skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You don't want to do that. If there is an exploit and an ability to gain root access, those libraries could be modified and affect everything else that uses those libraries outside the chroot jail. Best to just copy them.
I'm very excited to see this. OCaml is a really pleasant language to work in. It's certainly not without its warts, but it's surprisingly easy to write mostly-functional code that's highly performant, expressive, and easy-to-read. I've actually been enjoying picking it back up again, this time trying to learn it "for real", and knowing I have an interesting environment to target makes it much more exciting.
Thanks all for the replies!

I'm leaning towards using GAE at this point, with a contingency plan to switch to a third party (most likely AWS) if needed. I do hope that the wall that separates App Engine team is high enough and Google has internal controls to prevent anyone from peering into our data. We don't compete with any of Google's core products (search, email and etc).

Benefits of GAE are compelling enough for a scrappy startup to use it, even with all the reservations. What attracts us to GAE is:

- opportunity to concentrate on the product and not worry about administration

- this translates into tangible savings for a bootstrapped company, as we don't have to hire sys admins

- it's easy to leave if we must:

- our product is being written in a generic framework and all GAE-specific functionality is abstracted in a separate module.

- Google does not lock in the data: since release 1.2.5, it's now possible to bulk export data out of GAE

- low starting costs

I'll keep HN posted about the progress.
The way I've see, for all the noise, the world has a simple choice: do we build nuclear power everywhere now, or in 30 years once we've destroyed the environment completely?

The solution to our problems has been here all along, we just need to grow a pair and get it done. Putt-putt-ing around building windmills and dams to generate our power is not only an exercise in futility but one rooted in the fact that there's no urgency. If we really needed to end fossil fuel consumption now for some reason, you can be damn sure you'd see cooling towers being built outside your window right now.
Everything you say makes sense. Let me rephrase my statement into 2 separate statements then, as I should have initially.

1. Future browser upgrade timelines should not be based on the IE6 fiasco. It's too small a sample size to use as corroborating evidence in these predictions. It may end up being an anomaly.

2. In my own opinion I think the upgrade timeline will grow shorter. I don't have any hard evidence I can cite, it's just my impression as someone who's been involved in web development for the last 12 years or so. The points you mention are all valid, and I'm not saying there won't be new and different pains we'll enjoy ;)
Exactly: win win for all (except Big Brother).

How about this as an alternative:

Modify the plugin to route the GETs for the ad content through an anonymizer server.
Ars Technica:
"I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical..."

This guy (first sentence, no less):
"There's an interesting article on Ars Technica about how blocking ads is somehow unethical..."

Give me a break.
Because even if Google's management were secretly evil, the employees are independent minded enough that they wouldn't stand for any dishonest behavior. That was the tradeoff Google made in order to be able to hire the smartest people.
My reaction, which I think has similar meaning to what you said but doesn't contain the same subtly of your comment, is: This is not sustainable.
"Blocking ads indiscriminately by using a provided block list isn't."

Can you explain why not?

Unless there's some explicit prior agreement, I have no obligation to use my resources to render something in some specific manner, or at all.

Online ads fall into the same technological mismatch as online music. It's the application of solid-to-the-touch thinking to a fluid digital medium.

Web pages are not print. Don't base your business model on a different medium. (Ask the RIAA how well that works out.)

My browser requests some HTML; what it does with it on my end is up to me. If I don't want to waste time and resources making additional requests for other content, that's my business. If I don't want to render everything specified in the HTML, that's my choice. If I want to skip elements, apply custom CSS, block scripts, all are my choices.
That sounds like it's using the QuickTime plugin in both browsers. Firefox won't play anything in a QuickTime container natively. If you're using the native browser video playback support (aka HTML 5 <video>), you should be able to seek anywhere in the video without a special server as long as the web server supports HTTP range requests, which is part of HTTP 1.1 and should work by default with most configurations.
This is a marvelous article, informative and touching at the same time, a joy to read. Thanks for reminding me why I still comb through HN looking for things like this. I don't even mind that it delayed my work this afternoon.
It’s Time For Microsoft To Turn Itself Upside-Down
From the blog's FAQ: "I’m not actually a doctor, in the sense of having an MD or PhD."
Just like how Tivo has destroyed the television industry, right? I find it amazing that anyone believes they have a moral obligation to view advertisements.
If you had a replicator that could produce anything, why would you need money at all?

It would be an interesting world.

I suppose people could print some new planets if the earth got too crowded.

They could print willing slaves to serve them on their new planets.

The possibilities are rather extreme indeed.

Information would probably be nice to share but that could happen in an interplanetary fashion.

Of course, people would get bored and the only thing left to do would be for people to put themselves back into a very exact simulation of a world where they had challenges, limitations and ignorance. Indeed, they could temporarily program themselves to forget their omnipotence. Does this sound like a lot of religious beliefs?

One might even imagine that we, at present, are living out a life...
Why did it take so long to get the app listed? Because it was finished only a few weeks ago. I know, I installed it the day it came out.

Very nice, by the way, though lacking video chat last I checked :(
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>;

Some sites do this. In that case, you can guess that something is an ad based on the size of the image -- advertisers like to buy ads in standard-sized chunks, and you can just block all images that are that size.

Adblock also uses filters available from the Internet that automatically update at a certain interval. So if foo.com is even moderately popular, the filterset will be updated to block your site's ads reasonably quickly.

Finally, NoScript solves the problem of your adblock detector. If I don't run your detection code, the callback will not be called.
There are some good suggestions here, and I'll chime in on a few things that have worked for me. Keep in mind that I have no experience with adsense or affiliate links.

1. I second what peter said about screencasts or ebooks. We've made a good amount of money selling a DVD on SEO for a niche industry. Ours is basically all screencasts and basic SEO knowledge. If you have skills in that area or know someone who does, it can work. Granted, we did physical DVDs but you can just as easily do an ebook or web-based videos.

2. Take the BSD-licensed iui code (http://code.google.com/p/iui), style it up, and tie it into some PHP scripts so businesses in a niche industry can create iPhone-compatible websites (i.e. "iPhone sites for plumbers and contractors"). Give them simple install instructions for basic web hosts and it will sell. We've done it and it's worked well.

3. Niche industry WordPress themes. We just started doing this and it seems to be working. If you spin it for a "niche", you can charge more than the $30 themes you'll find other places.

Hope that helps.
I held my tongue on this earlier today thinking it would simply go away, but no more.

Bottom line #1: The content of this article is not technically newsworthy by HN norms.

Bottom line #2: If you're a photogenic & telegenic young woman software developer in Silcon Valley and you're also sufficiently socially charming, creative, or just plain lucky enough to fall in with the "right crowd" at the "right time" you can get spades of press far easier than any male or any non-photogenic female.

Remember Kim Polese? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Polese ('nuff said)

I can't cite the study offhand (I believe it was published in Nature in '05), but physical looks are a large multiplier (and and even larger divider) in young women's careers in almost all fields (there's an XKCD for this somewhere too). The effect dampens sharply later in life. As society has become more mediated, I'm sure that effect has only grown.

Looks sell, but that sales job must be followed through with commitment and execution. Judging from afar (Pownce's infamous Python eval() hole aside), I've not seen her lacking in either.

"Easy" fame and press is a double-edged sword. She's then expected to live-up to her "billing" and I doubt anyone is quite prepared for such a sudden burst of notoriety and the implicit expectations which come as part of fame's "package deal". At least by being a developer, her contributions can be more objectively judged. I suspect she takes great comfort in that.

I also think even by Valley Standards she's bounced from one company (and one relationship) to the next with alarming frequency. The fact that I even KNOW those few details of her personal life is evidence of our society's double-standard for women.

I can't think of a single other 'famous' developer who's personal life I know about other than Guido, but that's because he and his family used to live near us in Virginia.

I suspect Leah had few options for advancement at SixApart and simply had to "ride-out her earn-out" per Pownce's acquisition agreement.

I also suspect one of the implicit assumptions with her arrangement at Plancast was press-related (again simply leveraging fame as many "advisorships" in Valley companies end up being).

Nevertheless, I'm sure she takes a good deal of comfort from the fact that, at the end of the day, she's now a developer with a deliverable exploring a fresh new non-Django-related API and platform.

If she had wanted to be purely a "face" she likely would've stayed at CNET (err..Webshots) or moved to a more media-centric role.

I also suspect she's already seen the darker side of Silicon Valley and has little wish to return to those salad days. Let her build. Let her be.
Even if manufacturing becomes effectively free, resources won't. You'll still need energy and raw materials.

Uh, print space ship, print fusion reactor,

No, if you can make anything, then everything would be free. Of course, states would be first in line for the omnipotent power, so things wouldn't necessarily be easy...
Sure, do that. There are plenty of other sites on the Internet that don't do that, and I will just use those instead.
For those who ignore all ads anyways though, using an ad-block simply takes away some distractions and let's both you and the ad-server use less bandwidth. For people who are immune to advertising anyways, I see no harm to the content producers and advertisers.
Kinda interesting that Google's market cap is now higher than IBM's despite having 1/10th as many employees. I guess it sorta makes sense, since employees are costs and therefore should adversely affect the market cap.

In a similar vein, Wal-Mart (with its 2 million employees, 100 times more than Google) has a market cap of only $206B. On a good day, Apple could pass that and become #3.
"Ad blocking means the market will never correct itself. You're cutting off the feedback loop.

If an ad annoys you, just don't visit that website again! Simple. It's not like there's a shortage of websites to visit."

Doesn't this depend on how ad blockers work?

If my browser fetches some HTML, and it includes an img ref to some ad site, my blocker might a) prevent the fetching of that resource, or b) allow it to be fetched, but block the rendering.

I'm pretty sure blockers use the first technique. So, visiting a site with an ad blocker ups a site's hit count, but adds nothing to the eyeball count for the ads. Fro the ad-tracking POV, it's as if you never visited.

It may very well be the sort of feedback that's needed.

If you really want to be more active about this you're better off writing to the site owner with your concerns than simply not visiting the place.

If my site gets no traffic, how will I know if it's because of the ads, or crappy content?
> Their business isn't free to operate and that's their point ... a business is run by people that have families and need a regular income.

I understand. I do not begrudge trying to make a living. I am merely disagreeing that the business model they chose for that purpose is a good one.
There was an interview on CBC Radio with one of the authors a few weeks ago. (It is memorable to hear anything whatsoever of value on CBC Radio.) In addition to this study, he talked about a related one that showed people were more likely to be altrustic in rooms with a lemon-fresh smell!
If you enjoy something but you circumvent the methods by which the producer earns a living, you're making it less likely that the things you enjoy will continue to be produced. You may not see that as unethical, but at the very least, it's unreasonable.
I don't want to start a language war, here.

Then it's probably not a good idea to use the word "horrendous". Your commentary is not what would start a language war; your tone is.
You don't actually know yourself to be immune to advertising, though, nor can you. If it were possible for someone to know themselves to be perfectly immune to advertising, you might be right. But that, like knowledge of your courage in the face of death or your absolute quality as a lover, is beyond your ken.

Your argument is like the defense of a man who steals an unpopular toy from the shelf, reasoning from his knowledge of the sales of previous unpopular toys that some will surely be returned to the manufacturer and eventually discarded. Yet his action is still unethical because he doesn't truly know to the degree of certainty the moral test demands.
Just like the internet made the market for copyrighted information go away, right?

The Internet has torn big chunks in this market and remaining players of old media seem determined to stop this even if it means killing the net.

Things haven't settled down and I don't think they will for a while...
The best thing about that game was the insane 40 hit combos.
Great. That is the behavior I would encourage. If you don't like a websites ads, don't use that website. Everyone wins.
It’s time for Microsoft to turn itself upside-down
If I have the mind and knowledge to install an Ad blocker, I was never going to click on your ads anyways.
Back in 2007 a blogger named Danny Carlton blocked Firefox due to the use of adblock. some back story can be found here
http://adblockplus.org/blog/ads-dont-generate-money.

For myself, i user adblock and it is very hard for me to imagine my internet experience without it, i eagerly await Fennec on the android platform so i can block ads on my cell browser, it is especially painful there
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.

LOL, using user-supplied data as an access control method? Sure, keep doing that, it works great!

I also recommend replacing the locks on your house with a sign that says, "Authorized personnel only."
Looks like an awesome idea.
The idea of a typist pool intrigues me. It reminds me of the concept of a thread pool or connection pool, the idea being that one has many instances of a certain resource to share distribute over requests. Rudimentary parallelism and task scheduling seem to have existed since the dawn of history, when humans congregated in sufficient numbers to organize labor en masse.
Perhaps a better way to phrase it: you should expect your customers to act in accordance with their best interests (as they understand them.) They aren't trying to "screw" you so much as trying to get the best value they can. Not viewing annoying ads is of value to people, which is why they go to the trouble of running adblock or paying for ad-free premium pages.

It's up to content providers to figure out how to get paid. Guilt-tripping readers into viewing ads is one approach; running skeezy ads is another; paywalls or premium content is another; merchandising yet another. Each of those affects the value your readers get from your site. Given that, how can content providers best align their interest (getting paid) with their readers' interests (getting good content cheap/free)?

I submit that, if sites ran carefully-vetted ads that were of legitimate interest to their readers, were not annoying, and did not compromise user privacy, far fewer of us would use adblock.
Bwahahaha.

adblock = stealing

That's awesome. Wow. Alright, from now on I'm not going to install an adblock, you've convinced me.

...

Except I haven't clicked on an ad in 9 years anyways. Shit, I guess I'm just a perpetual thief.
IF people still shopped at malls this would be an amazing application.

However, with Amazon and Zappos destroying retail year after year it's clear that shopping malls will be reborn as universities/school or office parks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cuoohgp4ecc
http://www.deadmalls.com/
My feeling is exactly the opposite. Sustainable is coming up with business models where you provide something of value that people are willing to pay for. OTOH, steadily cranking up the quantity of advertising (already at the point where many newspapers and magazines are over 50% ads, TV is 1/3 ads, and many movies are little more than a continuous string of product placements) is _not_ sustainable.
>> "Finally, NoScript solves the problem of your adblock detector. If I don't run your detection code, the callback will not be called."

So just deny access if the callback isn't called with false :/ eg only render the content if the callback is called with false.

The number of people browsing with js disabled is pretty moot these days.
Time will tell. Facebook is in my circle of friends already past it's peak. The frequency of visits and interaction with the site is dropping and more and more profiles are left to gather dust.

Google is a very mature company with iron control over their monetization, they're in for the long haul. The OP specifically wrote working for google search, which is their core product and that's something that matters when selecting an employer.

Facebook gives me a 'cowboy' feeling and I wouldn't be surprised if in the long term they'll just be another footnote.

I used to think pretty highly of google but their last couple of years have been less then stellar, so I can't see either as a decision without downsides, but overall at least for me google clearly wins out.

Facebook's origins and CEO will forever leave a mark on that company.
How many times.....

Many adverts are paid by the impression, not the click.
From the piece that (I think) started this meta-discussion on HN, http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/03/why-ad-blocking...

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis. If you have an ad blocker running, and you load 10 pages on the site, you consume resources from us (bandwidth being only one of them), but provide us with no revenue.
I was thinking about this recently. My idea was to integrate advertisers as regular users into my web app.

Advantages: Ads are ordinary pictures hosted from my site\domain without javascript so not blockable. No annoying animations for my visitors. Manually targetted ads with a much higher click through rate. No middle man. Could maybe come up with some sort of market algorithm to change price to advertise based on demand rather than negotiating every deal.

Disadvantage: Would probably have to roll my own tracking system? Wouldn't be able to implement as many statistics for advertisers. Increased liability. Harder for small sites.

Does anyone know what the state of "off-the-shelf" advertising systems is for big sites that want to sell ads directly rather than rely on adsense/3rd parties? If anyone wants to hash out some ideas\code for a plug-n-play ad system that sites can drop on there server, gives advertisers dynamic quotes, handles payments/uploads hit me up at dhllndr at gmail, or aim redfoxbeatbox. Could be a good seperate product to monetize.
> adblock = stealing

I don't see where I said that.

Also, it's not my position that you are obligated to click on ads. Trying to make it seem like I claimed that is uncharitable and I'd appreciate it if you stopped.
> 1. Pay them the way they ask.

Perhaps you are overlooking the actual problem: they are asking to be paid $0. There is no price for using the service. They hope to make their buck from a commission on third-party auxiliary content.

If they ask to be paid something, i.e. institute a micropayment- or subscription system, circumventing that is unethical, I agree.
I get the feeling the best thing for the execs at Microsoft to do would be go on eBay and buy an iPod mini, put it in your office, and think that it was your competitors best selling devices and they replaced it anyway.
"More innocent people die due to careless drivers"

You can't force every driver to be more careful. I think the only way to fix these types of things would be to have really harsh jail sentences, so people think very carefully before they act. But, I would not want to live in a society like this.

"why should be concentrate on terrorism (which is one of the minimal risks we face)"

If we can prevent innocent people from dying, why not have extra security in place? For the average person, it's just a minor inconvenience.

Airport security is much easier to maintain because it is more of a controlled environment.

"But, they dont. Not all that often anyway. More innocent people die due to careless drivers; why should be concentrate on terrorism (which is one of the minimal risks we face)"

Like I said, if we don't concentrate on these things, we may have even more attacks because criminals/terrorists will know that they can get through security fairly easily. Many plots most likely never happen because of the difficulty of trying to get through security checkpoints.

"There are, generally, no attacks anyway."

Because we have tough security policies in place. Before 9/11, US airport security was lacking and terrorists were able to take advantage of it.
Doubleclick doesn't allow proxied ad distribution, and I'm not sure a similar effect could be achieved through DNS.

The Ars thread touches on this, where Kurt mentions that Doubleclick's ad deployment isn't smart enough to detect flash-blockers and serve a static ad, and Ars isn't permitted to replace Doubleclick's deployment code.
>> "Except I haven't clicked on an ad in 9 years anyways."

This is the thing I find funny in these sorts of debates. Of course you've clicked on ads. You click on them every day. You just don't realize they're ads. Sure, they might not be big flashy image 468x60 banner ads, but you click on links every day. Some of those are paid. They're ads.

If you think you don't click on any paid advertising, you're extremely naive.