

(b) confine the usage of key Java libraries in such a way that there's a clear line of demarcation between clojure's mutability and concurrency semantics and the free-for-all in the rest of Java. This is where the big win is in programming Swing interfaces, for example, where your core data model would ideally be implemented using persistent data structures and clojure's reference objects to ensure sane concurrency semantics, and you take all the usual precautions when touching the Swing APIs.
For me, it's all about Node.js. None of the other server-side JS web stacks have excited me at all - they didn't offer anything that Python or PHP didn't already give me (I'm utterly unexcited about being able to run the same code on both the client and the server). Node complements existing technolgies really well, and has an incredibly well designed API.
if (youDontLikeAdsOnWebsite()) {
dontFlippingGoThereThen();
}

If you went to the mall, and a shopkeeper in Macys started beating you over the head with a bat, would you come back next week to the mall and go into every shop in full body armor, or would you just not go in Macys any more?
Shinken: A Pythonic Nagios
Advertising is about moving product. Just a quick perusal of advertising techniques indicates that just "providing information" is a rarely used methodology. Biased information isn't very useful anyhow.
I would bet it's marketing fluff for Plancast written in her contract or they recently requested her to do a blog post.

Sharp .... maybe?
Yes, you do end up giving up a lot of control, performance and flexibility, but a lot of applications don't require it. Titanium has the ability to code modules in Objective-C for those that do, but this might be more complicated than just writing the entire application in Objective-C.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with someone who contacted me through the co-founder wish list. He would have benefited greatly from this article.

I spent over an hour listening to him over Skype, name dropping and extolling the technical virtues of his business. During the conversation, he left absolutely no pauses for me to speak. I ended up having to interrupt him mid-speech after realizing that he was not looking for a co-founder, but trying to sell his soon to be released platform to developers.

Looking back, I realize that I was the same way a little over a year ago. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of creating the next great thing. But care should be taken to ensure that conversations do not devolve into verbal masturbation over yet-another-victim.
Tivo thirty-second skip.
> Zoning codes in much of the US do indeed prohibit mixed uses and urban densities and prioritize automotive infrastructure over human-scale street design.

The vast majority of the US has no zoning.

You're seeing obstacles because you're only looking at existing areas. It's quite reasonable for the current inhabitants to resist your takeover attempt. And yes, that's what it is.

> Suburbia may not seem thoughtfully designed, but it is an existence proof that even ideas that do not work well at scale can nonetheless be widely adopted and carry enormous momentum.

Suburbia works quite well for the vast majority of its inhabitants. This "scale" claim is just your attempt to try to convince them why they're wrong.

And yes, suburbia is "thoughtfully designed" - it just isn't designed to accomplish the goals that you value.

Your values are not universal. If suburbia doesn't work for you, get out. There are options.

But, stop trying to force people into your vision. And if you can't, at least stop complaining that they resist.
This is a big deal. I'm not going to share my Gmail password with anyone (except my wife, maybe) - which was too bad, because Etacts is a really useful service. Now I'm able to sign up without giving them my password. Hopefully other mail providers will do the same thing.
I take it this is somehow related to the other post about blocking ads.

This post is from 2007, and this quote...

>>And in short, due to the fact that tools like this exist, several webmasters are now refusing to allow netizens to access their respective websites via a Firefox browser.

... seems incredibly off base.

I'm hoping there's something I'm missing that made this post interesting.
It's about telling you about a product/service you might be interested in.

The movie trailers I watch in frontrow on OSX. They're advertising. I love them. They inform me of new movies that are coming out. Useful no?
Google without a doubt.

Facebook is just another chapter in the geocities/myspace/facebook sequel, true, they've done a better job than any of their predecessors but they'd almost have to by definition.

One day there will be the 'next' facebook, I doubt we'll see a 'next google' any time soon.

I'm no friend of either company (Google to me is way too opaque given the amount of control they've got) but when choosing between those two the choice for me would be easy.
How can it possibly make sense to zip the video files? It ruins any chance one has of progressively downloading as you watch, and it can't save any bandwidth.
> It sounds like she is having fun with the jump-in-the-deep-end and start treading code method of learning.

The best way to learn how to swim is to drown.

Wait, that can't be right.
Try this, it may change your mind: https://panopticlick.eff.org/
NaCl/OCaml (OCaml as a client-side web programming language)
rm -rf ~/.flash
mkdir ~/.flash
chmod -rwx ~/.flash
"All sides come out having some reasonable points and some entitled-kids feeling IMO. In particular, the "wahh, my ads were blocked" websites sound a lot like the RIAA at times"

eventually, people will be saying "wahh..why do I have to pay for my favorite site..it used to be free".

My problem isn't that ads are blocked. If you want to block a site's ads, this is fine. However, these adblockers are blocking ads on pretty much every site that uses them. Many ads are getting blocked on sites that the user has never even seen. How do you know that they are intrusive if you have never even seen the ads?

"(though Ars avoids most of the more annoying rhetoric), attempting to blame someone else for the fact that their business model no longer works, instead of finding a new business model."

If the majority if users coming to their site are using an adblocker, and they make their money on ads, it's the adblocker that is preventing them from making money, not the model. You may say that those people wouldn't have clicked on those ads, but many people I know installed an adblocker in their friends/family members computers. Those people don't even know that there are ads on many of the sites where they are blocked. If this trend continues,advertising will no longer be profitable, not because it doesn't work, but because it's being blocked.
Open Angel Forum Silicon Valley 
Our fifth chapter will be in Silicon Valley and hosted by Dave McClure and Shervin Pishevar.

Applications are being accepted now and will be reviewed on a rolling basis. We've had just over 100 applications to each of he first three cities. Typically half of these are not ready for angel investing (i.e. they are business plans), so at this point you have a 10% chance of getting in if you have a decent product that is actually built.

I would say 50%+ of the ycombinator/techstars companies would be "OAF worthy" by the end of each program. Basically, if you're good enough to get into one of those programs and finish a good product you would probably be good enough for OAF.

We are taking a pause at five cities (LA, SF, SV, NY and Seattle) three times a year (so 15 yearly events) because I don't have anyone besides myself and Tyler to review the 2,000 applications we will get this year. However, we have launched five $50,000 national sponsorships for service providers (i.e. law firms, recruiters, etc) and technology companies (i.e. google, yahoo, microsoft). IF we can land 2-3 of those we will hire one or two full time staffers and be able to get to 12 cities (36 events a year). any questions hit me up here or at Jason@calacanis.com
Advertising is devastating to my well-being
Here's a simple detect function if you want to show adblock users a big paywall, which could be good if you have enough of them.

function detect(cb) {
var tt = document.createElement("div");
tt.style.display = "none";
document.body.appendChild(tt);
var i = document.createElement("iframe");
i.src = "http://adv.foo.com/ads/-adspace?ad_id=&affiliate=&advert=678";
var foo = i.style.cssText;
tt.appendChild(i);
window.setTimeout(function() {
cb(foo!=i.style.cssText);
}, 200);
}

the callback 'cb' will be called with true if adblock is installed.
An ironic point is that blocking ads actually raises the probability that I will buy the advertisers' product. Example: whenever I see the word "Netflix" now I am conditioned to want to punch a hole through the nearest computer screen. Had I blocked all their ads I may have eventually considered using them. Now I just think of them as the giant annoying red box that inserts itself between me and content I'm interested in.
Ya, you are right. I can see how it comes off that way. I apologize for that. I should have made it clear in the headline.
There are two reasons I decided on zipping the video files: (1) you would want a "real" streaming server for a streaming-type of behaviour
(2) I know a number of users who would find it difficult to save a video for offline-viewing, once they have it playing inside their browsers.
Do you agree? I am happy to learn something new here as this is, as we mention somewhere in the text, the first time we host any video content. And by the way, my email address is given at the bottom of the page you are referring to and I only found your comment accidentally.
Interesting. I disagree with each one of those sentences.

I think the choice would be pretty close, not something where you could pick without a doubt.

Facebook is definitely not just the social network du jour, just as Google wasn't the search engine du jour when they appeared. (Though people could have claimed with equal plausibility that they were.)

Thus while there may be a "next Facebook" in the sense of the next hot startup, it won't be doing the same thing.

And I feel like I'm a friend of both companies, both in the sense of knowing a lot of people at both, and thinking pretty highly of both. And choosing between the two of them would be hard.
Fully interactive shopping mall map directories and community your iPhone.
Thanks for saying what others don't have the balls to say.
Precisely, the system requires reform - but abolishment would even further deprive that "lone inventor" of right to her own work.

Trouncing patents now would only give the already successful less to worry about, and would force the budding minds into the dirt.

I, for one, am so anti-capitalist that I don't use a single piece of proprietary software, and I own only what I can carry. I'm an idealist with the causes that I can control (personal use) - I'm a realist when I want to actually see change in the right direction (political voice).
I think you nailed it: I'm pretty sure Microsoft's motivations are simply to make the best development environment they can.

But children aren't developers (yet) and learning to program isn't necessarily easiest or best using imperative languages. It's not judgment, it's a difference of goals.
FWIW, they appear to be working on it.
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=16932
Indeed. Putting a scantily-clad lady up on the TV screen isn't giving me any information. It's treating me like an animal, hoping my sex drive overrides the part of my brain that says "You don't really need to buy this crap".

Loud noises, cute kittens, catchy songs, scary consequences, status symbols, repetition until you can't forget the company's name if you tried. That's not any information I need.
Epic fail. All his descriptions do not even remotely describe me and my brother.
If only all online advertising were half as good as The Deck.
Mechanical Turk sometimes has well-paying jobs, though it's less common than it used to be, and they usually disappear quickly. But I've made ~$30/hr on it before doing things that the requester grossly overestimated the going rate for. Admittedly, jobs paying effectively $3/hr are much more common.
As usual with these things, the analogies are a bit lacking. I humbly suggest that it's more like requesting a catalog from Macys and then ignoring/defacing/destroying the parts of the catalog that I am not interested in.

if (youDontLikeMyBlcokingAds()) {
dontFlippingServeMeAnyContentAtAllWhenIMakeAnHttpRequest();
}
interesting. i'm working on erlmon, an Erlang and Lua driven monitoring tool, and there are some good ideas in this tool that we may borrow.
As naive as this may make me sound, I think this attitude is hurting society. The idea that everyone is and should be trying to screw everyone else out of as much pleasure and profit as legal is, in my opinion, detrimental to society.

When we stop doing things that don't negatively affect us much and help others, we've lost the benefits of altruism that helped our species evolve beyond the rest.
Mike Shroepfer, VP of Engineering at Facebook, hired me at Mozilla. I'm quite happy where I am, but let me tell you, that is someone you want to work for.

* http://www.crunchbase.com/person/mike-shroepfer
Progressive video download over dumb HTTP works very well, so it's unlikely you need a special streaming server for most use cases, and particularly not in this case. Modern browsers have native video support for Ogg Theora (Chrome, Firefox, Opera) or some codec in a QuickTime container now (Safari), so if the files weren't zipped there's a good chance that progressive video download would work for most of your audience without any special effort on your part.

Your second point is valid, I hadn't considered it as a serious problem. I think a better solution than a zip file is to provide a "download" link pointing to the file that serves it with the Content-Disposition HTTP header set. This requires some control over the web server (e.g. ability to run script, or set up an htaccess file), so it's not always an option.

Edit: sorry for complaining on HN rather than contacting you directly. I was venting because it's frustrating that I couldn't watch the first few minutes of the video to decide if it's worth watching/downloading the entire video.
Wow, so I'm not the only one.

I recall being bombarded by their ads via snailmail about 5 years ago, and developing the perception that Netflix was some money-hungry scamming company.

It is for that reason so uncanny now to hear my trusted circle of peers recommend Netflix to me sometimes.
9 is taken as well.
"The Prettiest Way To Learn About Satellites"
It usually is free if space is available and you don't annoy the professor. I've had several non-paying students; the only time I ever kicked one out of class was because we ran out of seats.

+1 to this - when I was in school, I was never denied a seat in a class that I wasn't officially enrolled in (I took maybe 6 or 7 extra courses that way - oddly enough, I was kicked out of some classes I enrolled in, for space/seniority/in-major reasons), and I always asked the professor before sitting in (I probably could have gotten away with not doing that, since in the math/science departments half the professors don't bother to learn names anyhow, but asking seemed like the polite thing to do).

Some of the most interesting stuff I learned was in those classes, and it's actually how I ended up getting back into programming (I hadn't programmed since middle school)...it's a great way to sample stuff outside your major without needing to worry about doing badly in the classes.

I know people that do this sometimes even as non-students, and they've told me that most professors don't usually mind, though occasionally they'll say no.
Does this mean it's immoral to use Lynx? No Google sponsored links, no images, no flash. Lynx will destroy the Internet!
* Then, 3 years from now, when one of your drives fails and you don't have any spares, try to find a new one that matches the exact geometry of the existing one.*

With arrays I build, I don't have onerous constraints like requiring identical size[1]. Moreover, if I'm not already already retiring disks at the 3 year mark, I'm very much remiss in my duties.

* Sucks to be you, you tried to save a few bucks and got burned.*

We're not talking about a few bucks. We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's enough to pay a salary for those 3 years as well as having replaced with something less than a couple generations old.

[1] I assumethat's what you mean, since true geometry is all but impossible to detect on modern drives.
> There is nothing ethically or morally wrong with an ad-blocker.

Haha, that is a huge, unbacked assertion in this article.

Maybe under some ethical systems it's not wrong. However, some of us recognize the concept of a social contract where there is an implicit agreement that if you want to use someone else's resources and they ask payment for it, you are obligated to either

1. Pay them the way they ask (including by viewing the ads they ask you to).

or

2. Not use their resources.

Option three, which is to circumvent paying them by some means, does not become ethical merely because it's easy.

You could also look at this through the lens of the categorical imperative. We haven't yet devised a means through which people can pay for things efficiently over the internet. Ads are the only current viable way to conduct business in situations that call for many small payments for small pieces of content. If everyone blocks ads, this business model becomes impossible, creating a detrimental reality. Thus, according to the categorical imperative, ad blocking is immoral.

> It is no different than using any other technology to filter language or explicit content.

This is incorrect. On typical webpages the author of the content is not being compensated for your hearing curse words or the possibility of your hearing them.

> No one is being harmed.

Not in a direct sense, but in a statistical and economic sense they are.

Basically, this entire article-let is a big instance of begging the question. It reduces to "nothing is wrong with blocking ads because there's nothing unethical about blocking ads," with no correct support. Or, to put it even more ridiculously (but, I think, still being fair to the actual logical content of the article): "nothing is wrong with blocking ads because nothing is wrong with blocking ads."
Those things get peoples attention, and make some % remember you.

Obviously not every advert works on everyone. It'd be silly if it did. But when taken as a whole, they do work. Astoundingly well.
I'd agree that that effect is in play to some extent, but I did learn a couple of things, which is more than I can say about many articles that get posted here.

Because of this article, I now know about ASIHTTPRequest, which is very likely going to find its way into my iPhone app in the near future as a result.

So I'd say it's a net win.
I guess I should have explained my point better. Things like streaming video consume a lot more bandwidth than loading web pages. For example, watching Hulu for an hour transfers 200MB if you're using the low-quality 480kbps stream. Google News is about 500KB, so you'd have to load it every 9 seconds for an hour to consume the same amount of bandwidth. A typical page load on Ars Technica is around 100KB, so you'd have to rack up 2000 page views to transfer 200MB.
Sounds like a very small phase in a cat-and-mouse chase. The people who use AdBlock are pretty technically savvy, they'll jump on another plug-in that bypasses the hack you've just mentioned in no time. And the hack doesn't work anyway for some existing popular adblock extensions.

Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to move to a different model altogether.
Excellent list. For selling sites, I recommend flippa.com. Averaging 7 to 12 times last month's revenue is very common.

On a side note, is it just me, or is Hacker News getting more and more interested in affiliate marketing?
The Elements of Programming Style: "say what you mean, simply and directly"
Advertising = Jobs
Not a problem. I have actually tried the un-zipped approach: it does indeed work with Safari and Firefox for the Quicktime flavours. One thing I tend to do, however, is to fast-forward the movie once to decide whether I want to view all of it - and this is definitely not possible if it is not a special streaming protocol. But it is probably a good idea to provide more than one link for a movie (we do not have that many different ones anyway), so users can decide whether they want streaming or download only. Thanks!
Frankly I think what all sites should do is offer ad-free option.

And I'm not talking about the greedy...let's charge $4.99 a month for ad-free service. No, I mean charge users what you are likely to see from them over a year $1-2 one-time micropayment.

This way you still get to make money off ads, you show the passers by...but your core users, can opt out for a small fee. You win, by earning the $$$ you'd ever see from them in a single period. And they win, by not having ads on a site they use all the time.
Many technical minded people tend to think that if something will eventually fail, it's not worth doing.

There's an old joke about a horse trainer who was ordered by his king, under penalty of death, to teach his horse to speak. So he very methodically starts to do just that. When asked why he's trying to do the impossible, he answers: "Teaching takes a long time. Maybe the king dies. Maybe the horse dies. Or maybe the horse learns to talk."
afaik, modifying css or not loading the advert is the most common adblock approach. To do anything lower level would be far harder.

One of the whole points of adblock is also to reduce bandwidth usage on the client side, increase load speed etc. So if you're using adblock and not loading ads from the server, that behavior is obvious and easily detected.

Advertising works extremely well. A very small minority of users decide to block all advertising without even giving websites the chance to show value in it.

I disagree about adBlock being tech savvy. Most of the time it's just doing regexps on iframe/image sources. Which is ridiculously naive.

Is this an ad? <a href=/foo.html>beds</a>. Definitely could be, yes. Can adblock block it? Nope.

If adblock did become more widespread (I doubt it will), then the advertising would just move server side, and become more hidden so that it can't be detected.

You'll stop seeing <iframe src="http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382>; and you'll start seeing <iframe src="http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html>;

What's this alternate model you've devised for the web? Say we removed all advertising from the web, how much money would we each have to pay a day to replace that revenue? How many of us would be willing to pay to use the web like that? I know I wouldn't.