skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I have tremendous respect for Sir Ive as a designer, I'm beginning to notice a trailing-off of quality in Apple's software products ever since Jobs departed. Little quirks and irritants which would never have made it to the outside world in Jobs' days, are now sneaking out.

Apple has the design part covered, but it seriously needs a fanatic who will make sure that every iOS release is perfect. They lost that fanatic, and he hasn't been replaced.
One possible route after Moore's law expires – a single-molecule device
A developer had a problem and thought "I know! I'll base my entire platform on HTML5/JS!" Now he had two problems.
> informal used for emphasis or to express strong feeling while not being literally true

This type of definition is how you defeat evil AIs
I would find it hard to believe that giants like Google aren't making significant investments into solving the ad blocking 'problem'.

It's an arms race that represents an existential threat to too many companies and too much money.
Show HN: Cinch – We make business transactions simpler
“Nash equilibrium” and its impacts on the world
Getting Started with React (watch Michael Chan Code)
Application Playvod: regardez les films en streaming en HD
I was inspired to try my own hand at this. I added a comment with a link to my attempt but it seems to have disappeared. Did it reach you?
Well, what about things that are low-likelihood but have happened in the past? For example, the asteroid impact ~65 m. years ago. There's other relatively higher likelihood events that could cause modern civilization to collapse, like pandemics, runaway global warming, etc. You don't need an asteroid impact to destroy modern civilization, so the list of threats is longer -- any threat that kills billions, or causes critical failure of institutions (an extremely destructive global war), or destroys the ability to build large scale, stable civilizations. It isn't just about lives either, it's about protecting the institutions that are a critical part of modern civilization and that requires protecting lives plus other stuff, so it's even more fragile.

Anyway, it's not like I'm considering 'moving to Mars' against 'staying on Earth and rebuilding'. You could totally rebuild on Earth and also have a separate colony on Mars that's self sufficient and not affected by the same disaster. I'm saying you could gain an ability to survive threats that you couldn't otherwise if you stayed only on Earth. If something destroyed modern civilization on Earth, well guess what, if you have a self sufficient colony on Mars, modern civilization would not have been completely destroyed.

There's other benefits too. Developing tech to survive independently on another planet, ability to transport non-trivial materials to another planet, getting access to the nearby material wealth (autonomous asteroid mining perhaps? spit balling), and all that new science and technology and trade and opportunity for international collaboration. There's positive value in setting something like this up.
There is this one other thing though... ad-blocking on smartphones is not as easy as ad-blocking on browsers on desktops/laptops. A lot of the big great tech companies (Facebook being the best example) are betting huge on smartphone... and it seems like they'll make bank there, because again, ad-blocking on smartphones is not that easy.

Any thoughts on what we can do to make ad-blocking easier on smartphones? Say, on the iPhone?
Addons work in Firefox. I always wonder why that doesn't bring users flocking to Firefox en masse on mobile.

Hopefully not a long wait for iOS users, Mozilla just did a "limited beta" blogpost a couple of days ago.
When I was in Europe last I assumed the cops just let all of that slide. That was until I got to Florence, where I saw undercover cops arrest a group selling prints outside the Uffuzi, complete with crash tackling those that tried to run away.
Sounds like Eve Online meets your wishlist...
Stay hungry, stay passionate, stay focused, be respectful. Life really is short. We all make mistakes. Forgive yourself, forgive other people. Work hard/smart enough so at the very least you aren't a burden on others, and at most, you can take care of others. We are all in this together. And learn how to code! :)
I don't think Ive is a genius, and I'm not crazy for everything they do, but decline? The state they're in ATM is anything but decline.
Hulu used to be able to circumvent ad-blockers (not sure if they still do) by making their ad content indistinguishable from normal content.

For example, a normal TV show segment would be served from:

http://hulu.com/v/1tgmeiwe

And a commercial would be served from:

http://hulu.com/v/m3fsn3i6

I'm guessing some reverse-proxy stuff was going on behind the scenes, but it was really effective at forcing people to watch ads. Of course, the downside to this method is that you need to implement something on your backend and pay for the bandwidth. But it's there as a nuclear option if needed.

EDIT: I'm guessing that the next wave of ad-configuration is going to ask content owners to proxy their content through the ad network, so that ad networks act like a CDN and inject ads as a wrapper around content.
DU HỌC THỤY SĨ – VỪA HỌC VỪA LÀM, HƯỞNG LƯƠNG CAO
"I wonder what price could have been achieved had it been marketed as "Patio11's Bingo Card Creator" not "a well-established software business creating bingo cards for educational and recreational purposes"."

Assuming it mattered, and I don't know if it does or not honestly, he may not have wanted it to be known that bcc did the amount of sales that it did because that could hurt his brand not help it. Not that he ever called it anything more than iirc "wee" but honestly I kind of expected that the sales and/or profit was more than what the sale page said and that assumes that sales have been going up and not down.

As far as the patio11 brand that only matters to people on HN nobody in the rest of the world cares about that at all. All they care about is what the business will make and what the product is and what they see as the potential. Which, quite honestly given the product (and especially since Patrick ran it) seems nominal to me, given the amount of time it was in operation.

Obviously there was a reason he didn't publicize the sale on HN and the brand. You can draw your own conclusions.
Focus is a big one, as nate mentions below.

The second is that when you've spend this much time working on a project, watching it die because you no longer have the time/focus to work on it is painful.

I've been in this situation several times, and being able to hand a project off to someone who will take decent care of it is far better than seeing it go under. There is a personal connection to projects like this, to the point where the time invested in selling it might not make sense to an outside observer.
Sorry, it is approved now. Comments with links are put into moderation queue.
Try searching your twitter handle in Google Maps if you want to be creeped out.
It's an arms race with a very easy to predict winner. Any scheme to force users to see ads is likely going to conform very closely to the precedent set by DRM. e.g. MPAA and RIAA vs fair-use and content sharing. A few 9-to-5 corps don't have a hope in hell of building something that will thwart everyone who hates advertising.
ok! phew! I was worried my writeup got lost forever
I am reminded of the panic over DVRs and fast-forwarding past ads.
You seem awfully obsessed with those numbers. What kind of answer are you looking for, here? You certainly seem to be looking for something, but I'm not sure what. Are you looking to understand why somebody like Patio11 would make a tradeoff that seems so alien to you?
>But ABP’s engineers found a way to spot and remove any mention like “Sponsored Content” or “Sponsored by”, which creates pernicious side-effects as the user won’t be able to distinguish between commercial and legitimate editorial contents.

lmao, fucking seriously? 'native advertising' exists to trick users into thinking that an advertisement is native content, it's the most misleading and treacherous tactic devised yet by advertisers. fuck this asshole for pretending there's a distinction between overt and covert marketing
Another example is the philosophy of trying to jam all possible functionality into one [phone|mouse] button.
Yea, except, Apple most definitely favors aesthetics over functionality.

Take the iPod shuffle:

- Gen 1 was minimal, usable, and a portable USB drive,

- Gen 2 was minimal and usable, but lost its portable USB drive functionality (required a cable to also be carried around), but

- Gen 3 was smaller for no reason, moved the controls to an earbud cable which was impossible to use while running, and cost extra to buy an adapter if you didn't want to use their shitty earbuds, and then

- Gen 4 returned to the 2nd Gen design, because Gen 3 was very clearly flawed.

Seriously, explain the 3rd Gen iPod Shuffle.

I can cite many examples where they've dumped functionality for aesthetics, like non-removable batteries, fully-sealed computers (latest Mac mini), etc, but this is the clearest mistake they've made where they had to actually reverse course because of their favoritism for aesthetics over functionality.
I'm not sure what the position of a novelist or composer would be in this copyrightless world where copying and printing has near zero fixed costs.

I'm pretty sure there would not have been that many Terry Pratchett or Iain Banks books in the world without enforced copyrights (just as an example - my early life was occasionally crappy and these authors provided very many positive experiences then).

It's not the obvious copyrights that are annoying, IMO, it's the fact that large copyright holders attempt to curb/take a cut of every frigging positive externality that pops up.

Musicians who perform live could survive professionally in a copyrightless world (one way or another). Novelists and composers? I have no idea.
population size was certainly a factor, but the main reason the us became the largest super power was that it was the only major developed country that was not bombed to crap during world War ii. being isolated by two large oceans is a great advantage.
You can thank the media for contributing to this too. Constant stoking of greed and vanity and materialism leading to an endless cycle of throwaway consumerism.
I've seen similar across their products too. Like the volume up/down display that appears whenever you change the volume; it's supposed to have rounded corners, but they goofed and it displays the area between the rounded corner and actual corner as black instead of transparent. At least for me.
I think the problem is you can't control which frame is displayed at a given moment to keep it in sync with the page animation. It seems like there is only a finite amount of possibilities for the icon, so perhaps they should just cache the data URLs each time around and load them directly from memory, instead of drawing them, getting data url info, then setting it.
Why let facts get in the way of a good story?
What age range/distribution are your users? I'd expect something centered around late twenties?
I believe it is a last frontier from a legal perspective.
Where do you get the 60k from? The price listed (57k) was the asking price afaik we don't know what it actually sold for.
Couple of years ago I created a workaround for defeating adblockers. I know the algorithm & methodology still works for all adblockers.

I pitched the solution to many media companies including Google. Google was not interested at all. They dismissed it due to high chance of losing users and chrome adopters.

I abandoned the project and I don't regret it.

(note: I will not share or open source it. I use adblockers as well and I don't want to mess with my internet zen)
It is user friendly to users who like the desktop environment to stay out of the way, and to stay the same year after year so that we can just bring our ~/.config/lx* over to a new system and have things set up the way we're used to.

LXDE may not be for everyone, but the desktop environments that try to appeal to the broadest audience can seem pretty user-hostile to me.
Publishers have no one to blame but themselves. If they actually vetted the ads that ran on their sites, and didn't act irresponsibly and allow malicious code to run with the excuse that "a third party advertiser did it," then we could start having a conversation about advertising. If they didn't allow a million trackers to run scripts on their sites, then we could have a conversation about advertising. Publishers shot themselves in the foot here by taking any dollar they could get, damn the consequences.
> It's an arms race with a very easy to predict winner. Any scheme to force users to see ads is likely going to conform very closely to the precedent set by DRM. e.g. MPAA and RIAA vs fair-use and content sharing. A few 9-to-5 corps don't have a hope in hell of building something that will thwart everyone who hates advertising.

That doesn't bode well for adblockers, then. DRM has been incredibly successful at

(a) acclimating consumers to the idea that they can't own digital goods[0], even the ones that they have purchased; and

(b) stifling innovation in the music industry for the last 15 years[1].

The status quo is that users have both the right and the ability to block ads. (The only missing piece is the knowledge or awareness of how to do so). In a DMCA-like situation, I can't see how things would realistically change for consumers for the better.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9414211

[1] Spotify doesn't count, since it's partially owned by the record labels. So the last major leap forward was.... iTunes? That was 2001.
> I'm told, somewhat to my surprise, that BCC was much better documented than most acquisitions handled by FEI, particularly in this price range. While the infra was lacking it was a major help to have nice clean books.

Was this thanks to Stripe, or another service, or another way you documented transactions? Or just the fact that you documented them at all?
Didn't google invest in AdBlock? Or some how give them money?
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to colonize Mars eventually, but keep in mind that even after a nuclear war, major asteroid impact, pandemic, runaway global warming, or almost any other catastrophe we can dream up, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars is.

Absent the Sun going Nova or something knocking us out of orbit somehow, there will be some parts of Earth that are still safe. Even if we end up needing to build some kind of underground sealed habitat to live on Earth, we still won't need to compensate for as many things as we would to build equivalent-size habitats on Mars. And we'll already have an enormous industrial infrastructure in place to do it with, and we won't have to ship things across 2 gravity wells and a 9-month space journey.
I find these advertisements to be the worst.

I ALREADY BOUGHT THE BOOTS. I don't need more boots. I have the ones I wanted. And even if the ones I wanted sucked, now I feel shitty every time I see the ad, reminding me what a bad decision I made. I'm still not going to buy another pair.
Well, what about things that are low-likelihood but have happened in the past?

In every single one of those cases, including the Cretaceous–Paleogene asteroid situation, you would be better off on earth than on mars as it is today by a mile.

Building a giant anti-asteroid system, or a mine-shaft system (a la Dr. Strangelove) would be infinitely better and cheaper solutions to the asteroid problem than MOVING TO MARS.

There have been pandemics in the past - Black Plague anyone - and we seem to have recovered fine. Earth based global warming is a joke compared to the atmoshpheric CO2 density of mars (95%!) - the fact that global warming is always brought up as a case to go to mars is proof positive that no one has really thought this stuff through.

I'm all for exploration and big shot dreams and stuff, but lets stop with the delusion that moving even one person to a completely uninhabitable place - as in almost anywhere on earth would be easier to live in, including under the ocean - 140,000,000 miles away is a practical idea.

and all that new science and technology and trade and opportunity for international collaboration.

As someone building future technology I call bullshit on the "spin-off" argument as a reason for doing something. The idea that "maybe some practical technology will come from it" is not a good reason to do anything. Using that logic we should be perpetually at war as nothing has moved technology further and faster than war.
Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Not to worry, copyright terms will be extended again long before "Steamboat Willy" expires. Disney has lots of friends in Washington. Nothing copyright after 1927 will ever be in the public domain.

In case you think I'm kidding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#Su...
"None of this is meant to be negative about patio11."

I always find it unfortunate that it is necessary to walk on eggshells around a person in any online community for fear of some kind of retribution by other members. It doesn't really serve any learning purpose for people to hold back on comments that might be helpful just because a particular member happens to be well liked.
Obviously, taken in context (that other companies might not tolerate higher costs and longer development times), the "as a result" line does not imply that higher costs and longer development times are the cause of far higher revenues in general.

The "as a result" line implies that for Apple, higher costs and longer development times has yielded more revenue.

The subject of the line is Apple, not the other companies.
Google/Facebook/Apple may not be as concerned by this as you may think; strategically, they would probably be happy if slow decline of advertising income on desktop would eventually make every publisher to move to walled gardens of mobile platforms, completely controlled by them.

You may end up with a world with nearly unblockable, more creepy ads, and no more open web as we know it today.
A great leadership reading list – without any business books on it
Nvidia's Pascal is ten times faster than Maxwell processors
Firefox’s tracking cookie blacklist reduces website load time by 44%
Unless Apple's rules have changed, iOS Firefox will be little more than a re-skinned Safari, just like iOS Chrome. I would be very surprised if it has add-on support.
Well, it would be nice if on the whole the fluid nature of our language added rather than subtracted. Allowing literally to add emphasis rather than being a statement of literalism makes it no easier to add emphasis but much harder to state something is literal in the classical sense. You are right that language changes and evolves, but that doesn't mean we have to passively sit by and watch it get worse.
The US spends $600B annually on defence, and China spends $130B. Multiplying by 3.5 still doesn't close the gap...
I think you're going a bit too far about criticising "standard marketing techniques". What will you do if you want to contract for others? Why is it not "Publish as much information about your research and skills as possible"? (this is the standard marketing technique here)

I'm not really sure what is wrong with this. It's not like he's just publishing infomercial with no experience. He's got lots of experience we see (BCC, conferences, published software, all the blogs) and don't see (contracting) and lots of exposure in programming community. Realistically, he's probably one of the reasons many people on HN know what A/B testing is. It's a huge personal brand... and what exactly is wrong with it?

I'm not even sure what kind of regulation would apply in this case.
Write a public domain song called "Joyful day of birth to you"
This was one of the first websites that got me interested in becoming a web developer. Classic web right here
The problem is not copyright, but copyright terms ... a 3-5 year term will allow such problems to not exist. And 90% of monetization is during that period anyway.
The ad blocking problem is extremely easy to solve. Start hosting the ads on the main domain. Then you cannot block ads without risking to also block other images and scripts essential to the website. But guess what! If they did that they would loose the ability to track and trace you around the web.

In this case I have no sympathy for the industry. They can have either one, the ability to track or they can self-host ads which would make them harder to block. But they are greedy and want both which does not work.
So I looked it up, and the NSA is indeed part of DoD. But the DNI is under Homeland Security, even if he's a former military man.

And I think both you and veonomsnake are grossly underestimating the culpability of Congress in all of this.
Shameless plug for my site. My buddy and I have started pennypledge.co as a hopeful solution to this problem. It may not solve the ad problem for everyone. But we think that it can solve it for most.
The thing about the arguments to an http.HandlerFunc is that everyone uses w and r for the argument names because everyone else does. Additionally, if you're writing a http.HandlerFunc, you're likely repeatedly exposed to a bunch of other http.HandlerFuncs in standard library code and gorilla/mux, all of which use w and r.

Because of this, anyone who's been wrangling HandlerFuncs for more than a few days tends to converge on w and r. At this point it's no more a problem than using short variables like d for distance or r for radius in math formulas.

As an aside, I have a file open right now with a struct member called "TentativeSpacesPerIndent int"; I'm not worried — yet — about how ungainly long it is because I'm still trying to figure out what indices I need to keep track of, and the last thing I want to do is confuse myself into using one type of index when I need another, or perhaps I need to track of something else entirely. On the other hand, I have

func NewScanner(bs []byte) Scanner

and all the thought I put into the name of the argument is "if a single byte should be a 'b', what should a slice of bytes be? 'bs'." That seems to be sufficient length for a five-line function.
This is great news. With the fall of advertising publishers will have to find new ways of paying for content production and selling produced content - there are a few options in this area - subscriptions are one, micropayments are another, crowdsourcing payment upfront like kickstarter/indiegogo is another - and all of those have a complex ecosystem of models to try.

The reliance on advertising revenue has resulted in a race to the bottom in many areas - it is no longer about the content but about the views to that content (see: the influx of # ways to <something> <something>)

If this report is accurate consumers don't want advertisements which is probably an uncontroversial statement to make - it may take a while for consumers to get used to paying for content but I think as more effort is spent in the space and the friction barrier lessened I would hope to see more sites adopting a paid format (for those who require adverts to operate - there are plenty of sites out there which don't require ad money which are doing just fine - or are run with no expectation of profit).
John and Alicia Nash, 1928,1933-2015
That's why I use Firefox on mobile.
the major difference is that with ads, there is a solution to hide the ads in the content (native advertising).

Native advertising is what's going to get us.
This actually gave me an idea for a way to get people to pay for your app. Use metric in countries that use imperial units and vice versa. It would be an awful thing to do.
Do you plan to record/stream the Parallella Technical Conference?
What makes them boring?