skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Second, sell a killer screencast or e-book"

Thanks for providing a spark of inpiration here! When I was in college I earned extra money teaching private guitar lessons. When I finally moved on a student of mine was kind enough to photo copy and hand me to a transcription of every_single_lesson I'd given them over three years. This stack of paper has been sitting on my shelf for nostalgic purposes only ... until now.
That quote seems to amount to "download the damn ads anyway, even though it'll be a cold day in hell that you find one useful, so we can get paid." Am I the only person to whom that seems arbitrarily close to coercing users into participating in a scheme to intentionally mis-price advertising rates?

Also, "hurt a site financially" seems a bit hyperbolic; ad-blocking users are priced in to CPM. If a content site's audience intersects largely with adblock users, and they don't like the revenue picture, they are more likely to succeed by exploring alternate revenue models or move to serving different audiences, than by convincing their users to change.

[edit] I'm not trying to make a judgment on adblockers being right or wrong, just pointing out what I see as inconsistencies in the argument against them.
The narration about the relationship between Microsoft's "garages" and its entrenched corporate structure reminds me of the Xerox PARC story. All this invention and innovation which is orthogonal to the established corporate bread and butter.
No, there would obviously be no market whatsoever at that point. The step for making most useful things to make absolutely anything will be much smaller than the step from here to making most useful things.

I didn't realize that my 3D printer has now morphed into matter creators.
I've come back to this list several times since I first saw it last week. Doesn't it freak you guys out that you're mining for ideas within such a small pie-slice of the human experience?

There are lots of things that can bring a startup down. In my experience most founders are so close and in love with their precious idea that they only pursue evidence and opinions that support their position. So even if there is an opportunity to ask "is there a critical flaw that realistically should keep me from even starting it" most geeks will find a way not to take it. That's why Steve Blank's "customer development" reads as radical to many geeks but it's beyond obvious to people who develop products in the real world.

Fact is, most startup concepts are doomed before the first line of code is written; not because of poor execution, but because the ideas just aren't that great — and they only ask people who love them "too much" to be objective for their opinion. When I tell would-be clients that their idea is not going to be a home run, that they should stop while they're ahead and take the time and money the were about to throw away and take their family on a nice vacation... some get angry, others thank me, and one fella bought a third of my company.

TL;DR version: if your idea is on this list, you're not trying hard enough. Nobody needs your Basecamp clone, but everyone sits on chairs. Design a better chair.
Because of this discussion I decided to unsubscribe (Google Chrome Adblocker https://chrome.google.com/extensions/search?itemlang=&q=...) from both EasyList and Chrome AdBlock custom filters and just custom-block ads that are offensive.
This is the kind of innovative, interactive advertising that we need to see more of. Forget banner ads, engaging users is so much more effective.
Realize that that idea is capitalism* or at least the inevitable side-effect of capitalism. And that the altrusim idea is socialism.

* as practiced in real life not some wanker's theoretical definition.

PS it was probably selfishness and greed (combined with tribal "us vs them" so that (generally) you'll steal from the fuckers in next valley over but not your children) that helped our species destroy and/or exceed our competition.
Wikipedia is the closest thing I can think of. Fark/Slashdot etc, don't generate their own content.

Granted people don't normally go their for "news" but it keeps up with major news stories like earthquakes, the Olympics and other sporting events, economic issues etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_crisis_of_2007%E2%80%... (ongoing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_earthquake (recent)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Olympics (future)
This is a little bit silly. By not watching ads, I am screwing somebody? How about by watching ads I screw the people who paid for the ads, as there is no way those ads would affect me in a positive way? I don't see how one is worse than the other. If a web site asks people who hate ads to watch ads, they are screwing the people who pay for the ads. They should be thankful for ad blockers, because at least they prevent me from getting negative emotions towards the advertised stuff.

If I block ads, the site should have a higher conversion rate, so they should be able to ask for more money for the ad impressions.
Anyone here applied?
Why Ad Blockers Work
NaCl is a way to run native x86 instructions in a secure manner inside the browser. As such, it has more in common with Silverlight than JavaScript. The difference between NaCl and Silverlight is that you can use any language with NaCl, provided that it compiles to a verifiable subset of x86. The downside, obviously, is that while Silverlight runs just fine on any platform with a CLR, which in practice means desktops and Zunes, NaCl only runs on x86 systems that have the NaCl plugin installed, which currently means the dev channel of Chrome.

As such, I view NaCl more as a research project right now than anything else, but who knows? If Chrome OS takes off, NaCl would suddenly be a very serious target, even if no other browsers endorse it. Meanwhile, it's still fun to tinker with.
By contrast, books (for example) are awesome. I pay for a book, and then I read the book start-to-finish with no ads

Thats the issue, you paid money for the book, it's the business model the author used to make writing the book worthwhile.

Historically the Internet doesn't seem to support content producers this way.
I think the point about books was "I pay for a book".
The lone inventor probable doesn't exist at all. We often observe that ideas are found independently and nearly simultaneously by several people. (IIRC, pg says so in one of his essays.) That would mean that when an ideas is ready for prime time, it will be discovered anyway.

Assume that the absence of patents could send some would be lone inventors to poverty, while allowing the ideas they would have found to be found anyway. That's probably not OK for most people. However that's also a net benefit for society, and so is most probably OK. But "benefit for the society" is a vague and abstract notion. The "lone inventor" is something you can understand, feel, identify yourself with. I think a good argument against software patents would have to make people cry just as much.
I'm running a pokerbot and specifically need people not located in the US (for casinos refusing US players). I would be able to pay you a couple hundred USD/month, possibly more, for almost no work on your part.
robopoker@yahoo.com if interested.
FYI: Finding it odd that there is no "sign in" button.

Tried putting my e-mail address back-in on the home page and I get "need oauth token"
Somehow though it has overtaken Google in the past few months. (Personally I am betting they'll converge again.. )
Yes that was the point.

Books have no ads in because it's paid for.
You should want to share your idea with all of those people who are also working on it

I don't know you personally, but if you owned a business that had sunk $10M into developing that concept into something patentable, I doubt very much that you would be interested in sharing your idea freely with your competitors.

Furthermore, the reason behind patents is definitely that they will benefit society: it's just that the patent holder gets to benefit first
6.1% is a huge amount of our power? The US generates 3x more electricity from nuclear than hydro: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2008_US_electricity_genera...

Most of the cost-effective places to build hydroelectric dams are already utilized. Also, the lakes created behind the dams displace people.

By choosing a more expensive form of power generation, the economy is impacted. This is an often-overlooked external cost of renewables.
Ask HN: an ad blocking compromise?
Out of curiosity: how old are you?
Not in this case. All this does is enable Time Machine to see all network drives instead of only those advertising themselves with a certain magic handshake.

It's a bit annoying but hey, somehow apple must sell those Time Capsules, right? $250 in profit per shot is nothing to sneeze at after all (cf. "printer cartridges")
This is just good advice in general.
Then assuming the people that block ads are the same that have adverse reactions to them advertisers should like ad blockers.
Exactly. Their statements aren't about ethics, they're about business.

When they tried not serving content to ad blockers, "there was a healthy mob of people criticizing us for daring to take any kind of action against those who would deny us revenue." This ignorance of Ars' business model led them to write a post to try and explain to people how they use advertising, and why ad blockers are bad for the future of their site. Every time you load an Ars article and do not render the ad, you cost Ars money and actively drive their business into the ground. Anyone who understands this argument should also understand that deliberately harming the business of a site you like is just dumb, especially over something as minor as "I don't like to look at that!"

It's interesting to me that Brian's post completely ignores Ars' content-blocking experiment, especially because it was the entire impetus for their post. To me, it seems like a perfectly reasonable policy (although I think redirecting users to a subscription page rather than showing them nothing at all would be more effective). I'd be interested to hear if he thinks it's as "garish and hideous" as displaying ads in the first place.

edit: thanks for responding, Brian. I think discussing this in the post would have made your argument a lot stronger.
Thanks Gecko. What about UI? With Silverlight, one would write XAML to define a webapp's UI elements (e.g. forms). Is there a NaCl equivalent? (Please excuse my rudimentary knowledge of how things work under the hood.)
It's the internet, though. Am I not free to maybe even switch off JavaScript as a whole, or use a browser that can only display text? I thought the general understanding is that you may watch internet sites with whatever browser you like. Unless the site specifically implements restrictions (IE only, for example).

But in general, sorry, but it can't be unethical to switch off JavaScript. And the ethics of pushing ads into people's faces are also debatable.
Stop making the world a garish and hideous place to live by flooding it with ads.

There are people so soft that they consider the world a "hideous place to live" because of some advertising? There are people who can barely eat each day without getting so offended by a few commercials.

It so happens that advertisements are devastating to my well-being.

This is crazy talk. Is it even possible to argue against someone who resorts to saying they get "very emotional" when seeing any sort of advertising or that advertising "devastates" their well being? Is he scared of animal crackers as well?
The real culprit isn't people blocking ads; it's the free-market nature of internet economy that allows companies/websites to rely solely on advertisement, causing internet ads to be so populated.
The argument here is that even if the user never would have responded to any of the ads anyway, the website loses money when users don't view the ads. I call bullshit.

An advertiser is going to pay as much for ads as they can profit from them. At the end of the day, the advertiser wants to spend less on ads than they make in profit from running those ads - they don't care about # impressions, # clicks, or whatever. If an advertiser can make $1.01 profit for every 1,000 random ad impressions, they'll pay $1 or less for those 1,000 impressions. If I can identify half my audience that will never respond to the ad, I'm essentially making $1 for 500 impressions instead of 1,000. I'll happily pay $2 for 1,000 of those more effective impressions.

I don't care if you get paid CPM, CPC, or CPA. You aren't making money of the users who don't respond to the ads.
Even accounting for employees being costs, though, the valuations seem like they must be based mainly on a prediction that either Google is going to grow a lot, or those other companies are going to shrink. Wal-Mart and IBM both make around 2x Google's annual profits, for example (around $13.5b each vs. $6.5b).
The Christian Science Monitor (a really informative paper, not evangelical, despite the name) shifted online in 2009, ceasing print for the daily issues, at least.

Salon & Slate come to mind.
Dashcode seems to have been stale for a while now, so I'd be hesitant to bet on it (you can't really extend it, as we don't own the source).
I didn't know whether to believe you or not, until I looked at the traffic from compete.com:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/stackoverflow.com/

It does look like their traffic has plateaued and is perhaps trending down.
> This is a little bit silly. By not watching ads, I am screwing somebody?

Yes. As Ars said explicitly in their post, every time you choose to block the rendering of an ad on their page, their ad provider does not count the impression, and they do not get paid anything. So yes, you're directly screwing Ars by costing them money, denying them revenue, and nullifying their business model.

> If a web site asks people who hate ads to watch ads, they are screwing the people who pay for the ads.

In the first instance, "screwing" means "putting out of business". In the second, it means "mildly inconveniencing".

> If I block ads, the site should have a higher conversion rate

Again, if you'd read Ars' post, you would know that they are paid on impressions, not conversion rate.
Why complain about it? She can't control whether others give her attention. I respect your comment, but one thing is a little . . . off. How would you like if someone pointed to your most prominent project to date and said, "that was probably his peak"?

On the actual article - I would've found this interesting regardless of who wrote it (even though, yes, if it hadn't been by her I might not have seen it)
what the eff?
if ads make wonderful software free (twitterrific 4 iphone), then sign me up.
Microsoft actually has started a garage concept with a real garage inside one of the MS buildings... Some of the things that have come out of there: http://www.officelabs.com/Pages/ConceptTests.aspx
Do you realize, that not blocking the ads but simply ignoring them just pushes "the hurt" down the chain? In this debate let's not forget the whole point of advertising—to sell some product. So someone pays money for ads, some site gets them, maybe for clicks, maybe for just views. The point is that if I see/click on the ad but don't buy the product advertized then site owner profits on acciunt of ad buyer.
So what's next—the urge to feel guilty if you don't buy everythig you saw an ad for?
It is about time to end this obsession with ads as the only way to monetize…
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

!?? Is this April 1st or will you next claim that the letters "g" and "x" upset you too? What about the number 283?
Profit is not wrong. Profit is not screwing someone. Any freely contracted trade results in a net benefit for both parties. It has to by definition, or else it wouldn't be entered.

When someone says ads are "screwing them over", I have to laugh and wonder what kind of life that person leads that annoying ads are considered an atrocity. If you want to see being "screwed over", look no further than our tax code. Our tax code is a system where one does not own 40% of their life, where there is an explicit understanding that anyone above a certain income level is not going to get out of it what they pay into it, where there has become a rational expectation that the money will largely -- to the order of 90% -- be wasted on bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. In all of the battlefields of life, you choose online advertisements to rail against? Hell, give Sally Struthers a dollar a day already.
Toyota Simulator
While I am in agreement with the sentiment, these "its good for society" arguments don't really move anybody. Just look at the music industry and it's pleas against piracy. Most people don't view their actions at such a global level; they do what's best for them and those close to them. If ads disturb them, then guess what? Ars technica will be releasing a few more staff. And most people won't care either, they'll just move on to the next thing. Thats just nature my friend. A taste of natural selection: adapt or die.

It would be much more practical to create things that boost advertising's strengths, but mute the weaknesses, rather than trying to convince people that current ads are good/tolerable. Like you pointed out, Google Ads are a step in the right direction, but obviously still lacking. The market always points you in the right direction, better to listen than to fight it.
> both animated Flash ads

Perhaps they change the ads based on region. I see 2 image only ads - no flash.

EDIT: ah, sorry. Now I see one of them as a flash ad (a rollover one)
Sounding off on blogs definitely furthers the momentum for change but a lot more would be needed to effect a change of view on issues that are so deeply rooted in U.S. history and legal tradition. So long as this remains primarily an ideological position of the free/open software movement, and nothing more, it will likely languish along with the old Jeffersonian sentiment that today sounds so quaintly out of date. I am not saying this in a patronizing way. For something to come of this besides just sounding off, a major shift in mindset has to occur in society generally, and I don't see any evidence of this as yet.

The free software movement is not the only movement to reach this conclusion.

The libertarian tradition itself has now reached a point of consensus regarding the idea of intellectual property, which is to abolish it.

This is a revolution that took place over ten years. It was slow and gradual, but now it is at the point at which all of mises.org, a libertarian think-tank is now licensed all their content under creative common attribution. It also cumlinates with mises.org carrying two book making the case against IP, which is Against Intellectual Property, and a non-Austrian book, Against Intellectual Monopoly.

The free software movement now have allies with the radical libertarians and some of the key major thinker of libertarianism.(Ironically, it shared so many computer programmers as to blur the line somewhat)
I'm speaking more generally, and more long-term. If the average content model on the web was "carefully vetted ads, of legitimate interest, not annoying, not privacy-compromising" then far fewer people would opt to use adblock in the first place.

For an individual site to get users who are already using adblock to stop, they may have to resort to the type of pleading or content-blocking Ars Technia did.
Wow, it seems to be ad-blocker day :)

Yours seems to be a pretty well reasoned idea, I think it was Patrick that first suggested that ads in fact function as a micropayments service.

I think the whole adblocker debate is overrated, after all it's not like everybody is using an adblocker, it's just a percentage of the users. And if your business suddenly fails because of that percentage then you didn't have much a business to begin with.

Starting a service on 'eyeballs' is like working with an unwritten contract that you expect the owners of those eyeballs to honour. But they weren't party to the negotiations, and if they disagree they can simply erase that part of their screen, and really, not much is lost.

After all, those ad-conscious enough to use a blocker are probably not exactly the people that would have clicked those ads to begin with. And most ads nowadays are performance based so the loss is really not nearly as big as some people make out.

Blaming ad blockers for failing businesses is dishonest because it will change the bottom line only so much.

A much bigger problem is the fact that a good bit of the advertising market is not transparent to begin with and that so much of the content out there really is hardly worth the bits it is stored on.

Videos on news sites are a nice example of where we're headed, non-skippable ads tightly coupled to the content.

The web equivalent is an interstitial page that you have to sit through before being allowed to view the content you came for.

Personally I have no problem with advertising, as long as it is relevant and not 'in my face'. If I get a negative feeling with a site a few times when visiting because of overly intrusive advertising then I simply stop going to that site.

Salon.com is a nice example, I used to read it frequently, since they started their overly intrusive campaigns I haven't been back. Chances are they've reverted in the meantime but I'll never know.

As for the blocker-and-micropayment system, I don't think it will fly, people that go for freebies are not going to be turned in to people that pay, no matter how you dress it up. Think about it, simply seeing an ad is already too expensive sometimes.

Until they have absolutely no other alternative. And on the web there are so many places to get your 'fix'.
A key here is that Ars is trying to find another way - their $50/year subscriptions. See http://arstechnica.com/subscriptions/

Clearly not enough people value what they do enough to warrant paying $50 a year (I don't, but I only go on their site a few times a year and am totally cool with seeing the ads so I consider it great value).
> She can't control whether others give her attention.

He did say "I just can't stand that people post the most minute things she does", which is a complaint aimed at HN (or other sites') posters, not at her.

I'd say the article isn't without interest, but I agree with the commenter that it's not really HN material: it's on a very specific programming problem, and it's not something that'll make you think or gain new insight. Compare to the Knuth submission. It'd rather call it 'stackoverflow answer' material.
NaCL programs are x86 programs built with a special version of the GCC-flavor toolchain, provided by Google, which creates ELF binaries that are especially easy to analyze. Before being run, they're passed through a verifier. The major difference between NaCL x86 and bare-metal x86 is that NaCL programs can't call out to the operating system (or do anything outside their code segment at all).

Those limitations don't rule out most programming languages; NaCL-flavored Haskell should be just as doable.

The programs themselves do in fact live in a process outside the browser.

The big limitation with NaCL is that virtually none of your site's visitors will have it enabled.
Cloning an existing service is a sure way to fail.

Looking at how existing products service a market, finding their collective blind spot, and then kicking its ass; maybe you'll be successful.