skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's amazing how few supposedly educated people understand the concept of sunk costs. What's the best time to stop flushing money down the toilet? Do you think we should continue longer because we have been doing it for so long, or would it be better to stop now?
Mine was taken over by a movie trailer that bogged down FireFox and couldn't be closed.
Are you getting paid by impressions or actual clicks?

If you are getting paid by impressions, I do feel a little bad for blocking your ads, but you have to understand that the reason I put up the adblock is a reaction to ad-abuse. I'm sick and tired of seeing ads scrolling up and down and across the page, interrupting your content. I'm sick and tired of pages taking 30 seconds to load because of ad-bloat, and I'm sick and tired of the generally bad experience that ads are bringing to me. Don't even get me started on pop-up ads or ads with music or talking.

If you are getting paid for actual clicks, then I don't feel bad at all. I never once, in all the years I have browsed the internet, clicked on an ad, so you aren't gaining anything from me anyways.

As an aside: I can't name a single ad that I have seen over the past week. Marketers thinking that ad-views are somehow equivalent in impact of billboards or TV ads are stuck in some dinosaur age of marketing and I ought to open up ads in pure spite.

The crux of the issue is that too many sites have abused its readership by thumping our heads with pointless and useless ads. The day I see you respect me is the day I'll respect you. This is no way implies that Destructoid is abusive, but unfortunately, you have been caught in the maelstrom. However, since I only click away the ads that irritate me, I find it odd that a site that I have never been to is apparently completely blocked as I see no ads. Choose your advertisers wisely and I may not even block (or notice) their ads.
>I kind of wish the majority of people would use ad blockers. Ads are a pretty flawed business model

Compared to what?

>There are better ways to make money

Like? Asking for charity on Kickstart or Donations?

Because surely asking people to pay for casual web content is not one of them.
3D printed rocket engine competition
I believe this is technically known as a market for lemons, and we all know how those turn out.
It tests esoteric (aka borderline useless) knowledge. There's a big difference between that and, say, knowing how to use something actually useful like double pointers.

I had no idea how the C parsing algorithm worked for +++ et al, and I'm an expert C programmer. Then again, I'd also never use such ridiculous constructs in production code.
Ironically, the linked page doesn't show the tweet that was posted just a minute later, which is quite relevant. (https://twitter.com/shurcooL/status/308949225276862465)
Rake task typo corrections
Nerd Politics - We The People Petitions of Interest
Huh, I didn't know that. I just checked the standard and you appear to be correct, so, just for the record:

"... if the keyword static also appears within the [ and ] of the array type derivation, then for each call to the function, the value of the corresponding actual argument shall provide access to the first element of an array with at least as many elements as specified by the size expression."
I've used both, and prefer JavaScript. I do agree both have their issues though, you need to learn to avoid the dangerous stuff.
Nope, AC21 allows you to transfer even if you have applied for permanent residence. There are restrictions based on where you are in the process and that the new job meets certain criteria.
I was visiting this article from an ipad, a device that can't have an ad blocker by design. I land on the page and start reading only to see the page disappearing and slowly being replaced by a slow and clumsy "mobile friendly" version of the site. Even so i persist in trying to read the article, except it got cut off after the opening paragraphs by a "read more" link, even though i had seen three ads so far. The read more link just refreshes the page, but doesn't reveal the rest of the article. To get to the content, i had to tap on three vertical bars hidden in the corner, and then choose the link to the desktop version. I assume that most people would have given up long before that.

So, here's my advice to destructoid: if you want ad impressions, try delivering your content on ipad in a way that's fast and readable, because on an ipad people don't block ads.
Only nil and false evaluate to false. Because there's no distinction between nil and non-existent elements, checking the existence of an element with a value of 0 requires that 0 evaluates to true, so you get this situation:

while 0 do print("loops forever") end
while not 0 do print("does nothing") end
> it almost impossible to force people to view ads that they don't want to

It's trivial to do, technically. Just embed the ads with in-page (not externally linked) JS, or proxy 3rd party ad network requests through the hosting server, or splice them in on the server side, etc. I think we are going to see this widely adopted if the adblock rates continue climbing up.

This will obviously rub the adblock users the wrong way, but if you are generating the ad revenue from a lot of one-time visitors, it should be fine. Then, to not alienate repeated visitors, offer a paid, ad-free subscription. Perhaps of a freemium flavor. Done.

Now the question is why we don't see this being done at scale yet?
Was hoping to see some relation with the big G, but the author instead used small g, which depends on all kinds of things and cannot be treated as a constant.
Are you saying that history is in all cases harmful for practical purposes? Or are you saying that it is harmful for most people, who are dilettantes who read a few pop-histories and think they understand the time period? If you are arguing the latter, I agree. True ignorance is preferable to false knowledge.

But for the serious student, history can be very informative and useful. True knowledge takes a lot of time. One must find good sources, learn the context of various writers and how their biases might color their writings, learn how to separate the creditable writers from the propagandists, and read both primary sources and the finest secondary sources, And finally you must be willing to recognize the limits of knowledge, at some points you must admit that you do not know what happened and never will. But if that is all done, I think history can be extremely valuable for understanding the present and making good decisions going forward.
Destructoid is much more ad-heavy than other similar gaming news sites, and they tend to implement the ads in a way that hits browsers hard performance-wise, so that the site is just painful to navigate. I stopped going to Destructoid a while back for exactly this reason.

It seems that such heavy ad bombardment has been chasing their regular users to block ads. It only makes sense.
This?

http://www.tiledtext.com/

Youtube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=t...

And the original HN post:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5306155
Wouldn't it just cancel out? If you have twice the impressions but the same number of clicks, prices for an impression would simply halve?
Want to echo this and also recommend reading the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, for some tactical advice on how to 'serve' others in small ways. Good luck!
P.S. If there were an easy way for me to pay a nickel per article I read (or however much), instead of having ads all over the internet, I would jump at that in an instant.
I opened up the article without ad blocking to see how polite the ads really were. I saw two of them, both in the sidebar (which is a good place for them). The first one was just a static image; I can live with that. The second had a big red blinking button on it, which naturally draws my eye away from the body text and drives me nuts.

These guys aren't as bad as some, but it looks like they're not just side victims.
Yeah, I guess it's easier to fit "log in with Facebook" on a button than it is to fit "let us hijack your FB feed, then sign in with Yahoo".
Elon Musk Keynote Presented by Oracle
TIL that you can do this. Awesome.
I've been using http://beermenus.com for years to find awesome beers near me. They've got both web and mobile versions, which is nice.
Yes! Thank you - I've been searching for about an hour, and this is just awesome.
You can compare lots of historical societies, or lots of historical companies, or whatever. Why shouldn't that provide valid data - more than anecdotes, because you can have a large data sample?

Also, even an anecdote can often prove something, namely the possibility of one thing. If you find one society or company that functioned in a certain way, it is a valueable data point.
You know, if ads like the ones with smiley faces adware, or any colorful animation, wouldn't exist, I may actually surf the web without adblocker. Alas, the admakers themselves are forcing me to use one.
Vest Test: 1923
I really want to hear the hypothetical ways in your mind; so far you have said nothing of value; just talking bad about current way of doing things instead of suggesting a way companies selling products could reach the market without using ads.
You seem to be assuming that the only way to block ads is a blacklist of domains that JS won't be loaded from.
That doesn't really help. A simple crowdsourced "see an ad? highlight it and it goes away" system would work against that. Adds have content, and that content can be used to find and block them, even if their source is the same as the page content.
Thiel's coming off a bit hypocritical. What was innovative about PayPal? Facebook? Apparently there was enough innovation there for Thiel to invest his time and money.

I think to non-technical people there is nothing innovative about Twitter, Facebook and most of online services offered today. To techies innovation is in the infrastructures these services are built on & sometimes made publicly available to others (ie Amazon).
Minimalist Business Card
Just block the site completely to everyone using ad-blockers, just do it; let them cry without regret for they are killing your way of sustain. If they want to enjoy the site, they have to take the full package. And perhaps ad-free paid version for anyone who really want those gone.

But don't use Flash ads; those can have sound and can slow down the PC and don't work on many devices, making it a very high price to pay for visiting your site.
I documented the tests on my project log:

https://scott.mn/projects/luasynth.html#filter_effect

In short, I ran C and Lua implementations of the same command, 6 times each, using the built-in "time" command in bash. Averaged the "user" time for each implementation and compared the results. As input, I used a 2m:38.040s long song, 44.1 KHz stereo, converted to a raw file with 32-bit float samples, and I redirected output to /dev/null.

For the first benchmark[1], which was faster for LuaJIT, I actually messed up: I compared the "real" time rather than the user CPU time. But as I recall, the "user" times bore the same relationship, and there was very little deviation among the six trials. If you don't trust me, feel free to do a more rigorous test!

It's worth mentioning that the effect for which LuaJIT beat C was a simple gain, so what was really being tested was a loop that multiplied a bunch of numbers by a (within the loop) constant. The second test in which Lua was a factor of two slower may be more representative.

To build the code, clone the graue/synth and graue/luasynth repos on GitHub. synth includes build instructions, while Luasynth merely requires you to install LuaJIT and run the script.

[1]: https://scott.mn/projects/luasynth.html#lua_beats_c
Star Trek 'holodeck' in the living room?
Looks like they skipped over two open source XMPP+OTR clients for iPhone/Android: ChatSecure (https://chatsecure.org) and Gibberbot https://guardianproject.info/apps/gibber/

Disclosure: I am the original author of ChatSecure.
I have so many plugins in my Firefox for blocking stuff, that I'm not sure how to whitelist anymore. The other day I wanted to whitelist sleepyti.me to see how he had placed the banner, and realized I couldn't.
The problem is that bad sites with horrible popups, popunders, page takeovers, random words highlighted to look like links but are really ads and all sorts of other crap drive people to adblockers.

So people just install it and forget it so that sites that aren't horrible and don't totally ruin the consumer experience with ads suffer.

And if a site is "nice" and doesn't put that crap on their site today, who is to say they won't tomorrow? So users never bother to turn off their ad blockers.
Do you have traceroutes that demonstrate that the path goes through Cogent and AT&T in both directions? Asymmetric routing is extremely common for things like this.
Its true that getting to the truth is very hard when you're studying historical events. The people who record such events are likely to have certain biases, some of which may seem barbaric in our present time. But that does not mean that you throw out the baby with the bathwater.

I would argue that the biggest achievement of the human race has been our ability to archive our past and learn from it, allowing one generation to build upon the achievements of the previous one. This is how scientific progress takes place; unfortunately, it is also how myths and superstitions are propagated, such as religion.

Anyways, addressing your specific points: history provides guidance to those facing similar situations. For example, James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, was influenced by the exploits of Robert Clive, of whom he had read in great detail. On the other hand, Hitler failed to learn from Napoleon's mistake and made the same mistake of trying to invade Russia.

Be it Military, Science, Economics or even law, history provides a rich database of prior experience from which we can draw lessons from and continue to make progress
The most popular ad blocker, Adblock Plus, not only supports blocking URL patterns, it can hide elements within a page via arbitrary CSS selectors. Any large-scale attempt to bypass Adblock Plus would be a cat-and-mouse game requiring advertisers to constantly change their DOM "signature" to keep ahead of the filter writers.
The best podcast on history: Hardcore History, by Dan Carlin. He also has a great podcast called "Common Sense".
I don't block ads as a way to rid sites of revenue. I block because of cookie abuse and internet tracking. Secondary is just play annoying ad abuse. I cringe when I see users surfing unfiltered with IE and ads are everywhere. The internet isn't here for you to make an easy buck off us, it's to share and spread information, plain and simple. Don't try to make me feel bad for your poor business model.
Adblock can already block stuff like this, easily.

It's much easier to update ad blockers to block new ways of displaying ads, than it is to come up with new ways of displaying ads that can't be blocked.
Ad blockers can block this the same way they currently block JS links, by searching for ads embedded in the page and removing them. If the ads contain any sort of recognizable div wrapper, blocking them will be trivial.

But even if they don't, you should be able to deploy a statistical ad blocker in the same vein as Paul Graham's spam filter (which is mainstream at this point).

None of this stops the situation from continuing to be a cat and mouse game, but hopefully the above points demonstrate that the game is far from over for either side.
Which sessions of SXSW Interactive 2013 are worth attending?
Expert Social Media Tips to Consider as You Build Your Startup Brand
It's been public since 2008 :)

This may work better for me since I've used phrases from out-of-print books and some are latinized phrases in Sinhalese. I prefer to use random passwords that I can add to a master file that's PGP encrypted, but in the absence of that, I can tailor this to a site and add character rotation.
Outre Mer by Paul Bourget
http://books.google.com/books?id=5lQTAAAAYAAJ

It is the account of a French man traveling around the United States in the 1890's It's not about organizations so much, but is a wonderful book about the general life of the times. It is the closest thing I have found to a time machine that let's you experience turn of the century America.

Democracy and the Party System in the United States: A study in extra constitutional government (1910)
by Moisei Ostrogorski
http://books.google.com/books?id=HmkPAAAAYAAJ&dq=democra...
This is a very colorful political history of the United States. A lot of information about how the democratic institutions worked in practiced and evolved away from their formal and intended structures. Definitely a great antidote to the traditional civics class view of American democracy.
On a website that is pretty much unusable on an iPad, I can understand why people would block ads. No one owes someone else ad views; if you aren't making enough money, charge.
4 Free HTML Books - Linux Links - The Linux Portal Site
> Amazon does this when not defaulting to free 5-7 day ground shipping after promising free shipping prior to putting it in cart

If you have the $79/year Amazon Prime subscription, then they _do_ default to the "free" 2-day shipping on eligible orders. I don't think they're trying to optimize the flow for occasional shoppers.
I don't know what kind of block you use, but adblock plus can be used to block certain elements on sites -- it works even for non-ads such as facebooks "spam your friends inbox and alinate them all" box.

So I don't really care where the ad comes from.
How a U.S. Citizen Came to Be in America’s Cross Hairs
Every time people ask 'What is the point of this?' I remember the Mathematician's apology : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematicians_Apology. Many ideas Hardy felt were useless then, now provides the underpinning for some very useful applications in the real world.
I tried switching my outbound traffic to the customers in question over to he.net (with a static route, which I know is the dumb way to do it.) with no improvement.

Hm. I need to learn more about bgp, specifically tags and communities, can you recommend me a book?
This is already being done. A physicist I worked with used statistical methods to decipher part of the script used by the Indus Valley Civilization:

[0]:http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/apr/23/indus-civilisa...

[1]:http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~rao/indus.html
flatter [1] is basically exactly that. You said an amount of money aside you want to spend each month and can then flattr either individual articles/postings or projects. The amount each project receives from you depends now on your monthly account / number of flatters.

http://flattr.com/
Just do the work
If we're plugging our lua-powered projects, I made a MUD server: https://github.com/endgame/MudCore

I chose lua because of its built-in coroutines. For a simple mud server, blocking until the next line of input is ready works really well. Because it's not preemptive, you don't have to worry about locking. Because MUDs are so niche these days, you don't have to worry about the userbase scaling out of control.

Never did get around to writing a mudlib, though...
Like most sites with ads, the moment you land on them, they sell you to one or more of their advertising partners. They don't ask your permission, or give you an option. The only way to deal with this is to use an ad blocker.

So the guy wants to make money selling ads? I want to make money watching the TV. I'm not going to write a blog post complaining that I can't make money by watching TV. I'm going to find something that people are happy to pay me for, and do that instead.
Glad to see the OpenOffice has it's priorities straight now that it's operating under the flag of Apache. Maybe they should just give up on the code altogether and just become a branded fork of LibreOffice.
I notice that all of those things are internally simple. No bloat required.
I think one day we'll head in the direction of paid content with an app store-like micro-payment system that allows us to chip in .05-.25 to view a single article if we deem it worth it. I'd personally rather do this than pay a $10/mo subscription fee for content I won't use every single day.

Been thinking about how the architecture for this will work for years now, lol. If I don't get to it, I hope someone executes it someday.
> This means that we're working twice as hard as other sites to sustain our company

No it doesn't, they have to deal with ad block too.

> Read more at http://www.destructoid.com/half-of-destructoid-s-readers-blo...

Maybe if you want your community to like you, don't use evil.js

> At first, it was about 10%, then 20-something. When I dared to blink it just increased faster. Over a few days it never got better, averaging at an ominous 42-46% block rate.

Why did it go up so fast? Maybe you used bad judgment and put up an ad that annoyed people?

You need to respect your users and treat them better before you get to complain.

I run ad block but i never tried to block the ads on Daring Fireball for example. Don't be one of the shady sites with crappy ads and evil.js
It would be nice, to create the logo with OO itself, but there is an issue with that: recently I created an infographic with OO, which worked surprisingly well, but when I tried to export the graphic, I ran into serious issues. Every exported vector format looked differently, so for instance in the pdf version the gradients were messed up. Exporting to bitmap was also odd. For example it rendered the red spellchecker markers into the image...

I would prefer to see such issues solved first, so that we can create the logo in OO itself.
Facebook’s shark-jump advertising moves
RuntimeExceptions – To try-catch or not to catch?
Awesome, thanks for posting!

It's interesting how the core game was basically finished very early on (week twelve or so), and then the rest of it was "just" polish. So in this case, the proverbial last 20% are really 60% of the work.
> I can't name a single ad that I have seen over the past week

Ads aren't trying to get you to remember the ads, they're trying to get you to recognize, like, buy, etc the product. That can happen without remembering or actively paying attention to the ad.

I won't go on a hunt for a list of research confirming it, but there are about hundreds if not thousands of examples explaining that marketing does work, whether its audience thinks it does or not.

tl;dr Even if you believe you'll never click an ad, you're probably still hurting the advertiser and therefore the publisher.
I thought you meant Andrew "Dice" Clay so that it makes a phrase like Hickory Dickory Dock...