skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have always been afraid that as ad blockers get popular, someone out there will create a wrapper for contents+ads to combat the issue. If the ads didn't get a return ping to the host server, then contents would be limited for not get pushed. This is fairly easy to do and I've seen it implemented on some sites. But they are still very rare for some reason.

As for Google, they've already paid Eyeo to be whitelisted , so they're not interested in this kind of solutions as it would harm their user base. This however hurt Google's smaller competitors which couldn't get Eyeo to whitelist them.
Even 100 years ago copyright terms were pretty long: as long as you remembered to renew you got 56 years.

Obviously the current life-plus-even-more term is a more recent change in the US, but the Berne Convention (not yet joined by the US at the time) required minimum terms of life plus 50 years starting in 1908.
I saw the TLA+ talk [1] recently and was surprised there was no discussion of code-generation.

Once you've spent a significant effort in writing and verifying a formal spec for a program, there should be an automated mapping between it and the implementation, or at least a template of such implementation.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4Yp3j_jk8Q
Happy Birthday is undoubtedly a work of art, albeit a rather trivial one, and the copyright clause extends protection to authors as well as inventors; I just think that its term of protection is long since expired.

I think things like literature, theater, and so on have considerable social utility and don't care for your restriction to industrial applications.

Plenty of works are created without direct economic incentive associated with copying the work. Just look at non-commercial YouTubers or open source projects.

As far as arts go, many non-commercial offerings are deeply lacking. Removing the economic incentive reverts the arts to a system of patronage and arguably subverts artistic freedom in many domains (eg theater) by limiting output to suit the whims of the economically powerful.
Ask HN: What resources are there to learn to write good docs?
I'm a CRM administrator working to train my users better and let them feel some ownership over the system they work in. I don't know a thing about writing good docs though. I've read docs that I thought were good and docs that I hated, but are there good MOOCs, courses, posts, or more that I can consume?
This feels like a thinly-veiled attack on Patrick McKenzie's character, backed up with zero factual evidence.

I've known Patio11 personally for going on 5 years. He's one of the most honest people I know and I've seen him donate countless hours to helping fellow bootstrappers.

If you don't know him or his story first-hand, and haven't seen the hundreds (thousands?) of hours he's donated to the bootstrapper community, you should familiarize yourself with his story before commenting on this thread.
Are we agreed that Mozilla needs a mobile platform of some kind (or a partnership) in order to ensure Firefox is the browser on it? (be it FxOS, MozDroid, or something else entirely)

Re: "FxOS, success or failure, pushes the Firefox product as a whole further," I don't see how FxOS is anything other than a waste of resources if it fails.

If Mozilla went the route of rebranding Android, they needn't fork it entirely. They could just apply their branding & app store on top of Google's releases. The app store is a necessary component because Google won't allow the use of theirs (at least without a price), and it's a user expectation of any mobile OS. (even FxOS has an app store; marketplace.firefox.com)

It's unrealistic to expect Mozilla would become a dominant mobile platform in the foreseeable future, no matter what they do. Like Microsoft, they just need to have some territory, for now. (perhaps they should also consider partnerships with "the new Microsoft", Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, etc.)
> I find the arguments in favor of ad blocking to often be similar in flavor to the arguments in favor of piracy: "I'd pay for content, if only they'd charge a reasonable amount for it." Since "reasonable" is subjective, there's no response that can be made.

I don't believe that's similar at all to the arguments for ad blocking. With ad blocking the argument is, "You're putting your content out there for free and saying, 'please also look at and maybe click on this ad'. But there's no contract in place that says I have to. Even if I don't block it, I won't even look at it, so I might as well save the bandwidth and not even download it."

That's a lot different from "I'd pay if it were a reasonable price" when they really mean, "I don't want to pay, so I'm just going to copy it for free since I know how." The ad blocking scenario is no different from, "I'm watching this TV show, but the show has stopped for a few minutes and something unrelated is on, so I'm going to the bathroom now, or to get a drink, or muting the audio or fast-forwarding."
I unapologetically use an adblocker and have for as long as I can remember. The critics say, "well then you can say goodbye to all the great content on the internet. Hosting costs money. You have to pay for it somehow."

I disagree. I don't see why corporations feel they have a right to exist online and to profit from it.

If you want to put something on the internet, cool. Maybe I'll look at parts of it. I don't owe you anything for it, though. I pay to host my content online because I like to share things for other people to see. Some of my friends do the same. Lots of people on this website do the same.

If you find that people consume the content you share in ways that don't fit your liking, you should feel free to stop putting content out there. But I don't owe you anything as a reader, no matter if you're just an individual or if you're News Corp.

Who has made the bulk of content on the internet? PEOPLE. That is why the internet is so amazing, the people have the ability to share anything easily. No medium has ever had that ease of publication. It will continue to shape the foundation of society, in small ways at first, but in bigger ways as we go forward.

Unfortunately in our current model, we haven't matured to the point where we can decentralize things enough. We need websites (and their implied business models) like reddit, facebook, twitter, google, and so on to achieve all the great things that the internet and computers can do. You want to translate some text? You better be willing to send that data to someone else. You want to talk about news articles? You better be willing to send that comment to some central server. You want to share a video? Unless you have the wherewithal to set up a server on your personal line, you better be willing to send that to YouTube.

I'm very confident that this can and will be fixed with time.
Stealing Private Photo Albums from Google
The existing network is part of the problem. Options put forward include do nothing, new dedicated line from CBD to the airport, or branch off one of two existing lines in the area for a new airport spur line. Then you have to think about, how often can you run airport trains on existing lines? Do they go express or stop at stations? If they stop at stations, does it take too long for airport passengers?

None of them are hard questions, but in a partisan political environment where no parties can agree with each other, unless you can plan it in two years and build it in another 2, there's no way it's going to happen before next election.
The main problem is that ads are mainly hosted by tracking sites. If I look at a micro controller on a online shop, I see it over and over again while surfing on completely different websites. These advertising provider do not only display some images or text which is including a link, they're also tracking and create a profile from me. And this is the main scary part of it: We don't have privacy anymore.

Additionally it's nearly impossible to browse. People come to me and tell me their "computer is too slow, I think I catched a virus!". If you install an ad blocker, the computer works pretty well again. The next thing is that it's impossible to read a text when fancy animations are displays everywhere on the page.

If advertising services violence agains privacy, make older computer und websites unusable, then don't be surprised that people do something against it. The same counts for the websites who are hosting the ads.
Congress has arguably had no meaningful oversight over the NSA since the 50s. Eisenhower warned us. He wasn't just talking about defense contractors. One might say that the US has been pwned by military hackers. I highly recommend Bamford's books.
I wish he could join this up with Elite Dangerous. Elites space environment is pretty impressive and if it needs something, then a proper surface-dimension.
Ive will be remembered as the man who succeeded (for only a while I hope) in removing graphics completely from graphic design. Flat "design" is uniformly featureless to make it easy for developers to make apps while requiring no skills in graphic design or expense on the same. Lower the bar and level the field. It's about apps, apps, apps...
>Would you be better off on Mars or on Earth?

I think I answered this already, but yes, again by far. If for no other reason than not needing a controlled environment to live. Like I can go outside without protective gear on.

>But arguing that if it did exist, you would be better off than if it didn't.

My point is that, even if we did have the technology you would still be worse off. There is a reason nobody who isn't a scientist lives in Antarctica.

>Green field, long shot projects don't have a good reason to be worth doing?

That's not what I said. I think those exist (AGI, Fusion, Asteroid mining) and have a good cost/benefit ratio. I see no practical upside to send human flesh to Mars or any planet or moon for that matter. Either as an exploration tool or as some kind of existential "backup." Send robots.
Any recommendation to get started with Haskell for a person who is pretty comfortable with functional programming (Racket, OCaml)?
Patrick does not optimize for the money. If he did he would have posted only about consulting for the last few years. He stopped consulting because he valued other things, like lifestyle. Since there are other things he values I think it's safe to recommend fixating less on the dollar amount of this transaction and consider the other benefits more.

His story has been all about contribution to the community. Since the BOS days he's been writing about his adventures and people who have earned far more have used his writings to make money.

One of his writing tricks is to over-contribute. He sometimes responds to an HN question with overwhelming value that often surprises the asker. Fuck 30k a week. Measure something else.

(Primary benefit of his mentioning gig weekly cost: you can probably charge more. Focus on the value you provide and up your rates. That's been his message for years.)
The most hotly-anticipated PC release early next year - coined as a First Person Universe: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/

Edit: the other suggestions below offer about a 10th of the admittedly promised gameplay and breadth of Star Citizen.
Spotify doesn't count, since it's partially owned
by the record labels. So the last major leap forward
was.... iTunes? That was 2001.

Also in 2001, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(online_music_servic... :

"Rhapsody was the first streaming on-demand music subscription service to offer unlimited access to a large library of digital music for a flat monthly fee..."
But copyright is a bad thing because the economic context is bad.

I find this mystifying. It seems that you're arguing that performative work is somehow deficient or inferior just because it can easily be reproduced. A painting or sculpture is solid and while copies can be made it is relatively easy to distinguish the original work. Literary works are no less carefully crafted, and large numbers of people seem to attach significant value to them judging by the amount of both money and time that people have traditionally chosen to spend on books, theater, films, and so on.

If you had all the money you needed, would you stop producing screenplays?

Of course not, but if I had no prospect of ever realizing income from working in film that would be a major disincentive to do it.
I would love for such and SDK for Google Maps. It's ubiquitous and I'm always trying to catch up with API breakage. Is there something like that?
I'm not sure what to make of that. Hulu is still alive, though I know for a while there, they almost weren't. Everyone I know who ever used Hulu mentions nothing about the service except how bad the ads were. And there's never been anything that I could only get through Hulu that I couldn't just buy on iTunes/Amazon or watch on Netflix. And on top of it, you're paying to watch ads. I'll never go with that model if I can help it.

If ads do start becoming native content, the blockers will find other ways around them, possibly even resorting to crowdsourcing. Worst case, they can figure out what content is the same on different users machines and block anything that's not the same (at least for textual stuff). I just don't see ads winning this arms race in the long run.
In the interest of fairness, and in regards to the "Underscore, a friend indeed", I'll point to the existence of eg, $_ and @_ as built-in Perl magic variables (you can get away with not using $_, but not @_). I have also been know to use _ for a variable I will not use later (eg, if a function returns two values but I'm only interested in one).

Additionally, in languages with pattern matching, '_' usually works like '*' and matches everything.
The 12 best open-source tools for designers
I would like to read a version of this article not written by someone in marketing...

> The reasons for the epidemic are unclear...

Sure, sure they are. Nobody's really sure why users don't love the advertising networks embedded in everything, making greater and greater incursions into privacy and carrying a greater threat of malware than email. Not sure at all.

> German opposition to online advertising that manifests itself in the government’s obsessive anti-Google stance...

Snowden who?

> Technically, Eyeo GmbH, the company that dominates the trade has “improved” in every dimensions.

"I put improved in quotes because I'm trying to write a 'fair and balanced' article about a product that threatens my livelihood."

> In January the company announced a new feature that allows large scale deployment of Adblock Plus (ABP) in corporate networks.

Good, that will be a big help to corporate IT. They'll have a lot less, "um, my computer says it's infected" calls.

> According to Shine’s chief marketing officer Roi Carthy, the proliferation of invasive formats displayed on mobile — popups, auto-play videos — accounts for 10% to 50% of a carrier’s network capacity.

"...reasons [for ad blocking's spread] are unclear..."

> ...the ad community is quick to forget that it dug its own grave by flooding the web with intolerable amounts of promotional formats.

...and by not policing its own networks, which moved the debate over ad-blocking from convenience to security, which was huge.

> ...branded contents are seen by publishers as a credible alternative to invasive formats that disfigure web sites.

In their latest giant act of contempt for their readers, publishers have entirely abandoned ethics and are now quietly mixing commercial content in with actual content and then wondering why anybody doesn't love that.

> In Scandinavia, Schibsted is hard at work on an initiative to raise user awareness by getting many sites to close down access to browsers carrying and ad block extension.

lol. Good luck with that. I think the best-case scenario there is that the internet becomes less of a time sink.

> ...opt-in, i.e. register with a valid email address. Yes, you will get ads, but on a selective basis...

"Trust us, we'll be as selective with our advertising as we've been for the last 10 years."

> Branded Content that I see as another form of editorial

"My opinions and reputation are for sale, I don't see a problem with that."

Good grief.

I've been dumbfounded that online advertising has continued for so long, seemingly unaffected by the continuing rise of ad-blocking. Ad-blocking's ubiquity has been making the rounds in the news every year or so for at least a few years now, but the online advertising market has only gotten more obnoxious in response.

I'm intensely curious what will happen once things do come to a head. Publishers and ad networks keep promising that the web can't survive without advertising; users keep promising they aren't going to tolerate the tactics that advertising networks and publishers have been using for years.
This can be solved if you start allowing the android framework to inspect other apps and expose these apis to developers. Xposed framework likely do this already (I'm not positive as I do not run it myself).

My proposal is to start defining this api and adding them into CyanogenMod.
It uses the EXIF data, so it would use the location data in the EXIF.

> So this would not work with photos taken with a DSLR without a GPS module/attachment.

Depends. You can also retroactively edit the EXIF data to reflect a location. It should work on those kinds of pictures, even though the original camera didn't have a GPS.
Another Stupid iPhone app. Really?
My favorite way of doing naming in JavaScript is using ಠ_ಠ as a variable (especially if I need to create some sort of quick "hack" to make some sort of urgent issue go away).

Also fun is using reserved JavaScript keyboards inside of JavaScript objects which, while legal, rarely color correctly in code editors.
The tadpole operator has been supported in JavaScript, Ruby, and Python for years.
Unfortunate given that my advice is sort of based on Java...

When I was learning Scala, I was intimidated by a lot of the syntactic sugar that it had. It's a calming effect to realize that all of that desugars into very simple, regular things. Java happens to be a very regular, unsurprising language.

So despite how surprising/special Scala may seem, under the hood it's just a bunch of methods.

There will be an acclimation period where you eschew the fancy stuff and stick with the Java style. But as you encounter the same structures and pain points, you will begin to see which Scala structures you like and will become comfortable with.

Find a style guide. Don't go crazy with point free. In general, it's a bad idea. (It's good if your DSL is super sexy/robust/easy to understand)
> In that hypothetical, Earth is what's hit by such an event. Let's say you have a self-sufficient colony of Mars of around 10,000 people. Let's say a civilization-destroying and mass-dying event happens on Earth. Would you be better off on Mars or on Earth? That's the argument that was constructed; that's the value of such an option if it did exist. A conditional, hypothetical argument, but whatever.

Er, I think that was the point, right? Take your hypothetical self-sufficient Mars colony, and build it on Earth instead-- underground, say. For far cheaper, you can have far more people living there, and even after an extinction-level event they will live on a more habitable planet than Mars.
What is the best advice for a young, first-time startup CEO?
It really didn't cost him $30k to close the project.

I'm sure Patrick felt a certain obligation to his users to ensure BCC was transitioned to someone who would look after them.

He could just stop answering support requests or flip off the domain, but then he's just paying with his integrity.
Ah, you are correct. I missed that.
How Batman vs. the Joker explains John Nash’s key insight on game theory
This is of course a joke. Here is why it holds in general. If x is signed number in two's complement representation then

x + ~x = -1

because x has a 1 where ~x has a 0 and vice versa and because all ones 11...111 in two's complement always represents -1 [ * ].

Transformation of the last formula yields

x + 1 = -~x

The other "tadpole" operator can be derived from the above one by setting x = -y

-y + 1 = -~-y
y - 1 = ~-y

[ * ] This follows from the fact that the sum of all powers of two from 0th to (n-1)th is equal to 2^n - 1. Now, if the sign of the most significant bit in all-ones binary number 11..111 is flipped then the sum becomes -1.
http://yyyyyyy.info/ (sound, sometimes NSFW)

http://fauux.neocities.org/Love.html
Correct, I should've been been more clear in my post; I meant location data in EXIF data that has been recorded by the/a GPS module.

I think this is so. Reading the developer's post it seems he had the idea to use pictures taken with his iPhone, which would include GPS data in the EXIF.

I think this is a fantastic idea.
Actually, NP isn't too intractable in practice. We are routinely solving huge instances of NP hard problems these days.

There are problems that we hope are hard in the average case. Like breaking cryptography.
> But it's there as a nuclear option if needed.

But only for bigger sites I would assume. Everthing going through the servers of the site seems to have a huge potential for ad fraud by smaller sites. I can't imagine any ad networks beeing happy about having to (at least somewhat) trust smaller sites.

Alternatively everything/something going through the ad networks seems like a huge problem (cost, flexibilty etc.) for small sites as well, especially for any bandwith heavy content.
From the title I was hoping this was about Morrissey.

I've come to wish you an unhappy birth-dayyy.
because you're evil and you lie and I wish you would die.

Which, I'm thinking that he should have gotten a decent life out of writing those songs and I hope Jeff Bezos pays him for all the plays I run up on Amazon [ http://amzn.to/1cXjn7f ]

That's the essential tension, we want to reward artists for brightening our lives and making music; but we don't see why a bunch of gentlemen in 3 piece suits who don't make music or write stories or do much of anything but attend meetings and put the hurt on the regular people should be getting mad money out of the deal based on a government controlled monopoly.

The rentier class needs to be disbanded.
It only exist in the premium class, so in that sense, if you want iOS just for the iOS, you are stuck buying premium hardware.

I do think iOS devices are generally a good deal (in the sense that they are worth the money),but that doesn't mean they are not premium nor premium priced. Quality costs money.
> very beginner friendly

Unless somebody like Tony Morris needs to feel better about his day. The average IRCer is really nice but (at least when I was over there) there is an ugly and abusive side that almost burned me out on Scala.
Just spell it out, will ya? M-o-n-a-d-s. ;)
don't forget tmp, tmp1 and tmp2.
Used a big endian machine ... um ... thursday. I've been on vacation/holiday since then.
Discovering the Web Traffic Spam Botnets
Also; Always name binary variables to avoid hinting to the maintenance programmer which way round they work. Good: result, status, flag. Bad: okay, error, valid.
Arm and powerpc are bi-endian...
"If anyone even hints at breaking the tradition honoured since FØRTRAN of using i, j and k for indexing variables, namely replacing them with ii, jj and kk, warn them about what the Spanish Inquisition did to heretics."

Hold on, should we use i instead of ii, or not use it? I fucking hate these double-negative articles.
Let's say there is a law against walking your dog without a leash on, because it will prevent unruly dogs from scaring other people out in the public(even if the dogs intent is good, people may not understand this), or staring dog fights, or pooping where they shouldn't. Sounds good.

Now, what if someone has a perfectly trained dog, that will stay right at their owners side no matter what circumstance is presented, and that dog is walking without a leash on? Is it appropriate to give that person a ticket? They are breaking the letter of the law, but the intent of the law was not broken because of how well trained the dog is.