skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alright. I'll break down the Clickz example since it seems the most relevant to your "current practices" at Mashable.

I honestly just googled "sponsored posts Mashable" and went down this list:

http://mashable.com/category/sponsored-post/

I didn't bother looking at the dates.

Clickz:

http://www.clickzlive.com/

http://www.clickzacademy.com/training.php

They sell information-oriented products for marketing and are reporting on the size of such markets. That is a huge, massive conflict of interest.

It is like me saying "Look at this huge market over there, here let me help you learn how to tap into it...for $199" and then publishing it as if it was a newsworthy article.

So you have a company that is pushing a product while simultaneously publishing articles related to the value of that product without editorial oversight.

Does that not seem like a conflict of interest to you?

Simply blindly syndicating that sort of thing is the same as native advertising imo.
$80 bucks for an hour[0] for Sam Zeiger's tank described in the article.

Shoot, I don't see the harm in checking it out. I'll try to start getting back into meditating more often and check it out in September. At the very least, it sounds very interesting.

It reminds me of a less intense version of the "world's quietest room" [1] which is apparently 99% sound absorbing. Of course people seem to have the ability to 'float' for quite a bit longer than people can make it in that room. Perhaps the salt water helps?

[0] http://www.bluelightfloatation.com/fees.html

[1] http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2012/04/05/how-long-could-yo...
The patent system is truly broken.
Unfortunately, the "nobody owns" feature of EMail is something Slack lacks and probably always will. Email is a federated, decentralized protocol of distributed mail servers that anybody can set up. Any email server can participate with any other email server. That's something that Slack will never have (it does interface with XMPP and IRC, but the service itself is centralized.)

It is hard to overstate how critical this fact is to Email's future. If you look at most of the canonical Internet protocols (SMTP, HTTP, DNS, XMPP, IRC, even BitCoin) - they have this fundamental feature in common. Even though they're part of the application layer of the Internet, they've become fundamental protocols that other technologies rely on. They are part of the infrastructure of the Internet.

I say this is someone who just started using Slack and loves it. I still can't see it replacing email, though.
I have been putting together a list of software to look at for a tech-based activism/volunteerism site I'm working on. This looks like it could be very useful and I'm looking forward to checking it out this weekend. Thanks for this!
Focus Fusion tried that, and it netted them only $180k plus some private investments.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowerthewo...
How Code Empowers Ben and Jerry's
> I must say that "Email killers" are really going to be successful.

I remember people saying that in about 1998. Email killers have been successful, but not at killing email.
First of all, what is the problem you're solving? who has that problem?

After knowing who you are targeting, find out where you can reach them (reddit, forums, HN, facebook, linkedin...) and start talking with them.
BP wouldn't say "we want a solar energy series but you can't say anything bad about us".

They'd say "we want a solar energy series, and we might want another in three months depending on results". The writers would simply not bite the hand that feeds them.
What would be interesting to me would be a Seattle<->Spokane HS line. Maybe it could run along the Empire Builder route? The cities are separated by around 280 miles using I-90 and flights take around an hour tarmac-to-tarmac. If you flew tomorrow the flight would cost around $200 RT. But you have to fly via Seatac which isn't exactly convenient if you're going to the city. The Amtrak station is right downtown in both cities. Such a connection could bring some much-needed economic development to Spokane, and might even turn it into a bedroom community of Seattle for some people - the economics might work out considering that a $1M house in Seattle might run you $200K here.
Extremely impressive. Going to be wild to see where this area of research goes in the next 1-3 years.
Nice! Also nice that these days Assemblers get written in JavaScript. ;)
Data Science Weekly Newsletter – Issue 38
For me, it's a matter of ethics. I would be spending time/money on figuring out better ways to destroy things or kill people. I'm not sure I could sleep well knowing that.
As much as i love anything that aids fighting the complexity, i think that it's best to address the root cause.

That said, i don't have any strategy at hand regarding browser complexity, but i believe as it gets more prominent, the change will come. At least i hope that the browser i'll be running in 5 years would be a saner piece of software.
Show HN: Need Android beta testers for our app, a GPS alternative to iBeacon
Another interesting perspective on diversity.

> I remember perhaps more than anything customizing the characters for some of the first 3D online games available and editing my skin color down to ... down ... to ... tan? Light tan?
> You have the technology to edit the hue and tone of the skin texture, I know you do because I can make it as dark as tan or as pale as snow, but you can't give me just one shade deeper? It's not technologically possible? Why can't you give this to me?

Why indeed.
Funny Gorilla | Picks nose and eat it
And what I'm saying is that regardless of the ethics of it, why should we regard it as in any way plausible that this company would pivot into weapons research?

By a huge margin, the most plausible military application of anything this company develops is "a fusion reactor on an aircraft carrier."

And I say that as someone who regards it as deeply unlikely that this company will create any major step towards a fusion reactor.
I think the problem is most brands don't pay for sponsored content to "have a good article written about them". They pay to push an agenda. They are completely different things, but at the end of the day the paying party is expecting a positive result on their investment.

This is bending the public perceptions on a subject in a subtler, but still pernicious, way.
Excellent article, and I feel it also applies to me, so I wrote down some thoughts. maqr's comment about this being dangerously close to social engineering rings very true, although I doubt that it's intentional/by choice. Personally I've never had a lot of natural conversational skills, so I find myself falling back to old tricks that work at times when I'm not confident, and sometimes they happen to be tricks that relate to social engineering. I'd like to think that this doesn't make my interactions less genuine. Finding a polite way to proceed through the conversation has not been a problem for me since I learned this.

Lately, rather than moving towards politeness, I'm trying to move away from it. The examples of always replying positively to people, never steering towards or even approach hostility is a very, very tiring path to walk. In my experience, it does pay off on the whole, but I've spent a lot of time talking to people that were just never 'interesting' or 'rewarding' to be with, simply because it always seems easier to please than to confront.

These days I'm trying to move towards blunt honesty with people as soon as I can (after an initial period of polite conversation to gauge if they'd be comfortable with it). So far, I think the people I know appreciate me more for it, and the people who wouldn't appreciate me for it are not in my life.

Or perhaps it just feels good to try something different.
Orbitera Adds Pair from Amazon Web Services to Its Executive Team
It's probably not possible at this time. The whole map is just a giant demo level which evolved (and still is) along with the gameplay and other features (like spikes and lava).

I've got some rough sketches for the final world as well as the powerup placement, since there are no text boxes in the game, everything will be explained through level design or other hints like enemies or neutral creatures performing certain maneuvers for the player to imitate.
Actually, that's exactly what we are trying to do with AirDispatch [1].

We started out intending to "fix" email with a better protocol, and ended up creating something much greater.

The core problems that we tried to solve (to help define "better") were:

- Security: encrypting and authenticating your messages

- Control: the sender hosts the message, so they can edit or delete them before the receiver sees them

- Flexibility: all messages are, in fact, just key-value stores, so any type of data can be sent on the protocol (whether it's Mail, IMs, Vines, Instagrams, or whatever the flavor of the week social network is)

I think it's a great product, and we are going to start the developer release of the client (Melange [2]) tomorrow.

[1] http://airdispat.ch

[2] http://github.com/melange-app/melange
I use a product called The Cat Locator for my animals (dogs included). It's a radio beacon (with an antenna woven into the collar) that sends out a ping every second. The range in the city on a halfway decent battery is one city block. Batteries last about one month. The housing on the collar is about as big as a stack of four quarters. It's a bit expensive but I never want to lose an animal again.

http://www.com-spec.com/thecatlocator/intro.htm
The Faces of Ultraviolet
Using RFID-tagged physical objects to represent the audiobooks is an interesting twist. Why did you decide to do that rather than add "next book" and "previous book" buttons, and use text-to-speech (or even pre-recorded audio files) to tell him which book is currently selected? After all, your approach increases the amount of maintenance your brother has to do, and makes the whole assembly a lot bigger.

EDIT: I'm also curious about which products you looked at and why you rejected them. For example, did you look at any dedicated talking book players, such as the Victor Reader Stream or the BookSense?
Look at Mashable's own copy wrt sponsored advertising,

> Every brand is an expert in its field [1]

Which is patently false. We can say, "well they didn't mean every brand, that'd be ridiculous!" and yet, the integrity of their own copy doesn't hold ... which shows that they can't even be honest with themselves/partners with respect to being objective and honest in their content.

[1] http://mashable.com/advertise/desktop/#brandspeak
If anyone wants to go back more, AtariAge has good tutorials on 2600 game programming. Nothing like counting clock cycles to make sure the CRT beam is far enough over before changing the background buffer :)

http://atariage.com/2600/programming/
I'm truly not trying to be rude, but if you agree with the above point, then why did you make it publicly available? Only two outcomes can come of this:

1. Nobody uses it, for the reasons posted above.

2. People actually use it, which is bad, for the reasons posted above.

What you were trying to learn from this "experiment"? And what did you actually learn that is valuable to other people?
C was a bloated language for targeting the Gameboy[0].

Only slowly after the 32bit became mainstream, did professional game developers started adopting C.

In the 8 and 16 bit days, C (and Pascal dialects) were viewed as C# and Java are nowadays for game development.

[0]Using my 80's developer hat.
What you say is extremely interesting. But I have to ask, do you have a source for any of it? Where can I read more about it?
Fat binaries are not by any means unique to NeXT or an innovation of NeXT and its descendants. Classic Mac OS had fat binaries in the early 90s for the 68K -> PPC transition. Other platforms have had fat binaries too.
I originally thought the same. Instead of immigration numbers decreasing during those years, it's possible a lot more people were born in the states relative to the number immigrating then. It turns out, though, that foreign-born population did actually decrease substantially:

http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0029/...
> How well that is actually maintained is up to the sales and editorial teams striking the deal, of course.

(emphasis mine)

Just so we're aware he's already in partial agreement (using his own words) with your point.
I have found it helpful to approach your first customers from the mindset of a consultant... who happens to have most of the work done already. Take your pre-built software and integrate it to be a solution for your customers. You'll learn along the way what people really want from your product and after a few beta customers, your product will mold to fit what most people want to buy.
Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models.

The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.

"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?"

Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.

Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...
Funny name: is it open to other CDNs too?
Depending on the military application, it might still have a halo effect.

Great skill in manipulating magnetic fields would probably be useful for: MRI. Detecting landmines and UXO in a field from a UAV or otherwise safe distance. Detecting submarines, including those by terrorists or rogue states transporting NBC weapons.

While those are military applications, they're fairly unalloyedly positive.

Even the hypothetical plasma rifle isn't necessarily a bad thing; if a plasma rifle allows rich countries like US, Japan, etc. to overmatch poor countries and thus prevent war, that's kind of a plus.
.. not to mention that there's a lot of overlap between aerospace and F1 engineering. Plenty of the engineers (even the trackside ones) started out studying aero engineering.
"Societies with fierce weapons are empirically safer than those with outdated weapons" - correlation does not imply causation.
As a reader the key thing for me is transparency. If Dell purchases a traditional banner ad on Mashable I can reasonably assume that they had no input on the article, even minimal input about the article subject.

But native advertising, for the lack of a better work, is sneaky. For all I know Dell may have simply suggested the article subject. Or they may have submitted spelling or grammar revisions. Or written the entire article at Dell corporate headquarters.

The only bulwark I have, as a reader, is your word. A promise that your editorial process will not be compromised by advertiser interests. The editorial process is a black box that I can't open or inspect. And that should concern me.

I recently watched a PBS Frontline documentary on the creation of the mass-surveillance programs under Bush and continued under Obama. One scene stood out in my mind. The editor of the New York Times had a story, maybe as early as 2003, that contained Snowden-esque revelations about the burgeoning mass-surveillance programs. After a meeting with top-level officials, including members of the President's cabinet, he decided to axe the story. The NYT editor had an opportunity to bring the public into the discussion about mass-surveillance. But he made a mistake - he held back. His poor judgement allowed the program to continue to grow unchecked for nearly a decade.

The point is, if the editorial process of the nation's "paper of record" is so amendable to the interests of the state, why should anyone believe a tech publication like Mashable is any less amendable to corporate interests?

The only way to restore trust is to verify. Add good start is to embrace technology like the AdDetector plugin. Publish a list of URIs of all articles that contain native advertising, so tools like AdDetector can easily identify and label such articles. Let us know how many words are written by staff, how many are written by the advertiser, and who decides the subject matter. Give us transparency.

On one level I really don't care if Mashable or any other publication re-prints corporate-written articles whole cloth. Just tell me about it so I can make an informed decision about what I'm reading.
You don't even need to go as far as the Seychelles to dodge taxes - there's the inter-state tax dodging version called "Delaware" (although the incentive is a bit weaker).
Atari Archives also has quite a good selection of old programming books for the later models.

http://www.atariarchives.org/
I was thinking about this the other day. I think when I checked last the US death toll was about 3 times that of Sweden.

This is all good. The swedish government has been spending ridiculous amounts of money building away death in traffic.

But, I suspect the americans probably drive a lot more than the average swede. I think if you change the death toll from per-person to per-driver the numbers will change and if you change it to per-driven-mile I'm not sure there will be a difference any more. Anyone know if there are numbers on this? Can't be impossible to produce. Maybe you can estimate using national gas consumption?

edit: Found it, turns out: nope. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm
BP doesn't talk to the writers; they talk to sales. The hand that feeds the writers is very specifically not the advertiser. I can't speak for other companies, but our sales team is good enough to recognize that an alternative energy series sponsored by BP is ripe with potential for conflict, and would likely steer them in a different direction.

I really do hear what you're saying, and I 110% agree that it's a legitimate concern. If I saw a post on solar energy sponsored by BP, I'd be looking for the hook, too. That's why you need a good business development and sales team; recognizing those conflicts and working around them before they become an issue is a critical component in making this kind of thing actually work.
In my experience working with large media content sites, the advertiser does not have any sort of "sign off" but they do want to make sure the content is in-line with what they paid to sponsor. The leverage comes from the fact that if the advertiser doesn't like the final output, the dollars move elsewhere next quarter.
There are probably a ton of variables but I bet some people don't even realize that the red line means anything. Let's say literally everyone did know it though.

Just having to right-click is enough to dissuade me. For people who have to look at a keyboard when they type, do they proofread what they typed?

Typing in anger/annoyance and getting your text out there faster is the biggest reason I can think of for my own typing.

I wonder also if being used to txt/chat abbreviations makes you ignore typos and move on more.
I wish I could buy these custom chassis; I didn't see a link in the article.
The only reports of looting and burning were from Sunday.

The subsequent peaceful but heated protests, on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights (and, doubtless to be repeated tonight) involved no reports of looting and burning.
While you're here, can you negate all the ridiculous negs against my account ("rankban", slowban, problems submitting articles) that have accrued over the years? You've had less-than-competent predecessors, I'm afraid.

Thanks!
Mobility as a Service
Well, they used to be written in Basic as well, so given that JavaScript has apparently taken Basic's role....
> There's no point in denying that and Go will end up like both Java and C++, both of which didn't have generics in the beginning - and so it will end up with a half-baked solution ...

[I take no position on whether Go should have generics]

Go has one thing that neither of the other languages had: Rob Pike. This is not meant with any disrespect to Gosling or Stroustrup, and I don't know Pike personally, but he has a reputation for sticking to his convictions even (especially?) when they are contrary to "market pressure".
I seriously think that what we have is great. Send this text from here to there. It's so simple that almost anything can be done with it. If only social networking had followed the model of a simple protocol with distributed servers, we would have a serious alternative to Twitter's API restrictions and Facebook's privacy invasions.

That said, if we could redesign email, my quick wishlist would be:

* Better encryption. No surprises that a HN comment thinks we should encrypt metadata as well as contents, and have something better than the way we have to exchange GPG keys at the moment.

* Better security. Easier to guarantee that the ostensible sender of a message really did send it. Also, help prevent the viral problem of malware, which spreads through inboxes protected by rubbish passwords.
Rad. I'm writing a Z80 emulator in Haskell. I'll be sure to test Tuff on it once I'm to the point where graphics are being drawn.
I actually like that C++ enforces a struct to be at least a byte long because it means you can have pointers to them and they will compare as non equal even if you do not know the type. That is actually quite handy sometimes.

I wonder why Rust does not do that.
If native advertising is nothing more than brands attaching their names to articles, why don't these publications simply implement a way to buy ads on specific articles, or on articles with certain very specific subjects? As in something like, "Whenever you run an article whose main subject is adult ADHD, we will pay a premium to occupy all of the available ad placements on that article."

That's what I've never understood about native advertising. If it's as pure as its proponents say, why is it even needed? Why does a print magazine need a "native" article when they could sell a massive, full-page ad on the page right across from that article? Doesn't it accomplish the same thing? And if advertisers aren't somehow exerting an editorial influence, then what exactly has been gained here?

It seems to me that there are two options: 1) "native advertising" is merely a hypeword that makes it easier to charge a premium for ad space, because it gets buyers irrationally excited. 2) The thing of value being sold w/ native advertising is actually a very tiny amount of editorial influence, something which otherwise is incredibly scarce and, ethics aside, would understandably carry a very high pricetag.

edit - of course there is the other option, which most likely is the real-life case: 3) Native advertising is valuable because it is not a traditional ad-space, consumers aren't used to it, and most readers will not recognize it as an ad unless they read carefully (and how many publications are read carefully, really?).
I only clicked a few times and already had enough items to overwhelm my browser's back button. I had to open my history to find HN again.
Does America Need an 'Organizing Principle'?
Old waters. They return the waters of their birth.

Also, the storytellers die before their audience hatches...
You've twice cited "looting", but that's not something that's been relevant since Sunday night.
Quite happy with Thunderbird.