skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The overwhelming population wants things for free. Ads have allowed that to happen by monetizing attention to pay for the content.

Every time a site has tried a paywall approach, it's met with backlash and a huge decrease in users. Only some of the top publishers have been able to monetize this way.

Micropayments have been tried and even Google is on it's second run with the Contributor program but it's still proven hard to get anyone to sign up.

When the alternative is to just install adblock, why try harder or pay money? Users are just as greedy as anyone else, free will always be the biggest draw.
When did men stop wearing high heels?
Indeed.

Roughly, the whole idea of free market economy, a.k.a. capitalism, is based on theory of rational behavior of participants - and also on assumption of complete information about the matters which are being decided.

Advertisements heavily change that last assumption (lies, selective omissions or inclusions), so much that the whole system doesn't work as expected. Game-theoretically, everybody incentivized to advertise his goods, while together we make market working worse for everyone - conflicting goals. I wonder if there are theories modelling this state of things.
Obama Political Speech Generator Using a Recurrent Neural Network
> App Academy graduates compete for the same jobs as people who have taken computer science in college, a four year long, $200,000 undertaking.

No they don't. I have never once considered a recent bootcamp graduate to be equivalently talented and knowledgeable as a recent CS graduate. Their earnings difference certainly reflects this. (Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad.)
I think this article by Douglas Adams from 1998 is in hindsight very inspiring on this matter: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-05-a.html

The industry simply disregarded the opportunity Adams recognized and just moved what we all hate from paper media to the Internet. However, in the Internet we have a tools we can use to defend ourselves. It's really no wonder that we, users, increasingly reach for them and it's only a stupidity (and/or greediness) of ad companies that prevented them from predicting that.
There are some good recommendations in this syllabus:
[pdf warning]
http://ca-cf10.wharton.upenn.edu/syllabi/?term=2014C&course=...
>And what if a nonnrich person needs access to capital in order to pay workers?

The most natural/good way of doing this is running a legitimate working business and paying workers with revenue money generated by the business itself. Other ways include borrowing money, getting money from angels/venture capitalists, or money from an IPO or reissuing of shares.

>Who would buy an IPO if they knew everyone else took your advice and would never let the IPO buyer exit? Trading stock is dealing in liquidity. Liquidity is where all the wealth in the market is made available to humans.

There are many IPOs that don't let the buyer officially exit yet people still buy it: Google, facebook, microsoft. In fact almost all IPOs are like this. When you buy stock from these companies you can't officially redeem your shares for the value it's worth. You can only sell it to another person.

Believe it or not the stock market is a market of people trying to outthink each other in buying paper for a low price and selling it for a higher price. No GDP is generated in these exchanges. Magically, the prices for these pieces of paper follows the intrinsic value of the company they "represent." People simply being told that the paper represents a percentage of the company is enough to make people behave as if it actually does even though the owner of the "paper" can't use the paper to redeem a portion of the corporate value.

You can only do one thing of monetary value once you own a stock share: Sell it to the next idiot. It's funny how it all works out. You could say that the entire stock market is a bubble of empty dreams.

The only time you can officially redeem a stock share is when a company liquidates. But that almost never happens, and people buy stocks expecting it not to happen.
Her husband is shady as fuck. I think it would be weird if people didn't scrutinize. If you knowingly are married to someone with low moral character who tries to exploit the legal system, then what does that say about your character?

I support equal pay for equal work. The stench of unethical behavior is on both sides of the Ellen Pao saga and I'm more likely to label it a con than gender rights activism.
@nkelber, thanks for this clarification here. can you recommend some good texts on this issue: "how to capture 'bookness' in the digital realm..."? It would be me much appreciated.
No, this is actually wrong. While they can do this, they don't in practice because of competing banks. If that 33.33 dollar check goes into a competing bank, that competing bank, by virtue of being a rival/competitor, is going to immediately go back to the lending bank and demand the IOU in cash. If the lending bank has only $10 in reserve then they can't pay back the $33.33. So instead, due to necessity, the bank will only lend out $7.

What you are describing is fractional reserve banking under a SINGLE or central bank. The United States Federal Reserve does this kind of lending to commercial banks deliberately to control the money supply. Actually, I'm not even sure if the federal reserve is required to maintain a reserve ratio (of federal notes to cash) at all. I think those federal reserve notes are literally created out of thin air.
No I'm not a student, but you publically, immaturely and insultingly stating that my behavior marks me as someone who has not dealt with the real world does not bode well with your claim that you chaired shareholder meetings. I certainly wouldn't want such a person making difficult financial decisions. You realize what would happen if you called someone niave in the real world? Surely you would know that such a statement doesn't facilitate open discussion even if the person in question was actually niave. Of course, I'm being redundant since your extensive experience with the real world should make you abundantly aware of this.

You still haven't answered how YOU running a company without access to capital makes ME niave.
I'm getting voted down. But if you got time please watch (or read the transcript) this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocra...

This person elucidates my views completely and in a way that may be easier to understand.
Writing the definition of sha 256 in Coq must have been of great fun, hehe.
The knowledge you gain is only part of it. You also learn how to learn by thinking critically.

So yea, that course on how to fabricate a diode using 1990's technology, wasn't useful, but when I had to learn how to manufacture NAND flash using current technology learning it wasn't nearly as hard.
Is there a ranking of these issues?

56,564 entries is a bit over my 7 ±2 short-term memory managemen capacity.

OK, here's a ranking:
http://www.uia.be/sites/uia.be/db/db/x.php?dbcode=pr&go=t&t=...

Though "monsters" at #6 suggests at best an idiosyncratic prioritization basis.

More on the Union of International Organizations, for those curious:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_of_International_Associat...
I mostly block for the tracking. In theory, a google text ad doesn't bother me so much. But since my profile, built up from analytics-- fonts-- jquery-- recaptcha, and so on, is being sold to the highest bidder, I block everything I can.
Overstock has been the target of naked short selling before and now Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock, is on a crusade to change the stock market to make it impossible to do so. This is an oversimplification, but it is also a great motivating factor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_short_selling
I thought I read somewhere that most physical sports aren't really that healthy when played at the intensity level needed to be a national-level star. Everything in moderation, and all that.
Soccer players hit the ball with their head. Hard. I'd be unsurprised if that resulted in measurable damage after a few years.

In fact, it seems it does. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-heading-a-soc...
Why is that an advantage to Overstock? Once the bonds are sold, they have the cash. What happens after the initial sale won't affect this.
I've just discovered there's a book addressing part of that problem:

http://www.powells.com/biblio/17-9780596159795-0

Blog:
http://buildingreputation.com/

Wiki:
http://buildingreputation.com/doku.php
In old browsers, yes. The much more secure CORS is now an option, however.
Laying off American workers and replacing with H1-B seems outrageous.

If this is accurate, and there is not some bigger performance issue with the 250 displaced workers, then IMO it's a direct flaunting of the intent of H1-B.
"Destroy your Internet economy with this one weird old tip..."

>don't mind ads and chose to contribute to the creators of the content they consume...

The current ad economy favours clickbait over original content.

Paradoxically, there's a lot more original content than there used to be in the days of print. But that's down to Wordpress and the low cost of entry to web publishing, and not so much because there's an infinite number of content monkeys trying to monetise an infinite number of articles of the Twenty Things About Hacker News You Just Won't Believe kind.
I disagree with a lot of the decisions, both personal and business, that this person has made over the course of the last several years, including the decisions not to take the 1M settlement, and then to ask for 2.7M. It makes me wonder what sort of CEO she is at reddit, which I love immensely. Her decision to implement a no-negotiations salary is interesting though, I wonder if they pay higher or lower than what candidates are wanting.
Calling rich people "wisest custodians" of wealth really got to me. What a self serving statement.

I urge you to watch this video, your comment compelled me to find it:

http://www.ted.com/talks/nick_hanauer_beware_fellow_plutocra...
Show me where to get a full set of non-GPL ADA 2012 documentation, tools, libraries, compiler, IDE, etc. that doesn't lead back to AdaCore?

And pricing on AdaCore is "Get a Price Quote." Which means, "you can afford it."
It's not really a 'bit beyond'. The proof is about the machine code that runs on the CPU! It's a huge abstraction gap from C and it is the result of years of formal proofs and PL research.

About the effort being worth it or not, I believe that security critical programs MUST have formal proofs. Vulnerabilities in this kind of software are extremely costly. The same goes for software whose failure can be of danger for humans (c.f. the Toyota debacle).
Suggested AI class project: write a generator for Theo rants

Or just use theo(1) from 9front: https://plan9front.googlecode.com/hg/lib/theo
>Try getting a job at Google as an "App Academy" graduate vs a fresh Stanford grad

I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google.
How can you be sure that the firmware blob you got for some chipset is really some software compiled from source code and not a hand made initialization structure for some registers needed for it to operate properly?

Or maybe you need some custom, proprietary solution to compile it that even the company that developed this hardware have no rights to redistribute?

Or maybe even the company you bought that hardware from has no idea about the source code or firmware, because they simply used some chipset available on the market?

Or...

It's really counterproductive to differentiate it in this way. It doesn't help the cause at all. The license of firmware blob is really not a kernels issue. It's a lower layer - you can go for that when you start requiring all your hardware to be open. Otherwise, it's like bashing Mozilla due to Firefox not providing an option to load only Creative Commons or similarly free content from the Web.

The kernel is here just to upload a bitstream to memory of some device. For kernel, it doesn't matter if it's open or not. It's just set of bits needed to be sent somewhere, nothing more, nothing less. It not like a typical software, as it's not even executed on your system.
Get used to this, watching people run benchmarks after having forgotten to compile with optimizations is basically a meme in the Rust community. :)
BeWelcome is frequently on the verge of collapse, and IMO is simply too small and unreliable to be of genuine value. It serves mainly the French folks who set it up nearly a decade ago, as a form of protest against the founder of HC. Some sort-of funny criticism is here: openbw.blogspot.com

If you want to see a _really_ ambitious CS-replacement project, sign-up at trustroots.org! These guys are experienced travelers and hosts, and very skilled and up-to-date, professional coders. They invested years of unpaid tech talent into CS and BW, before finally starting their own site last winter.

https://github.com/Trustroots/trustroots/ Got some MEAN skills? Get in touch with them!
Even coq have had its bugs where it was possible to prove that true is false: https://github.com/clarus/falso
Not sure I understand, suppose 100,000 non-managing employees, span of 1 to 10, adds 10,000 managers, span 1 to 10, adds 1,000 more managers, span 1 to 10, adds 100 more managers, and so on. Therefore, for a company of 111,111 employees, there are 11,111 managers. Let's say double the salary on average gives 20-25% overhead?

Why would, for a company of 100,000 employees, it bump up to 33,333 managers?

Linux, organizationally, does not fulfill the same functions as are needed in a company (recruitment, firing, finance, HR to name a few.) How would you model a company after it?
Nintendo's got an irritating policy of not releasing games that originally came out on any TV-based system since NES on Virtual Console for the DS.
Doesn't this argument work both ways: "Once the visitors pay for the bandwidth they use accessing my websites, they can visit without adverts"? And if so, isn't the solution that if you're not happy with advertisements using your bandwidth (but you don't or can't pay to opt out of advertisements) then you should just not visit websites with advertisements? Seems like a fair compromise.
I got "ConfigClassesAndProfileResolverWithCustomDefaultsMetaConfig.ResolverConfig" as real (which I failed to pick... I mean, really?) and had to doublecheck it really is.

Sadly, it's true. What the hell, Spring Framework?
I have written Ruby for many years now. The ambiguity never disappears, and the delight at how "expressive" the syntax is quickly turns to loathing. YMMV, of course.
We like Workflowy too, and we started out wanting to build a Workflowy for ourselves with the features we want, and this is the first iteration.

For example, we want to have a high-level structure that's easy to search, i.e. folders and documents. We also have a bunch of other ideas, like interconnected nodes, formatting, math equations, etc. We're trying to validate the idea and see which way to go further.
Makes onde wonder if such unscrupulous lawsuit comes from her real desire, or her husband's.

If the former is true, it's quite ludicrous to believe the case would be an achievement for feminists.
Such as enough exposure to both the real world and opportunities for extended reflection thereupon to appreciate the extreme unlikelihood of being able to distinguish between "mere enrichment" and "crucial background knowledge that made the difference between success and failure" 2, 3, or 4 decades out?

The "enrichment" model isn't premised on "job training doesn't matter". It's premised on the realization that it's impossible to know what you don't know but might need to know for a job that you'll have in 2 decades but doesn't exist yet.

Examples abound of Mathematics majors who make tremendous contributions to industries they never studied formally. Many people who never obtain a deep theoretical knowledge of a field do well in life because the usefulness their industry knowledge just happens to outlive them.
Tried this for a while the last time I saw this posted somewhere, but went back to using tail.

Using less +F you're not able to add blank lines to the terminal. Seems kind of silly, but it's very useful to see if there has been any output since last time you took a look.
> I know of an App Academy graduate who went on to a job at Google.

I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's significantly less probable.
Show HN: Fisheye visualization for preview photos
Built a cool fisheye view for preview photos in a place discovery app. As map is panned, photos at center are always larger than at sides.

Screenshot and iOS demo: https://herebyapp.co/?hn

Video: https://vimeo.com/129619873
> This is propaganda and some of it is quite false (for example the bin Laden stuff). They are killers, enforcers, doing dirty-work for the most deadly, brutal and dominant empire the world has ever seen.

I have no love lost for imperialism, wherever it comes from, but it sounds like you never heard of Rome or the way Genghis Khan solved problems.
As an advertiser and publisher I resisted ad blockers for a long time and YouTube ads drove me so crazy that I had to install them feel finally..

So the guy who converted YouTube to a TV channel coated Google and all the publishers a huge sum.
I downvoted you because arguing that managers are unnecessary is so naive and uninformed as to make me suspect that you're trolling.

That's like saying that a film doesn't need a director. Well maybe in theory you could make a film without one but that's not the best way to go about it.
>> Just give it up and try something else already - why would I want to import everything that sucks about television/radio advertising?

I think they are trying payment based schemes. But for people who prefer not to pay - what is there other than ads and freemium[1] ?

[1]that's usually exchanging user advertising versus free service - but Google doesn't need advertising.
Not really. NBA D-League and minor league hockey salaries aren't exactly anything to write home about either.

And then there's football, where the "minor leagues" are 3 years unpaid in college, where you not only have to batter your body without getting paid, you also have to keep up academic performance at the same time (wouldn't it make more sense to make some money playing football trying to get to the NFL, and then if you don't make it, having that money to get an education if desired on your own schedule, without having to do both at once?).

I often wonder if this, or the similar Hollywood model, is where Silicon Valley will eventually end up. The model is already quite similar, the money at the bottom just hasn't been squeezed out the same way yet. But there is pressure on first time founders who raise funding to pay themselves the minimum at first "to keep them focused," and the same applies to early employee equity stakes. We even have the tech-scene focused gossip/hero-worship of the Hollywood or pro sports scenes down pat!
Personally I want ads relevant to whatever content I am consuming, not relevant to my prior browsing habits.
Show HN: 99folks – an app with a new way to network using geolocation
At run time - the language has built in support for assertions (syntax and conciseness way more convenient than C++ et al), contracts pre and post-condition, and you can run a formal logic analyzer on it if you limit yourself to the Spark Ada subset.
Show HN: Fleetzen – “Uber for moving large items”
I wholeheartedly agree and I'm sure others do, too. There are many sites which I have on my whitelist but tracking and the risk of malware causes me to maintain a whitelist as opposed to a blacklist.

The reaction from many websites is often to either more aggressively target those without ad-blockers - thus leading more people to turn to ad-blocking, or to switch revenue models - a risky and IMO often necessary step. Eventually the pool of people who aren't blocking ads will be a deeply suboptimal demographic - as noted in the article the majority of people who use ad-blockers are at least somewhat tech savvy, fairly heavy internet users, one of the prime targets for advertising online.

I haven't thought a great deal about this but it's very interesting to consider that through increased use of such software, perhaps end users can truly take control of how they are treated. There is absolutely no reason why advertising should cease to be a successful revenue stream but changes are undoubtedly needed to guarantee it into the future.

FWIW, websites which I visit frequently that are transparent about their tailored advertising and sponsorships gain much more trust and respect from me.
I'm kind of disappointed that with a name like LASP, it doesn't have lisp syntax.
And in French "piou piou" can be used colloquially to mean "bird"... Many languages seem to agree on this.
I start at SpaceX on July 27th... I'm pretty stoked about that.
Hippies from Hell
There's a hint of desperation in it that signals the product/service may not be as good as it sounds.

Usually, good products are promoted by people who don't stand to gain anything out of their promotion.
Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9290332
I only installed Adblock about a year ago, after years of resistance. I'm happy to support the sites I visit regularly...but, when the trust I put in those sites is betrayed repeatedly with intrusive, disruptive and distracting ads, I get tired of it, and lose any sense of loyalty. If your site plays an ad with sound enabled on load you're no longer worth any concern from me.

I whitelist pages I trust not to be abusive (reddit mostly). But, otherwise I don't care to serve an abusers interests any longer. If a site doesn't respect basic decency with their ads, I will impose that decency on them with an ad block tool.
I don't think it's counterproductive at all and we actually agree in a sense. In a sense, opaque blobs are the default license category. Moving past that, if we can acknowledge that unambiguously (positively-stated) non-proprietary licenses are worth favouring, it is worth differentiating as a means to an end of open hardware.

For example, I would appreciate a "noblob" kernel option. If my system doesn't boot, I may reverse that choice, but I can also (still) hope for, and request, useful information along the way so I can choose the closest to ideal (for me) from the options available.

At some point it becomes a "if you don't like it, submit a patch" scenario, which is fine. It is more likely to lead to that when the response isn't overwhelmingly dismissive or insulting.
Managing developers is easy. Managing the rest of the company so the developers can do their job is the hard part.
> (I'm saddened that you can't imagine ever needing to load FPGA, NAND, or VRAM "firmware" to boot a GPU.)

That's clearly not what you were talking about. It's true that drivers usually also contain firmwares, or microcodes for GPU. However, removing them will most likely prevent you from using GPU at all, not just "fast 3D".

And even if it doesn't, because the most important parts of that non-free firmware are already sealed in memory on the card, it's no different from, let's take the easier example, any HDD out there. So either your blob-free system works almost perfectly, cause you only take the software running on main CPU into account, or your blob-free system doesn't work at all, cause you actually removed all firmware blobs and basically nothing works anymore, including HDD, CD drive and motherboard.
I think there is shameless and there is shameless. I don't see the examples the OP mentions as being shameless really. Perhaps riding on the back of a notable death or otherwise serious, negative event is shameless. For example, in the UK, we recently had a roller coaster crash. An accident solicitor sent out a marketing SMS along the lines of "Have you been involved in a roller coaster crash? We can help claim the compensation you deserve". I would say this is an example of taking shamelessness too far to the point where it's disrespectful and ultimately harmful to your reputation.