skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I personally am of the opinion that "targeted advertising" _is_ the problem.

Random generic advertising is fine. It isn't as profitable but it doesn't exploit a person's mental weaknesses. Targeted advertising is straight up exploitation.

Kids being bombarded with ads for plastic surgery nonestop on TikTok, radicalized individuals being targeted with fear-based ads. This is super toxic. And while advertising is a tale as old as human commerce, such insane targeted advertising is not.
More people should: https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-your-giving-public

(Written years before I started on ads at Google)
>eventually you'll either find something good or figure out something else to do.

Or they'll die of exposure on the streets, or worse. People, in general, can't be expected to solve fundamental problems of the distribution of wealth, opportunity, education, healthcare, food, property, knowledge, power, and comfort in our society by job hopping. The median job in America is a bullshit job for a petty dictator which is a direct result of terrible policy over decades.

The "or figure out something else to do" at the end of your comment is telling of these systemic problems, even if you did not intend it to be such a profound criticism of society and culture.
I think that's the curse of our social media. At best you get a binary Like/Dislike mechanism, at worst just Like. There's no contextualization of those choices.

In this case, PG's writing is directly related to the discussions around MightyApp even though he doesn't disclose this fact. I think that's important because it's seemingly a conflict of interest being passed under the auspice of objectivity.

I also think it's important to discuss MightyApp, not for it's merits but for it's implications.

Unfortunately social media doesn't offer a "look at this shit" button along site the like button. I venture to say if they did there'd be a lot fewer likes.
Full example doesn't have this mistake, so I would assume it's not in production :) https://godbolt.org/z/KWYEW3d9s
I've found r/ethereum to be pretty level-headed.

> Ethereum could be extremely valuable but that its value is currently hurt by the speculation on Ether making transactions far too costly

FYI the price of ETH does not affect the transaction costs. The fee market is independent. There's solutions to this in place and more being worked on though. The 3 biggest contributors will be EIP 1559 which is meant to level out the fees and make them more predictable, L2 rollups which scale through sidechains that have the each of their blocks confirmed on Ethereum's L1 with proofs, and sharding of L1. Ethereum is currently in a growing pains phase as these L2 options gain more traction/adoption, UX for them improves, and all activity migrates there. The end goal is for a majority of interaction to occur on L2 with L1 being used mainly for a settlement layer.
I’m only 29, but the impression I have received from my youth, from parental and grandparental anecdotes, and from photographic records is that offline advertising in at least Melbourne, Australia is worse than it was, with a key tipping period being somewhere around 15 years ago. As the most significant example, public transport vehicles and locations had no-to-minimal advertising 20 years ago; now they have extensive advertising surfaces, inside and out, and the big posters at most of the train stations cycle between multiple ads and blah blah blah. Awful stuff.

My guess is that offline advertising has become cheaper and so they do more of it.

I live out in the country now. There are no outdoor ads here. I like it.

(The local weekly paper is called The Advertiser: an apt name, for it’s about ¾ ads. But I don’t look at it. My life is basically completely ad-free except when I go down to Melbourne.)
You could already download most of the comment data from them by querying their API. Similar to profile pictures on Gravatar, emails were only hashed with MD5. They’re easy to reveal with some wordlist attacks.
Not the first time, not the last time. We were misogynists when we were criticizing Elizabeth Holmes. It comes with the territory.
Look for unglamorous "tech enabled service" companies. Companies who's main thing is the problem domain they are in, supported by the their special-sauce automation. They are more likely to need people who can do more than program, have a broader set of life skills, and aren't in the game of competing for hungry young coders who really want to get to FAANG. I have assessed many of these for my work in private equity acquisitions, and some of the most niche, unglamorous companies can be making boat loads of money. They are willing to pay well to hang on to their people, the technical bar is lower so you are more likely to be able to be a solid contributor early in a tech career, and they usually have an older and more broad-backgrounded staff. Many of them also seem like very nice places to work, where people go home at 5pm and don't have pager duty... :-)

From my conversations with them, a lot of them hire in non-traditional areas too, because they know they can't compete with FAANG. So look broadly for their posts.
GomorraSQL – Understandable queries in Napoletan language
At the end of the day, it is what it is.
My family pays for youtube premium (https://www.youtube.com/premium/family), it's $18/month for 5 people. They also get access to "youtube music premium", which is basically a spotify clone (so unlimited music with no ads). It's quite a good deal imo
If that were the case you’d expect them to reply to the several beta test requests this rich/dumb early adopter has sent over the last year+.
The irony for me is that they're not being asked to learn something new, they're being asked to learn something vintage.

A full modern gnome/KDE desktop environment might be a lot more user-friendly than, eg, blackbox - but they also price you out of the 20-year-old laptop. OP wants to have their cake and eat it - and they can, but it will require a bigger plate.
I mostly agree with you, the problem is that the alternative is worse.

Every time in history that we've institutionalized suppressing speech in support of official truth, it has gone horribly wrong.

The problem with nuanced issues like this is that there isn't really a "right" or "wrong" answer, there's just bad and less bad.
I can always read source code. Any programmer worth a damn can. Docs are out of sync with the code the second the code changes in any non-trivial way.

However, code always documents how it works (sometimes poorly, of course).
Or just post a set of links refuting the most common claims. As you’ve said by now the topic has come up frequently enough.
What a nothing-burger article.

Just sounds like more lock-in with Google, why is this interesting?
We should test everyone in India once a week for Covid using rapid at-home tests
Who is arguing that? I never seen any credible evidence that it contributed in any significant way to the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Hi!

- What was the fail rate?

It takes me a couple of hours to go from 0 to a half-baked ~2m track. Using this process, I ended up creating more than 100 tracks, from which I selected 8 for further development and mastering. 6 of them ended up in the album.

- Did you ask friends for opinions on half made tracks?

Yes, I have some friends who work in the music industry, and they served as my test bench during the process.

- You have some ear for musical finesse - you do seem to know something about the process of making music.

Thanks! I been actively listening to music for a couple of decades now, and got decent at the task of identifying why I like a track or not. Just tried create a tool that allowed me to leverage that experience :)
> can you honestly not understand the dangers of the path you're going down?

I downvoted you, and I consider your question here hyperbolic. I don't think you are being disingenuous, I believe that you sincerely hold your belief, I just view your concerns as a modern day Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling. I've looked at the same set of data and come to different conclusions than you.

I don't think we'll see eye to eye, and I don't think it's likely we'll convince each other of anything, so I don't know how worthwhile this comment even is, but I thought I'd pass it along as a "Here's one reason why people might be downvoting you and here's how you are being perceived."

Maybe that's not valuable, maybe you already know that's why people are downvoting. I dunno, it just felt like you were accusing your downvoters of not being rational actors, and I suspect your downvoters look at you the same way?
I find this genuinely hard to believe about Gates. There is a lot not to like about Microsoft but I find it hard to believe the net good of who wins in technology is going to be larger than projects like curing Polio, effective sanitation in places that don't have it, all kinds of energy technology to fight global warming and so much more. I'm not saying Bill Gates is a good person or that his actions since redeem bad business practices at Microsoft, but in terms of net good done in the world it's hard for me to believe we haven't come out ahead.
Simple Trick Can Get Any Baby to Sleep
> Why raise wages if you can force people to choose between starvation and working two jobs until they break of old age or die of a very likely preventable disease that they could not afford to diagnose and/or treat?

Well they obviously got what they deserved from not working hard enough. Must have not been told about bootstraps

/s
Because it does not express how hard it was.
I'm too busy tilting at the 'just say use instead of utilize' windmill, but your cause is worthy.
I do this with all my websites. At the end of the day, a custom font just isn't very important for the vast majority of sites.

I do purposely leave Ubuntu out most of the time, because I find it's a pretty ugly font. I'm an Ubuntu OS user myself.
For the record, Critical Theory doesn't really refer to Baudrillard or Lyotard - it's a term from Adorno, I think.
Hi - I love what you built. I wanted to know if I can buy the RCA chiptune jack or one like it? Id love to see it working IRL. Im not near Innsbruck atm but if I can buy this or a similar product that would be neat. Thanks!
Did you have a competing offer to get those sign on RSUs at Google?
You're right. The post is better without that final tag. I've removed it.

But for honesty's sake, I will note here that, originally, I ended the parent post:

> Maybe the absence of these reminders is one of the things that's wrong with North Americans.

I do think there's a problem to do with being historically adrift, but I won't belabor it here.
But the main thing that leads reasonable people to dismiss new ideas is the same thing that holds people back from proposing them: the sheer pervasiveness of the current paradigm.

This sounds like the sort of nonsense used by scientific crackpots to attack their critics for "not understanding" them.

Sure, your idea may be revolutionary and actually upend everything, but the overwhelming likelihood is it won't and you need to go through the same evaluation process as everybody else and not be so salty about that.

Incidentally, I find the MightyApp concept interesting and wish it well in forging a new market, but this sort of rationalisation as the "main" driver behind reasonable scepticsm is a very poor defence.
That's why I never became a cook. Jerks kept eating my food!
Code Counter
> I see ads as a force for good

> I feel OK about working on it because I give half my salary to charity

Cognitive dissonance that occurs between sentences is particularly hilarious.
> Our passions are easily manipulated. When you have sacred cows and official truths, you enable the very thing you're trying to fight.

There is no arguing whether or not the Holocaust happened. That's not a debatable thing but something that affected millions of people. There are too many impressionable people on the internet and often a weak education system. How else do you suggest we prevent history from getting rewritten by a bunch of internet flashmobs?
So when my phone battery is dead and I try to log into my computer to tell everyone I’m going to be late, I can’t message them because my phone battery is dead. Awesome.
"Mrazik" was another text game in this genre - you were some kind of agent infiltrating a Soviet military base.
I have a 1 man shop start up ( marketplace) and i charge an upfront fee to list. The very fist thing an interested party asks me is, what isn't free to list? The big boys platform in this space make it free to list and they make money from ads. A small time guy like me in a niche market has to charge an upfront fee to pay to put food on the table for my family and i don't run ads on my site and i don't use cookies. Most people are so USED to free that it's a shock to them i charge a fee to list on my site. Advertising has SHAPED their behavior. Thats my 2 cents. I have been in business since 2016. Never ran third party ads on my site.
They will probably define a list of acceptable fonts and let the browser choose. See this article… https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/css-system-...

body {
font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, "Segoe UI",
Roboto, Oxygen-Sans, Ubuntu, Cantarell,
"Helvetica Neue", sans-serif;
}

Hopefully moving forward the browser writers will settle on a name for the system fonts, sort of like the "system" is implied with the "-apple-system" vendor specific tag in the article.

It looks like the browser vendors tried with "system-ui", but screwed it up badly with Windows and designers are afraid to use it now.
Show HN: Refinery (YC S20) – edit your website in-browser, push changes live
Hey HN, I'm Edo, one of the co-founders of Refinery (https://www.refinery.so/). We founded Refinery to make it simple to edit your website's frontend without needing to write code.
Refinery is a chrome extension that lets you edit your website in-browser and then lets you push the changes live instantly.

After building a Shopify app, there were so many times when we wanted to quickly change some copy here and there, but didn’t want to have to start our dev environment, open our text editor, make the change, create a branch, create a PR, … you get it. Luckily our team is 3 software engineers, but it got us thinking around how our first marketing or sales hire would make these changes.

The current version of Refinery essentially turns your existing website into a CMS. Right now you can use Refinery to tweak copy, but more functionality is coming soon. Specifically, we’re working on adding the ability to tweak CSS, add links & tooltips to copy, and run A/B tests on different possible tweaks… all which can be done in-browser.

We’ve on-boarded a few companies in the past week where Refinery is typically being used by non-engineers (founders, PMs, & marketers) who don’t want to bother engineers with small copy tweaks.

Installation is really easy. Install our chrome extension, add a JS snippet to your head tag, and you’re good to go:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/refinery-editor/pmfpnhdkcikalnldmkmcofllbdbannhh

We’d love to hear what the HN community thinks! If you’re really keen on trying it, email me at edo@refinery.so to skip the waitlist.
I have noticed that every time someone mentions China in negative light, they get downvotes. Interesting.
There certainly were other factors, but people have been quite vocal in their enjoyment of the new syntax.

I think the ML people like me are kinda used to not getting their favourite syntax. Alas!
If I'm trying to read, watch, or listen to something of a thoughtful nature, something that requires my utmost attention to grasp or process, and reflect upon it, ads are destructive. They destroy the experience and slow or limit the learning process. If everything we do is interrupted, it's an attack on our thoughts and disrespectful of our time.

Our Internet experiences are becoming Ray Bradbury's worst nightmare, interspersed with its "Denham's Dentifrice" ads and Facebook Mildreds everywhere.
>Listening to a bunch self-proclaimed "thought leaders" tell almost biblical tales about their struggles that lead to their dubious success, followed by an "ok, let's reset the room" and then a bunch of back patting about how great and positive the group is

I don't understand how there's so little criticism about this desire to keep such (apparently) valuable knowledge from "thought leaders" confined to an exclusive club. I always sensed the overwhelming consensus among us all (tech people, namely) was that such information should be made free and accessible? Is being a member of some dumb hyped up app really more interesting for so many of us?
The articles said that the industry has been talking about micropayments for 25 years and says it's hard. I think the real issue is that no large-ish tech organization has any incentive to invest in micropayments.
That's a question I want to get paid six figures to answer.
There is no mention of ethics, and the privacy discussion ends with "I don't think my work in advertising is something harmful to offset." The author seems to think there are some good ideas to increase privacy that he is working on, but the existing problems are not serious enough to be considered "harmful".
This is what made me subscribe too. I'm glad to see others enjoy it - it's a very well done video.
Upvotes don't mean that something is perfect or worthy of worship. It means that something is interesting or (partially) insightful.
They're only a PITA to me because my keychain isn't close by. Otherwise, I touch the phone to my keychain and that's it, I'm authenticated. What's painful about that?
I like f.lux too. My monitor is 100% sRGB, so the settings I chose in f.lux are Daytime: Daylight, Sunset: 4000K, Bedtime: 3000K. I have it disabled for fullscreen media players.

What I look for is warm, but not so warm that colours get wildly distorted.

The lighting one uses in the room also needs to be complementary with the f.lux settings.
Not quite - They're getting it equal based on population (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_dat...). Ontario and QB are getting far more doses than Nova Scotia, for example. But the hot spots are in some major cities and there appears to be no way to divert the NS vaccine to the GTA, even for a short time.

And demand isn't in all of the big cities. Just the ones where the provincial governments went early on removing all restrictions on high-contagion events (ie. indoor dining & church-service-like indoor gatherings). Montreal had the largest outbreak per capita of the second wave, and they're doing fine right now because they didn't do these things.

And, Ontario itself is only about 38% population of Canada. The GTA is about 18%. Large, but not close to half.
They have it already in WebAuthn in a completely siloed way. That is, they only implement hardware token support and if you want software tokens, they will make your life painful.
Blatant self promotion, we do this at some scale:

https://floathub.com

And there's a guide to using our open source software-only option on a Pi:

https://medium.com/@floathub/open-source-boat-monitoring-7ea...

Contacting the author of the parent version now to compare notes :-)
Maybe the tech was not yet ready?

Fake it until you make it is still a thing in Silicon Valley.
This isn't loading for me(mobile or wifi), which I find weird since it's hosted on substack.

Edit: seems like all substack pages are down for me (except home). Not a good look for a service that hosts something so simple to get right. And too bad for this guy who is missing out on the HN subscriber wave.
Lojban is the first thing that came to mind as I saw this. An excellent choice.
Good question. One potential albeit less-than-perfect method would be a premium registrar that has a contractual control in place to unlock or modify the domain, with verbiage in place requiring the registrar to have a well documented policy and procedure for dealing with take-down orders and that they will advise you unless they receive a NSL. Even this comes with the risk of human error and the risk of them receiving an national security letter if based in the U.S. or E.U. This is a single point of success.

Taking the decision away from the registrars would require having different accounts with multiple registrars in multiple regions, different payment methods and use a unique domain on each registrar to have a status consensus API or TXT records for people to validate against. I would probably just put a simple cryptographic public key in a TXT record on each of the domains and publish a simple script that uses "dig" and "openssl" to verify sanity. To avoid relying upon EDNS0 one could break up the key into multiple TXT records. This may be more work than people would accept and assumes you have a technically inclined community. This also assumes the members of your community chat with each other out-of-band on something like using signal or some other secure means of out-of-band consensus. This is also not perfect but may be sufficient.
The stalking is the problem, but the ads are too. Ads have been a problem well before tracking was a thing.

Since at least the 1920s (I’m thinking of Edward Bernays but there are probably earlier examples) the goal of advertising is to manipulate consumers into making irrational decisions. The majority of ads make us feel inadequate to get us to buy something, like the only the thing that will make us whole is a new instant pot or whatever.
The browser chooses the default sans-serif. If you want the system font, you need to use "system-ui" for Safari/Chrome and "-apple-system" for Firefox (Chrome also has BlinkMacSystemFont). "system-ui" is becoming an official standard, so its only a matter of time until Firefox supports it. https://drafts.csswg.org/css-fonts-4/#system-ui-def
It's not necessarily true. Some people are conservative and have forgotten the reason why.
Git and KBFS only.
Spotify is a bit of an oddball in the podcast world in that they're an all-in-one closed platform with a player and a production arm. They can easily feed user behavior data back to their podcast producers and advertisers.

Most podcasts and players operate on RSS feeds though. While they can very well target things via IP addresses and user-agent (no getting around that), podcasters and their advertisers don't have the capability to read/write persistent tracking data on the client, at least as far as I know. An advertiser would be hard-pressed to see that I personally listen to Stuff You Should Know and This American Life, even if the advertiser had contracts with both. The medium really hobbles how much tracking can be done.
Completely disagree: https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-your-giving-public

Publicizing altruism helps build a culture of altruism.
IMO these are weak examples.

- Are you suggesting that your friend got divorced so that she could sell her ring, because an ad told her she could sell her ring? I doubt that was the straw that broke the camels back.

- The android phone has utility beyond it's addictiveness. Yes homeless people need a phone.

- Re fusion centers: ads targeting data is a relatively shitty surveillance too, the three letter agencies have much better ways of collecting this data.

- Targeted alcohol advertising I'll agree is an issue, but if you're an alcoholic, you can't really escape the ubiquity of alcohol everywhere.

I think the adverse privacy impact of targeted advertising is pretty overblown, but it so happens that ad targeting is so effective it has the illusion of being surveillant. The actual data being collected is anonymized and not personal.
Not with me they're not, no.
I’m sorry, but the reason he is getting voted isn’t “ads vs no-ads”, it’s the inability to acknowledge that ads are not the problem.

Ads are fine. Stalking people to “optimise” those ads isn’t.
Good news: we've paid for it, it was the costs associated with learning from these kinds of failures.