skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Luckily, reality is a lot more complex than that, you can't reduce it to that simple choice.

Nuclear power is getting a fresh start, but even if a lot of nations committed to constructing more of them right this instance, we wouldn't see the results of that until decades from now because you would first have to invest in the capability of manufacturing nuclear power plants, because the current capability is very low.

And even if you build out the nuclear capacity, you would still need other power sources, because nuclear power plants yield power constantly, but our power consumption isn't linear, it varies a lot over the day, and you need to adjust production to consumption.

So why bet on a single horse? We need lots of alternatives to complement each other, there's no golden hammer.
I think they can say they feel it borders on unethical (which is the impression I got from it). Along the lines of: "ok so you can block our ads, but that's a bit sucky guys :("

On the topic of your article (I assume it's yours?):

I pay for a book, and then I read the book start-to-finish with no ads, no distractions. A few pages at the back maybe, but I can ignore those. Books are nice.

I assume you can see the difference here?

In terms of forcing you too look at the ads. I dont think the ars article tries to imply that either. They are saying they would appreciate it if you looked at their ads. Please.

I dont know if you have seen the ars site with ads but they are one I personally unblock: they aren't particularly in your face, are generally aesthetically pleasing and I also like their content (some of the best on the web). Encouraging that approach is a plus IMO.

If I had to generate revenue to keep my sites going, I would find a way other than advertising to do it. Or I'd shut them down.

Seems a "shoot yourself in the foot" scenario. Chances are people wouldn't actually pay monetary cost for your content - people hate doing that generally. Adverts are "zero cost" to a consumer :) most are happy to swap free content for a few adverts.

Why is it unethical, as your seemingly suggesting, to do that? :)
I use a lot of my (sometimes ancient) Java code with both Clojure and Scala. So far I have always written wrappers that copy Java data into Clojure or Scala 'native' data types. If you do this then there is little chance of having problems like those you are concerned about. It might be more efficient to use Java types, but not worth the hassle in most cases. (I also use (J)Ruby a lot, and I have found the secret to happy use of (J)Ruby is to give up the desire for good run time performance :-)
Ads i dont realize are ads are fine with me then.
What did Stack Overflow do to endanger itself?
In the commentary there is a lot of talk back and forth about whether old media understands tech or whether tech people understand media and journalism. I think this misses the point.

I subscribe to The Economist and New Scientist, as reading them online just isn't very user friendly. With the Economist and New Scientist I get full access to the archive and the online edition when I subscribe, but I don't want only the online edition, it is a hard reading experience compared to the magazine. Will the iPad change that? Time will tell.

I have recently dropped my newspaper subscription, which I actually miss. Their website is good, but not at all a replacement for the paper edition. The content is structured differently and more importantly, hard to browse quickly. Wherea the newspaper is very good to allow me to quickly get an overview of what is going on. But I dropped it as an experiment because I don't read it enough and I get a ton of paper to recycle.

I am looking forward to news delivered to me electronically in a way I will consume as willingly as printed news. The web as it looks today is not it.
"Circumventing payment" really is not in this case. It's the other half of the price-finding mechanism in the marketplace for content, which is suspiciously missing from option 1 above. Every price is negotiable, and in this case some small segment of the target audience is offering $0 for the content.

By your logic, it's immoral to mute the TV, go to the kitchen, and make a sandwich during the commercial break. In reality, some percentage of the population makes sandwiches instead of watching ads, and this behavior is priced into the advertising contracts.
Different basis for what "dark" is then. I'm sure someone else could find a sound justification (not claiming validity).
"Understanding is a three edged sword. Your side, their side, and the truth"
If the advertiser told you you had to read them thoroughly, then you might be obligated. However, when content owners put up ads normally all they ask you (/your browser) to do is display them.

> What if you are paying for a subscription of some kind? Is it ethical to block ads then? Or is it even ethical for the site to try to show ads if you are already paying them?

I am not sure. If the advertiser says in your agreement that your subscription fee is the sole payment you need to give them, then blocking ads would surely be fine if they display them. If not, probably still not ethical, though I'm a little more gray on it. It is certainly ethical for content providers to ask payment in composite form from you, but they should be straightforward with you about whether or not you will be expected to display ads even after you pay for their service.
List of Internet exchanges with traffic graphs
Indeed, we shouldn't forget economic side of this.

Nuclear fission is physically the most powerful power source we can control now, that's true. But it is very capital intensive.

Solution is not a single technology, it's a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, natural gas, nuclear etc.
> and in this case some small segment of the target audience is offering $0 for the content.

There is a segment like this in every market. It doesn't follow that that segment may ethically consume the content at the price they find acceptable. To be morally right, they must negotiate to a price that the provider also finds agreeable. If they cannot reach agreement on a price, the only morally correct thing is to refrain from consuming the content, _not_ to just consume it anyway.
It's not ironic. It's statistics. Advertising works on a percentage basis across a population. Over all, it sells more products. If it didn't, people would stop doing it.

You may happen to fit within a percentage of the population that will not buy the product after seeing an ad, but that segment is far, far smaller than the percentage of the population that will go out and buy a product after seeing an ad.
I've found technical descriptions of NaCl, but still don't get what it would look like in practice. Does NaCl enable languages like OCaml to be used instead of JavaScript to manipulate HTML pages? Or is it like Silverlight, which has its own non-HTML UI widget library and runs within the browser? Or would it run outside of the browser entirely?
I am sure that they are well aware of this. The issue is that the total compute time to compile their build is significant, and significantly (several multiples of 2) reduced by going to c#. Compile time increases development costs, execute time increases hardware costs.
Until recently, I refused to use adblock on principle, because I wanted to support ad-supported websites, even if I didn't like the ads.

Then PDF and flash player exploits started showing up in ads on high-traffic websites. After a couple close calls (only averted thanks to my particular system configuration), I installed AdBlock and FlashBlock. I blacklist both ads and flash content by default.

Websites I can trust to serve me ads that aren't going to try and root my machine get whitelisted so that all their content shows up. All ads based on Project Wonderful fall into this category, since they only serve text and images. Google Ads would have also fallen into this category, but they're not safe anymore since I've seen them serving up Flash.

I'm perfectly happy with sites not liking my approach. They can show me a message asking me to turn off my ad-blocker (and I might, if I'm willing to give them a chance and I'm interested in their content), or refuse to serve me content entirely. That's fine.

If content providers are upset with the current state of things, maybe they should think about how we got here: ad networks are, in general, a wild west in which you serve up unknown advertisements to your visitors without any knowledge of its content. Content providers that care about their customers tend to block any advertisements they get complaints about - which is great - but by using ad networks that run on a 'blacklist only' system, they're knowingly putting their visitors at risk in order to generate ad revenue. By the time a flash exploit makes it onto your advertisement blacklist, your customers have already been hurt.
Etacts Launches First Implementation of oAuth For Gmail IMAP Accounts
Basically, targeted listings PROVIDES value to viewers. Look at Craigs List. A site should have no problem hosting the ads on their own server and being associated with its advertisers if they respect their readers and what they see.

Content from 3rd party ad servers almost universally does not. They are designed to be as attention-grabbing as possible, stealing the resource of attention from your readers, and SHOULD be blocked.

My idea is a web app that big sites can drop on their servers where advertisers are the users. Advertisers get dynamic quotes from the system based on length coverage etc and demand by other advertisers during the same time, and can upload their ads directly to the sites server. Each site hosts the ads from THEIR web server in the same manner as they do their content images (without javascript) so they should be unblockable.

Basically, it's about giving medium size sites an easy option as possible to host ads directly from their own server. I have a few ideas for peer-to-peer ad sharing between websites as well, if anyone wants to bounce ideas or write some code, dhllndr at gmail, or aim: redfoxbeatbox
Does anyone have experience with running large scale deployments of this? I am not a fan of nagios itself (last I looked at the code it was a horrible perl mess), but the idea itself is great.
Advertisers are in an 'arms race' with users. Users become less likely to click on ads over time. Website owners have to increase the percentage of the first visible page over time to maintain the same income from ads. Adverts also become more visually distracting over time for the same reasons.

Witness Adsense, which started off with text only, but now has full flash capabilities.

What is the solution to the problem? I don't think there is one.

Perhaps the rise of the paid app will provide a way to reduce ads, just like cable tv has done, but this will only be a niche. (I'm speculating there.)
It's painful to see so many intelligent people unable or unwilling to analyze the effects their actions cause. If you block ads on sites you enjoy without communicating with the producers of that site, you are lowering the probability that sites you enjoy will continue to be produced. There are several ways to mitigate this effect if you don't like ads:

1) Pay for a subscription.

2) If no subscription is offered, ask for one to be offered.

3) If you'd simply like less offensive ads, ask for less offensive ads.

Taking actions that in sum lower the probability of things you like being produced in the future is incredibly stupid.

"The internet is also a wonderful thing. FIRST a person or company puts a lot of information somewhere that everyone can read it effortlessly for free, and THEN they sometimes expect me to look at their ads. And I can simply choose not to."

Ars Technica doesn't expect you to look at their ads. They expect you to render their ads or pay for a subscription. If you choose to do neither of those, you are a parasite.
Something about this: "...the experience of darkness, even one as subtle as wearing a pair of sunglasses, triggers the belief that we are warded from others’ attention and inspections."

...reminded me of this, from The Catcher in the Rye: "I hate fist fights. I don't mind getting hit so much - although I'm not crazy about it, naturally - but what scares me most in a fist fight is the guy's face. I can't stand looking at the other guy's face, is my trouble. It wouldn't be so bad if you could both be blindfolded or something."
I read the Ars article to mean: "We won't judge you for blocking our ads, at the same time, please don't judge us if we choose to block content from those who block our ads."
Ask HN: How Can Ads Not Suck?
There have been numerous articles debating ad block, ads sucking, etc. Instead of arguing about the way things are (we can't change that), let's talk about the future:

How can we make ads not suck?

Google does well because the ads shown on search bring forth some form of utility. List as comments how ads could "not suck". Maybe a long list of grievances will prompt things to somehow get better. It's better than complaining and arguing with each other.
MixergyNotes on the founder of Etacts
http://mixergynotes.com/howie-liu-etacts/
Yes, it's my blog post. (I would hesitate to call it an article.) Advertising is unethical insofar as it's manipulative and dishonest and invasive. Even if not unethical, it's highly annoying and aesthetically displeasing. Most people probably are OK with ads, but I'm not, so I wouldn't run ads on my own site.

I looked at the ads on Ars briefly, both animated Flash ads, one for razor blades and the other I couldn't even tell what it was selling. I admit to being very emotional about this, and I can understand how some people can tolerate these, but I can't.

I'm uncertain I see your point about books. Are you asking why I can ignore the ads in the back of books, but not ignore the ones on websites? Because it's possible to read the book start to finish without any knowledge whatsoever that the ads exist. It's trivial to ignore them. If the ads on websites were all relegated to some page I had to deliberately navigate to, that'd be similar.
While the idea of increasing nuclear power is one of the leading solutions, it still has to get past some negative fall-out from previous events (i.e. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island). These incidents are the reason why the law (in the U.S. anyway) makes it hard to build one and why there hasn't been one built in the last thirty years. The other critical point nuclear power plant supporters have to break is the popular idea of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard). The fear of nuclear meltdowns is so great that coal-plants can't build hyperbolic cooling towers (one of the most efficient type) because the public at large believe the towers are nuclear reactors.

To sum it all up, until the public at large welcomes the idea of nuclear power and gets past previous nuclear mishaps, you won't see many reactors built in America.
You don't get paid for being you, you get paid to perform a function.

That your public profile rises because of that is a side effect. Anybody in that role would see their public profile rise.

How - and if - you monetize that is up to you, some people feel that monetizing their public image is not in their long term interest, others have no qualms about it and allow their image to be used for product endorsements and so on.

The final decision on how and when you 'mint' your public persona is really up to you but whatever you do don't become the 'face' of anything that you do not 100% believe in. Otherwise you might find that you can lose respect and standing as quickly as you can gain it, and possibly even faster.
The UX does not do the statue justice. In other words, the UX is terrible.
3rd party javascript ads hosted on ad servers should be blocked. The majority of them disrespect web site viewers, so it is a rational decision for web site viewers to block them.

If a site is running ads that they don't mind being associated with and are worthy of reader's attention, they shouldnt mind hosting them directly from their webserver as content.
Are other people getting a revoked certificate error when accessing this with Chrome? Firefox doesn't complain, but Chrome 5.0 on Ubuntu is all over it.
afraid of hack from hacker news reader:)
Is there an example of any news organization like the New York Times that is purely web based? I don't mean in terms of size, or even prestige, but just in terms of content. Does there exist a self-sufficient, general interest, maybe high-end, news organization that is not a part of the old media? There seem to be lots of profitable and high quality niche news sites on the web (obviously a huge niche on the web is tech/gadget news), but I'm coming up blank for anything like a general interest news organization.
Why does the answer have to be invest in tech?

Microsoft throws off something like $14B in free cash flow. They could use their toll booth-like cash flow to acquire good businesses that offer nice, steady returns, in areas outside of tech. There is some logic in the conglomerate model after all. Go buy a big insurance company.
Inform sites which you enjoy of this opinion. If you don't, you're just reducing the probability of sites you like existing in the future, which is stupid.
Doing targeted advertising that is utility is the best way to make ads not suck.

The main reason advertising is annoying is because we are looking for something else, we don't need it right now, or its the wrong audience.

If you had a huge spare tire and wanted rock hard abs, and the advertisement could prove the safety of your purchase, you would say "HELL YEAH!"

When I was 16 the advertisement for Proactiv was very engaging. It worked and I was amazed. I'm no longer a zitty teenager so now I find their advertisements annoying.

I recently joined the Spiceworks team, and it is free software. It is advertisement driven, but most in the case where you need it. It is IT management software. As an example, if you see your SQL server getting slammed, you could see an ad that offers you RAM for that specific machine. Does this advertisement suck? Probably not.

One reason advertising could suck is due to audience. If you go to Digg (which has a wide audience) you are going to get wide or undirected ads. This is why targeted advertisement is all the rage these days - because its less annoying, and more to the point effective and win-win in more cases than not.

I'd say to make advertising not suck, don't involve yourself in communities without a common interest or goal. If you are an IT manager and you are in an IT community, you will more than likely get IT advertisements. If you are watching MTV... well...
Their 'test' solution sounds like the way to go. If they figured out a decent way to simply bust the whole page for the adblockers they should just go for it.

If I went to a site and it was totally broken due to my blocking the ads I would either a) whitelist it or b) stop going there. Sounds like exactly what they're trying to get users to do.
I'm guilty as hell! Make every comment count will be my new phrase until I forget it and revert to crappy comments...
I don't think it's fair to say that.
I rather like Ars. The content is a bit varied in quality, but I do have a look at it most days. The best content makes me reminisce about Byte Magazine.

The ads are annoying. The alternative is $50/year. It just feels like quite a big sum of money when the extra benefits are not that interesting. $50/year that also gives me a good daily iPad edition, with articles I can save, without ads and full archive access may start being in the right realm for me.

Maybe I should just pony up the $50 to experiment, I did save it on my dropped newspaper subscription recently. :)
What if someone made a browser plugin where every time an you visited a website it gave that website 1/1000th of a cent (and took 1/1000th of a cent out of your paypal/google-checkout/etc. account), and in exchange that website saw the plugin and served you a version with no ads. How many people would choose to use this plugin?
I organize Hackers and Founders SV, and I'm finally heading out to NYC in a couple of weeks to check out Hackers and Founders NY. I'm really looking forward to checking out the startup scene.

BTW, I'd love to be able to crash on someone's floor the night of the 25th after the meetup. Ping me if you're interested. I promise to be a good guest. :)
Yes, he said, but still - if you cannot patent your idea, then somebody who ALREADY has the resources will snatch it up and use it to dominate the field BEFORE you can acquire the resources to do it youself. And so you end up just giving somebody an idea for free, and you get nothing in exchange for your years of work.

This is assuming your competitors have the ability to predict which ideas in the pool of not-so great inventions idea that would have ultimately brought them nothing if they were to use it.

In business you relies on the ignorance of others to establish yourself, and your ability to predict which inventions will rake in the cash.

That is how entrepreneurship work.

In any case, you advocate the existence of patent system. It is your burden to prove it against the grain of established literatures.
Yup, that's a feeling I have too. One thought is: how can you involve your community more to decide which ads are useful and get feedback?
Hear, hear.
> Ars has no right to demand your attention on their ads, so fuck'em.

Ars isn't demanding that you pay attention to the ads, they're asking you to simply render them, so that their ad provider counts the impression and pays them the tenth of a cent that covers the bandwidth you just used to load the page. That doesn't seem like much to ask.
You should block your competitors from seeing your AdWords ads
Well then don't go to the sites with ads you do not like. Just close your browser, or press the back button the moment you see an ad that disgusts you. And then don't go to that site again.

The way I see it, there is an implied contract between a website and a viewer. The website says, "well you get to look at my content for free and you will not have to pay for all the work I have done creating the content and serving it to you, but in exchange you should see and consider the various advertisements and deals we are offering."

Again you do not have to use the website, but if you do you should not block the ads.
As far as ideology goes, I suspect mine would be the opposite of your. I am a pro-capitalist, going as far to assert that nobody have the right to make money from their work. However, on the flip side, I also argue that everyone have the right of property. I have no qualm in letting engineers starve themselves working on an invention. However, I have qualms about people destroying my community in addition to my business which I have established without the monopoly mechanisms.

I love open source software so much that I gladly stake my whole business model on it, to the point of wishing to experiment without the protection of copyright.

Those patent entrepreneurs wish to live in a world that would take my property right and freedom away in favor of their monopolistic business models.

This is liberty versus economic security.

I rather be a free dog who don't know what his next meal at, then an enslaved dog who get a small but a sure pittance.
To be clear, you still need to give Etacts your password IF you use Google Apps (not simply gmail), right?
Stanza on the iPhone turns to the next page with a single touch on the right side of the screen (and turns back a page with a touch on the left.) When I first started using Stanza, I was annoyed that it didn't scroll. But now I definitely prefer the touch-to-flip interaction.

It looks like the iPad is going to have a swipe-to-flip interaction. I'm wondering if I'll like that as much as touch-to-flip.
Microsoft Small Basic
If you don't get an offer, check out :

http://www.airbnb.com/