skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This exposes a fundamental flaw in the internet advertising model. On some level I've known that a script like this could be easily written for a long time, but seeing this working product really made it clear. It's unlikely that millions of people would use something like this, but if they did it would be chaos in the advertising industry. They love online ads because it allows them to gather empirical metrics that can't be gathered from television or radio. It's impossible to know objectively what kind of an impression a tv made, but you can see exactly how many people clicked on a banner.

But this could also be a fatal flaw. If a lot of people wanted to, they could destroy payperclick advertising. It would be almost impossible to know which clicks were real and which were fake. Companies would lose a lot of faith in the industry because an update to the script could play havoc with the online ad budget of this company or that on a whim. I don't know why anyone would chose the attack the online advertising industry and it wouldn't be a good idea, but it's interesting to that it's possible. Online ads is a huge market space but also one could also be severely disrupted by a greasemonkey script. They'd better be careful not cross the line with tracking and privacy invasion because this is one of the rare cases where people can take direct action to fight back.
Classical mixin inheritance in Sass
Wouldn't this just enforce the existing ad preferences? Say the ad networks determined that you're looking for a car. They then start showing you car ads, this software clicks on them, and now they think that you must really, really want a car. That hasn't messed up the fundamental information, it's just adjusted the scale.
Frictionless billing is harder than it sounds, because it opens the door to frictionless fraud. If I can automatically bill you for a thousanth of a dollar I can automatically do that hundreds of thousands of times. If it's with bitcoin I can obfuscate the destination of the money.
http://elixir-lang.org/

It's the Erlang VM you love, but with the Ruby syntax we all enjoy!
And what if you live in poor Romania and you don't have money? Or in even poorer Egypt?

There is no model better than advertising. Nothing beats free. Get used to it. It's not going anywhere and such initiatives are futile.

* blumkvist maximizes back the SAS Miner window and laughs.
It would be nice if you could also get this report for an account that you don't own yourself.
And some cites have outlawed billboards in some areas: as they are blight.
The real solution is for ad companies to agree to allow their ads to be vetted, and hosted on the delivery network's systems.

I had no problem with ads up until the point I went to the official online source for a number of print comics, and had my browser forcibly minimized, with a new window spawned in the bottom right corner of my screen designed to look like a Windows alert, trying to trick me into installing malware.

At that point I installed an Adblocker, and have never looked back.

I don't mind disabling it when reminded (Hulu and the like), for certain sites, but until I can be certain that websites with positive reputations won't deliver such scurrilous ads, it stays on by default.
Ask HN: How to show off new product with video
We're looking into a way to show off our new product to our clients by using a video capture tool (windows). We're aware of CamStudio, TinyTake, Camtasia, but we're not sure if that's the way to go.

What's the modern way to show off a product? Seems like a lot of people these days are embedding gifs on their landing page, but we'd like to have some audio to explain some features since our clients are not too computer-savvy.

What do you recommend?
Review: Rollbase by Progress Software
Minority Life in Israel
Science Fiction: Apple Makes a Toaster Fridge…
this looks awesome, but how do you deal with noise? If the use case is being able to process email when not explicitly doing that task, wouldnt it essentially be when you're waiting for the train or playing with kids or even around a noisy office?

I have a tough enough time with IVR systems today because of my kids talking in the background that I have to switch to touch tone mode.

How does this work in the real world?
I wouldn't respect it. Because they publish a free content, and are taking advantage of many other Internet services, which provides them with free marketing - search engines, aggregators, social sites, etc. I can download their content and then display any subset I want - that is how WWW works. If they want to prevent me doing that, they should implement a pay-wall.
In the long term, this devalues a click. The
very moment things turn...

Why would you expect a sharp turn? Some fraction of clicks on the internet are already fraudulent, and if people start using this product that fraction goes up. But it doesn't really matter because it's all auctioned.

Let's say I run a billing service and I've placed ads on searches for "billing service". I find that it costs me $X of advertising per incoming visitor, Y% of these convert into customers, and a new customer is worth $Z to me. I'm willing to bid up to $X x Y% on ads. Now lets say a lots of people switch from blocking ads to giving them fake clicks and now half the clicks on my ads are from this extension. Y% drops by half, because half the visitors from this source are now just browser-extension bots, so I'm only willing to bid half as much. But so is everyone else, which means my new 1/2 x $X x Y% bid is still competitive, and there's twice as much traffic to bid for, so it all comes out the same.

Ad networks take click-fraud very seriously because it's important to their reputation, but the market is actually pretty robust to it.

(Plus this browser extension sounds like it would be really easy for the ad networks to filter out.)
Hm, so how viable would it be to launch a rebranded Firefox/Chromium that includes Adblock or HttpSwitchboard by default?
I think "new technology" is a bit of a stretch. It's just not really done because it has very little benefit. I think a lot of people also don't like the idea of all their typos and "actually I won't send that" moments being broadcast to the recipient.
Wow. I am terribly sorry to hear that. :(
Yeah- implicit concatenation + snprintf seems like the way to go. Although you'd have to calculate a length, I suspect avoiding that is the primary virtue of this approach.
Does touch typing versus less than ten finger typing really make a difference if one is programming in a terse language (assembly language, APL, etc.)?

Is touch typing really the only true way to control the computer "lever"? Does that mean an office secretary who touch types uses a more powerful lever than an APL programmer who does not touch type?

If what we are doing with the computer lever is ultimately just manipulating _symbols_ (not long strings of verbose text like this comment), then the question I have is whether entering these these symbols using all ten fingers really makes a difference.

Touch typing is underrated, but certainly, with the requisite knowledge, there is a lot one can do with a computer "lever" without typing more than 30 wpm.
So, what's the license for these? http://www.nasa.gov/connect/artspace/participate/royalty_fre... seems to indicate "royalty free". What does that mean in the context?
If I were in that line of business, I would assume that everyone has valuable information and would take steps to capture that information before it is destroyed. Other valuable information - especially that a physician might carry - might include contacts to other physicians for extortion or medical records on politicians or other adversaries.

I think many intelligence agencies have a similar outlook.
That's what "strict in what you issue" means
More in your face, html5 ads are coming (sigh). If ad blocking gets real popular like an arms race where those that don't block ads suffer the most.

Maybe the days of site/advertiser direct partnership will come back (see strobist/ midwest photo exchange or xlr8yourmac.com and otherworld computing.)
MySwapp-a mobile app that allows users to swap items locally
I also don't get push notifications of my e-mail. I also don't get a ton, but it's a well known fact to my colleagues that I don't reply to e-mail instantly and if they're sending me an e-mail expecting an immediate reply, then they should re-evaluate why they're sending me an e-mail.
7 Game Changing Productivity Apps
You are painting with a broad brush. My sites would be negatively affected by this plugin even though we sell our own ads (no network) and don't target them by fingerprint or IP.

It's also just kind of mean. By design it only messes with the sites that you yourself think are worth visiting.

> It's the seedy side of capitalism. Everyone should get the same price

This rant against price discrimination seems like a tangent. The behavior you're describing is something e-commerce sites sometimes do. It doesn't have much to do with ads and blocking ads won't make hotels.com show everyone the same price.
i) I see an unfamiliar term. I search for it. For the next X weeks I am showered with stupid useless adverts for something that I have zero interest in.

ii) I am[1] a person with alcoholism / gambling addict / person with anorexia / etc. This informs my search habits. Showing alcohol ads is immoral anyway, but showing those ads to a person with alcoholism is sub-optimal for many reasons.

iii) I like gory movies. My 5 year old son enjoys watching some YouTube clips. There's no mechanism to prevent fucking YouTube from showing me ads for gruesome videos even when the clip I'm watching is some child's show.

iv) I am ad-tolerant. But ads just fucking suck and targeted ads suck about the same as random ads. They don't push what I'm interested in, they push what the ad-buyer wants me to be interested in. When I search for "metal detector" I'm not shown ads telling me how to chose a metal detector or why detectors differ. I'm shown ads from metal detector sellers who are peddling some kit of unknown quality at me.

[1] I'm not, but imagine a person that is.
I glady pay for Internet access, cable TV, the cinema, magazines, other content I view. The problem I have is with tracking. Ads should never do anything save show an ad. There should be no attempt to learn about me or track me or sell my data. Magazines I buy don't track me. I ignore ads in the cinema by whiling away that time on my mobile, I FF thru DVRd programs at home. I've paid already. I'm not viewing your dreck.
That's how we use it too.

I want to show someone a funny YouTube video? Just send it to the TV they're sitting at. Boom, playing in up to 1080p.

It is also extremely useful for music. Like sending Google All Access there over the Christmas holidays and having a "remote control" per the phone to control the music from another room.

We have both a Samsung and Sony Smart TV, but the screen sharing on both is just awful. Only works with their proprietary devices (e.g. Sony with Xperia phones, and Samsung with Galaxy phones, etc). Chromecast works with anything that has a recent-ish version of Android.
Yep, we moved a whole team of about 30 people over from Java to Clojure. On the whole it was fairly painless, considering how big a shift that was anyway.

It's hard to know where we started seriously advocating a move to Clojure and where it was just our enthusiasm but we did quite a few things to sell it.

- A Clojure club where we booked a big meeting room and taught some of the basics of Clojure

- Buying a bunch of books and leaving them around the office

- Re-writing an existing service into Clojure as an example of how quick this was to do, and how nice the resulting code was (as a note we haven't gone back to re-write working services)

- High levels of enthusiasm and trying our best to make sure everyone got a chance to be included

At some point we decided that we had enough support to try things more seriously so we got all the devs together in a room and made a proposal to work on a few new services in Clojure. Having a Service Oriented Architecture actually really helps here as we didn't have to make too big of a bet. That was enthusiastically accepted by the team and from there we ended up writing more and more things in Clojure. A few people were more resistant than others and they stuck working on Java projects for longer. After a while though curiosity or necessity led to them working with Clojure and they ended up convinced. I'm not aware of anyone now who isn't a fan.

Training was a combination of self taught, books and, later on, booking a 3 day, onsite training course from the guys at Lambda Next. This is something Cognitect also offer now.

From a dev ops perspective not much had to happen as our existing Java tooling continued to work. That said we have recently rewritten all our deployment tooling (in Clojure) to target AWS (and generally improve it in just about every way). We actually have a blog post due to be published this week talking about our new, Clojure based, tooling.
MSC Nutrition Announces Scottish Rugby Partnership
Show HN: Tag a Cat – A Mobile Social Network for Cats
You study 6 years CS, then start your first job, how do they treat you? - like a beginner,... which has to learn,... "like everything".

"It's product-know-how that counts", but also "a good theoretical foundation" (for thinking logical, and believe me, it is better for everyone if you have that). So 6 years of studying + years of experience (for each product), the more the better.

Unf. you are mentally fittest between 20 and 30. Youngsters may make up with that, but I don't worry about my future.

It's not that 6 months is too little, it's that nothing is ever enough (and more is always better).

I guess some young startup guys may disagree and yes, there are Marc Zuckerbergs, which escape the law.

I don't want to hold you back from trying to escape this law.
This "sweat of the brow" argument doesn't cut it. Books have long been unprofitable for the majority of writers. At the same time, it's now easier to publish than ever -- look, I'm doing it right now! The question here is should publishers be allowed to control and make large profits (the authors weren't in any case), and I think the answer is clearly no.
idea is to try to make photo by request, which I see as a nice exercise, otherwise I can
About legal issues, I don't see problems there actually. Except model releases, if people are on the photo. But this is concerns to discuss over email.
> really limiting and cannot last long
thats an idea, I'm not going to make money with it and it's just an exercise and hobby.
interesting to follow if this will fly
I wish Glacier was a realistic option for me, but I need to look at my data again.
Its extremely naive to believe everyone who needs access to the content in the internet has a credit card to pay for every bit of it that they need.

This kind of behavior will only push the movement even more far away from mainstream popularity, slowly becoming a new form of extremism.
I apologize for the delayed response. HN really needs reply notifications like Reddit. Anyway...

Apple bought testflight. No more provisioning on up to 1000 devices. Android is still much simpler, but I was just pointing out that you don't have to provision devices or add their udid anymore.
I'm very much looking forward to the lander doing its thing. The photos will be breathtaking!
That makes it seem like quality is a given in the face of market changes. I don't think that's true. I remember back 10 years ago, the Internet was actually useful. You could search for a product review and not get a bunch of computer-generated crap SEO optimized to turn up at the top. That's not true any longer.

Increased competition has had a negative effect on the media. Go watch CNN clips from the 1980's and compare to today. Its a totally different product than CNN today, and it was possible because they were insulated from the degrading effects of market competition. They didn't have to plaster Kim Kardashians rack over every piece in order to make money, like they do today. And what's driving that competition? Lowest common denominator Internet media like Huff Po that can churn out dreck at zero marginal cost.
>Is it really a privacy issue to track what ads you click and use that information to target advertisements to you later?

I found it hard to reply to this and I think its because you framed the question in a strange way. Targeted advertisement is not only based on what ads you click, but also the sites you visit and the stuff you view on them. If targeted advertising only worked based on what you'd click I wouldn't have a problem with it since I never click ads and it would be that easy to opt-out of it.

Targeted advertising itself is a whole other thing. In order for it to work, they need to gather data about you and this doesn't always happen in obvious ways (e.g. clicking on an ad) and that means you can't always opt-out of it, which makes it a breach of privacy in my book.
Java does, for the "+" operator.
Products like this do not have the burden of a trailblazer like the Chromecast. When the Chromecast was introduced, they must explain elaborately what it does. For this Amazon product, simply saying "4x storage 2x memory more than Chromecast" is sufficient in explaining what it does. People immediately know that it does what the Chromecast does. There's no confusion about that. Furthermore, it's also implying that it's better than the Chromecast. So, while that first line didn't entertain you, for many people, it says and implies a lot.
Products like this do not have the burden of a trailblazer like the Chromecast. When the Chromecast was introduced, they must explain elaborately what it does. For this Amazon product, simply saying "4x storage 2x memory more than Chromecast" is sufficient in explaining what it does. People immediately know that it does what the Chromecast does. There's no confusion about that. Furthermore, it's also implying that it's better than the Chromecast. So, while that first line didn't entertain you, for many people, it says a lot.
In the long run, ad blockers should evolve to become undetectable by websites. I don't see any way to reliably stop that from happening, without making the internet more Orwellian.

That said, I agree that if a website respectfully asks visitors with ad blockers to leave, then leaving is the nice thing to do.
cool idea - i tried to pick perceptually separate colours and thought blue and red would work, but turns it's confusing for some people. I might add "colorblind" mode and use your colour range.
No, advertising you want should be allowed, while the advertising you never requested shouldn't be.
Most decent IDE's or text editors have autocomplete, even the Unix shell has tab complete. Touch typing is overrated.
A Good Programmer: Why You Need to Avoid Being One
Bob Young talks about the origins of Red Hat
Email Marketing Guide
this is absolutely moronic and childish

if you don't want to see ads, use adblock and be done with it. why do you now have to be a child and "one-up" the ad agencies by sending fake clicks to the them?

you do know that legitimate businesses and people advertise on these networks and the only thing you're going to be doing is draining their accounts. if you _think_ you're hurting the ad networks themselves by use this extension, you are living in a fantasy world. i'm sure the ad networks are laughing their way to the bank with an extension like this.
I honestly feel that blocking ads is a win for both the audience and those serving the ads.

I don't mean this to sound insulting but if you're not (let's say) "wise" enough to block ads, then you're exactly the target audience for 99% of the stuff out there.

This is similar to the way Nigerian scammers purposely use bad grammar to target the less sophisticated.

It's a win for the ad network because they're not wasting bandwidth pushing an ad to someone who would never consider whatever they're selling.
In related news: NASA has a Soundcloud channel - https://soundcloud.com/nasa
"Is it really a privacy issue to track what ads you click and use that information to target advertisements to you later?"

Ad networks track quite a bit more information than just what ads you click.
Wrong title. "Nobody can make you a decent ANYTHING in less than six months." At least job related. You need to make a bunch of mistakes and have a bunch of "AH HA!" moments when those theories you learned in school or a book actually make sense.
Thx for the offer! I could really use some nature pictures to make my book site more colorful: http://minireference.com/

I've been looking for mountains (e.g. two mountain peaks that represent math and physics) that could be used. The book is your guide to the mountains of math and physics.

Alternately, just some nice picture of fall colors. Спосиба.
I think it's simplistic to say that someone attacking a problem because they think it will be profitable is intrinsically shallow. There could be many problems that a person sees they could solve, and they could choose one most likely to be profitable first a stepping stone to make the others easier.

Also some things are said to be difficult, and that alone gives certain types of people motivation to solve them, since they feel a certain type of disconnect with their intuition of what is possible and what other people around them are telling them.
This market is getting awful crowed: AppleTv, Roku, ChromeCast, and not to mention offering from manufacturers that are built into the tv.
I'm not sure how this would be used for advertising? This is about pushing messages to the user agent when it is not actively visiting a page. Ads are actively requested when you view a page, there is no need for push there.
An imperfect analogy would be street musicians, they play in the hope that some people give them money for it. You are hosting content and each person accessing it is perfectly free to display only parts of it, you have no right to enforce that the content has to be viewed in a specific way.
If I click on a link to a website, I have no way of knowing whether it would display ads or not. Since I have blocked ads for years, now I am not even aware of how awful some of the sites look with ads (piratebay / facebook come to mind).
If this were my team, I would be unsettled by the fact that we never caught it in testing. Did no one write tests to exercise this part of the app - the one where we're handcrafting HTTP requests?

Objectively, you need to write more tests. At the minimum, this bug should have a regression test so that it can never accidentally happen again (say when a dev merges an old branch in for whatever reason).
9 reasons why you should never bike to work (2011)
There are plenty of companies in China that would never work in the us due to laws. You are naive if you think this wouldn't happen in Mexico. How about the diamond industry? We have restrictions, but it has done little to nothing in those African countries.

It's all about volume. People will fake pain once in awhile to get Vicodin, but I don't see 10+ doctors opening up shop for fake scripts. This is he difference.

The U.S. Government has been funding it because people continue to buy the drugs. I blame the consumers, not the government. The consumers just don't want to do the right and difficult thing of boycotting a product that is clearly involved in murder and crime.

If we we talking about tax evasion, the company would be to blame, not failed tax policy. This is no different. He difference is that too many people don't want to give up their beloved MJ.

I only referenced he documentary because it had actual news film footage. You can do the research yourself, I already did and I know the corruption existed. In one year during that time, they had to fire an entire police class due to corruption and payoffs with the cartels. This is a fact.

I guess I really shouldn't care. I will never go to Mexico and legalized drugs really doesn't matter to me. So you can continue to support corruption and violence and Mexico will continue to be a war zone.