skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm so torn on Adblockers. While I agree that advertisers generally don't act in good faith, the penalty falls unfairly on content producers. Two wrongs don't make a right, but maybe the middle ground is to be a responsible website owner who uses best privacy practices around advertising while consumers un-adblock their site. Seems like it's really just an arms race not benefiting content producers, as it is now.
hosts files are nice, until you need to unblock something to make it work.

then they turn into a big pain.

Unfortunately "unblock-to-make-work" is step #1 when dealing with academic websites, in my experience.
Does anybody remember the internet in the early 90s? Before it started getting rammed full of ads and get quick rich startup schemes? It was kind of awesome, kind of a mess. People just put up whatever personal scratch they wanted to itch paid the then outrageous hosting fees ($20/mo for 1MB of space!) and the world was good.

My point is that these days, it seems like providing the same experience for most people, involves millions of dollars, thousands of dollars a month in hosting fees, forming a company and having a marketing department that buys ads on ad networks.

We can all dream of making our millions, but sometimes it's just cool to have a modern personal site and get on with life.
The thing about current ads is, even if they are perfectly relevant, that they are so overwhelming that the distraction is not worth the potential benefits.
Maybe in the future by implementing a basic DOM structure.

https://github.com/rc0x03/node-osmosis/issues/4
"do not worry about what is happening in the second decimal place until you understand what is happening in the first." On a fixie you have to work your legs just as hard (in someways harder) going down hills as you do going up them. With a freewheel you only have to pedal up the hills.

I was a bicycle mechanic for 6 years, I've been a mountain biker and bmxer for 12, and rode a fixie for 2 years. You do feel efficient and intimate on a fixie and what he says about the longer stroke length (and more effective torque) is true. But the benefits of coasting down hills, being able to make sharp turns without pedal bite, and having gears more than make up for this, and are why the vast majority of cyclists don't ride fixies.

On a more bike snobby note, bunnyhopping on a fixie sucks too.
The major argument against adblockers (at least as far as I have seen) is that it deprives content creators a source of revenue. I can't disagree with this statement because it is true, it is a (read: singular) source of income that we (read: users of an adblocking program/method) are eliminating. I for one believe that they should ge something.et paid for their work, but ads just don't seem to be the right solution. I know there is paypal donations, and patreon subscriptions (or similar services) but these don't seem to draw people to contribute. I can't seem to think of any other alternatives to these, but I'm sure there must be something. Anyone have any ideas?
>>Is there a single example of a living organisms that is not DNA based?

Consider that cells are mostly ribosomal RNA/units by mass.
I'm as scared as the next person of all the data being sucked up but if I wanted to be charitable, ... a different pov is perfect advertising which would effectively read your mind and present you info exactly when you need it. Thinking about going on vacation to Vietnam? perfect advertizing would devine that and show you ads for good hotel deals, flights, attractions, restaurants, events, markets, etc in Vietnam. Perfect advertising would also not present ads for things you'd already done there unless it knew you'd probably want to do them again. It would know if you're an adventurous eater or a conservative eater and present you with restaurants that meet your preferences. If you're a thrillseeker it would present you with thrilling activity options. If you're a clubber you'd get ads for the best clubs featuring the artists that fit your preferences best.

Perfect advertising could read your mood tonight and suggest restaurants if your mood indicated you wanted to go out. I could know which ones are already booked solid and not present them. It would would know if wanted a quiet intimate dinner or a louder venue. It would know which friends are free and suggest asking them along.

Yes I'm scared of some of the repercussion of getting to that state and all the abuse and how it will probably never get there but it's certainly a fun thought experiment to imagine what perfect advertising might be.
I think the anger is quite misplaced here by the author as it has never been the ad industry that has done "everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them" as the ad networks are simply a platform for which there are buyers of ads/eyeballs (advertisers) and sites/apps that display said advertising. It's the sites that you use that have chosen to include the code snippets needed to display ads or track you (not withstanding those terrible ad injector add-ons). Without your favorite sites providing it space to advertise on, there would be no advertising network.

In fact, our reluctance to pay for any type of content has led to the state we are in today. Paywalls largely don't work for many types of content and advertising is much more lucrative for the sites you patronize. Who's paying for that "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" quiz on Buzzfeed that you gleefully wasted 5 minutes of you life on? Certainly not you; it was the advertiser who paid in exchange for an opportunity to influence you in some way (either direct action or indirect branding).

When you think about the 'morality' of ad blockers, it's not about the ad networks that we're talking about, it's the publishing sites that produce the content you consume. When you block an ad, the network doesn't pay the site. Simple as that.
In Reno vs. ACLU (1997), the US Supreme Court ruled that the Internet deserved free speech protection under the First Amendment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_v._American_Civil_Libertie...

Some have argued that prohibiting Internet access to an otherwise free person (not a prisoner) is cruel and unusual punishment. In 1992 that was laughable. In 2015, it's much less laughable.
You can still have a modern personal website. The reason we do not see them as much anymore is that 1) the web has gone much more mainstream, and 2) social media sites have taken over a lot of the market share the personal sites once had.
I don't think so. If an ad isn't displayed, then the impression probably doesn't count and the publishing site doesn't get paid. It would certainly hurt the content creator more.
At that point you might as well just carry around a USB flash drive.

The "computer" is the screen. People buy tablets and laptops because it's a portable screen (that incidentally has a computer inside). They want to be able to take their screen to a hotel room, airport, cafe, etc.
Surprised you haven't heard of neocities, sounds a lot like a modern version of what you're talking about :).

Neocities is a community of 42,200 sites that are bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web. We provide free hosting and tools that allow anyone to make a web site. Only your imagination is required.

https://neocities.org/
I am not sure that the "morality" argument re: adblock has anything to do with the "ad industry and its supporters." Rather, people generally speak in terms of the needs of websites who host ads and the harm done to them by adblocking. For the argument expressed here to have weight, we would have to go one step further and say that since websites who advertise necessarily dealt with the evil ad industry in hosting ads, they do not deserve the benefit of a moral argument now.

I am not prepared to view my favorite sites as evil because they attempted to exist.
That is a weak argument. You don't need advertising to make money if what you're doing is valuable. People will compensate you for it because they know it will go away if they don't. Take the No Agenda Show[1] for example, they have no advertising. Two podcasters make a living creating six hours of original content every week and are solely supported by their listeners.

[1] http://www.noagendashow.com/
I finally installed an ad blocker a couple of years back, after two decades of browsing without. It had become too much for me to cope with. The popups that took advantage of me clicking to focus on their page to get past my popup blocker, the ads with sound that didn't start muted, the overlay ads that blocked out the whole page until acknowledged, etc. This doesn't even begin to address the privacy concerns. I spent too much time being angry at nameless faceless advertisers and the asshole coders who serve them.

I never liked advertising, but I usually liked the sites I was visiting and wanted to support them, so I didn't kill the ads. Even now, I let a small number of sites serve me ads, if they have shown themselves to be responsible and respectful of my attention. reddit is one of the very few, for example, because they almost never serve a really obnoxious ad.

And, of course, I have never heeded the alligator tears of the online marketing industry (or any other marketing industry...physical junk mail producers can rot in hell). I respect the desire of websites to support their business. But, I'm not obligated to accept the method by which they want to do it, if it includes behavior that I consider unethical or just annoying.
What gets under my skin is the perception that they have this "right to be seen".

Where 'being seen' means robbing me of my attention for a moment to try to sell me something I likely don't want, and every company and their dog is lining up around the block to be seen.

This author has nailed it: "The ad industry has spent years cultivating a 'fuck you' attitude where they would do everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them. To now suddenly be concerned about the 'morality' of what other people do is the height of hypocrisy."

When Ad companies start respecting my wishes, I'll consider respecting theirs.
You're sort of describing Google Search, with its ads on the side. Neat
People are publishing content on the internet without putting it behind a login/password/restricted access.

Not only are they publishing it, they're announcing its presence on social media, performing "search engine optimizations", and cross-promoting it on other non-web technologies (radio, tv, printed media, etc.).

... At no point, as a consumer of this content, did I get presented with so much as a simple "In return for consuming this content, you agree that you will look at the ads being shown here".

I also haven't agreed to such things for cable tv or radio - but guess what? I don't generally consume those media products, in large part because the formats are linear and full of "unskippable" ads.

Nothing is stopping the web from moving to this format. There are many sites out there that present an interstitial of some sort before moving onto the main content. And every time I end up on one of those sites, if my ad blocker isn't dealing with it somehow, I generally remember and avoid visiting the next time.

If you want me to pay for the web content that you're publishing because that's the business model you've decided on, be up front and attempt to get a paid agreement from me. Or deal with the fact that I'm part of the audience that doesn't look at the ads in print media, mutes or skips channels on TV, and installs ad blockers for the web.
Festival Chorus: des artistes pour tous les goûts
>The ad industry has spent years cultivating a 'fuck you' attitude where they would do everything that was within their technical capabilities to spy on people and shovel ads on top of them. To now suddenly be concerned about the 'morality' of what other people do is the height of hypocrisy. The ad industry has lived by the sword of 'technical capabilities are all that matters' (to the detriment of basically everyone else on the Internet), so it's only fair that they may now die on that sword, like it or not.

"They were mean in the past so we can be mean to them now," is not really a valid argument.
There seems to be an approaching "framework overload" point where javascript (at least frameworks) will suffer some backlash and begin to push people away from them. It happened before with java and ruby for a time.
I wonder how effective the ads were in Computer Shopper back in the day, vs other advertising? People bought that magazine almost strictly for the advertising in it, very similar to your model.
Ad blocking software, until it comes default in a browser, actually helps the industry. The sort of people who run the software are also the same people that ignore ads anyway. By removing yourself from their audience profile, they are able to decrease CPMs/CPVs for their advertisers, since they aren't wasting impressions on you.
I'm surprised to see this point of view upvoted so much. If you browse the web through chrome you might not notice it because you can style the scrollbar in chrome.

But if you scroll the same websites in Firefox (which is my main browser), those will stand out. It's not only the scrollbar of the page, it's also any scrollbar that you can see inside a iframe or a textarea or really any divs with overflow:scroll;

If you think this is silly then you must think CSS and styling page is silly
I don't really understand the criticism of PACER. It's not necessary to use PACER to access case law. Federal court opinions are published on each court's website, and collected by a number of sources that aggregate them (I've never run across a case that wasn't on Google Scholar). PACER is a filing system used by litigants. The search and other features work great for their intended purpose, which is looking up dockets and keeping track of documents in dockets. You can't full-text search across dockets, but why would you?
Certainly the author can't really be faulted for not foreseeing the mass popularity of the Web and Internet email and the spread of the Internet in an article about laptops in 1985, and certainly carrying a laptop with you is still far from being something that everyone does. But the writer went further, to claim that by and large even the people who were already regular users of word processors and spreadsheets would have little desire to work on them anywhere but in the office and at home: not that it was still infeasible or not worth the trouble, but that they just weren't interested in doing so. It wasn't that he didn't foresee hardware and price improvements, he just largely dismissed them as pushing on that rope. That really was just a classic prediction clanger, and it was already disconfirmed by about 1989 when the Compaq LTE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_LTE began the modern notebook era.
Right, there are different ways of doing it. In general, an arrow/line between Controller and View is better understood as "there is some type of communication"; then, different variations of the same design will use different forms of communication (observers, data binding, the controller references the view, the view references the controller etc).
> Traders prey on investors, forcing them to waste effort on behaving less predictably so their transactions aren't front-run.

It's not your fault, but I think you've just been spun by the Michael Lewis Flashboys hype machine here. Frontrunning isn't really a problem. Did you know the majority of orders are price IMPROVED, in part due to the activities of high frequency traders? Meaning, you place an order to buy at $10 and it's filled at $9.995 because some HFT wanted your order flow so they improve the best quote by 1/2 penny to get to fill your order.

Moreover, if you're a buy-and-hold investor, even if you were "front run" you would never even know nor miss the 1/2 penny per share or whatever.

Respectfully, this is just a subject that's complicated and it to grok it you need to give it some real thought.
Injected dependencies are more easily stubbed/mocked for testing purposes.
Inside a computer
> things they don't really need

Who gets to decide whether something is necessary or not?

Maslow understood that humans "need" pathways to self-esteem and self-expression. An extensive collection of Marvel action figures could slip through that loophole.

Francis of Assisi lived in abject poverty, and would be a much harsher judge than Maslow, and would probably criticize either of us for bothering to own any electronic devices.

I'm neither a Franciscan nor a Maslowian, but the concept of "human needs" hardly lends itself to immediate and universal agreement.
Retired/on a permanent vacation but still programming as a semi-serious hobby.
One hopes Betteridge's law is in effect
That's not correct.

A human could live on an island.

In society, we trade for what we need from others, which is different from saying we require that others provide us with things.
While I can't say for sure where I'll be 30 years from now, I feel like it is better to dream big than to give up while I'm still young. With that in mind, I'd love to be helping to get us off of this rock before we accidentally sterilise it - even better if I can do so before 30 years passes.
Scheduler Tracing in Go
Albeit, aren't we already existent amidst a simulation?
I have run an ad blocker for at least the last 6 years, probably longer - it has been a staple in my browser setup for so long I cannot stand browsing without one.

The author linked to a tweet which I think requires further examination "ad blocking is shoplifting for the Web".

This argument fails on several fronts, the main one is consent - by loading a website, I am not required to load any or all resources that the server presents to me - certainly in many cases e.g. text-based browsers there is no point to loading these resources - they simply cannot be displayed to the user.

An adblocker is the same, it is a consent mechanism - the server presents my browser with resources that it thinks would be worth rendering with the content, I am free to allow or not allow these resources to be loaded as I choose - and this includes offloading the decision making to other code on my machine.

I don't have a solution for the content creators, I wish I did - I regularly buy books from authors I first discover online. I would be open to micro-payments - however I am skeptical surrounding current implementations as it requires me to submit my browsing history and likes to a third party which is one of the other reasons I run an adblocker in the first place.
Two things,

(1) I always assume morality doesn't exist, laws do, consequences do, but running on the premise that someone will make a decision for increased short term revenue is a sound one.

(2) I use affiliate links in my articles, and although I don't make a lot, $100 - $200 every month isn't bad.

I've also considered adding ads that don't use javascript. i.e. someone pays me to add an image to my content or has me do a write up about a product. Both of these, because you trust me, and I can decline to advertise for the advisor makes a much higher quality ad.
I say we abandon the concept of advertising completely. Everyone should switch to models where consumers pay the content creators directly. http://autotip.io
"I would rather much see an easy way to connect peripheral discrete devices to my phone with ease for the extremely rare occasion i would (and atm i can't think of one) need it than to have to select different hardware for my phone hoping it will all work together than having 6 different vendors to get support and claim warranty from while hoping that at least 2 or 3 of my lovely blocks will be compatible with the next years model."

No, I'd like the opposite. I want the ability to explicitly, physically remove pieces of the phone - like the GPS module, the camera module, and yes, the GSM/LTE module.

These are largely considered core components of the phone, but I want the ability to remove them and replace them as I see fit.

The additive functions of a modular phone are not the exciting part - it's the reductive functions that are interesting.
I think if you step back a bit from this problem, the real source of the problem is that typical capitalism -- supply and demand and all that -- fails miserably for such things as web sites and services, where there is zero marginal cost.

Subscriptions or other kinds of paywalls are the closest to a capitalist solution, but they require artificially limiting supply. The most dramatic and poetic discussion of the evils of artificially limiting supply to increase profits would have to be chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath: http://genius.com/John-steinbeck-grapes-of-wrath-chapter-25-...

Ads produce such a tiny amount of revenue that the web ad industry is in a position of just giving up altogether, or trying to milk every penny out of the ads. And as others have noted, that's not pretty. Everything from obnoxious in-your-face-ads, to ads that don't let you leave the page, to ads that don't let you view the content for a few seconds, to video ads with audio that comes on automatically, to ads that track you all over the web.

I don't have a perfect solution, and I am not going to blame people for using ad blockers, especially if privacy and tracking are big issues for them. But I suspect that if everyone used ad blockers, a lot of web sites that we know and love would disappear. The best thing I can think of is that the big ad companies should offer a plan where you skip all ads, but pay the same amount the ad would pay to the advertiser for the privilege of viewing the page ad-free.
The Nestle water situation doesn't actually pose any problem for the negative/positive rights distinction. I'm not familiar with the exact legal situation in parts of South America where that is an issue, but basically, if it's illegal to draw water from water sources and purify it yourself and sell it to others (perhaps via a municipal water system like we do in the civilized world), property rights have been misunderstood and misapplied.
A couple of years back, Ars Technica started putting up banner ads targeting adblockers: "Ads pay for the lights, etc." I felt guilty enough that I unblocked ads on Ars.

Returning to the site one day, I see the technical equivalent of a "punch the monkey" flashing banner ad. Aaand, adblocking back on, plus I now block the anti-adblock ad. And I no longer feel guilty. You had your chance and you squandered it.

Ars Technica styles itself as a site for well-informed technology-oriented people. The ads should fit the site. Insulting your audience's intelligence might work on Facebook, but these days you don't deserve to make money from advertising (on what is essentially a niche site).
10 Ridiculously Simple Ways to Generate New Blog Post Ideas
That sounds nice in theory but in actuality is complete BS. On a site like Teamliquid.net, a video game/eSports forum and team, over 50% of visitors have ad blocked enabled and they in no way make of this missed revenue from donations or TL Plus ($5/mo for ad free).

Everyone always says they only have ad block on for obnoxious sites, but that's such a load of shit. The free internet is run by ads, like it or not, and as someone who uses ad block I accept that I actively hinder it.

I don't mind if people use ad block, it's just the moral high ground people take that annoys me.
yeah but uBlock is easier