skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apparently (based on a bit of googling) it's very common to be peppered by birdshot when hunting birds. People are basically firing birdshot up into the air - and it, not infrequently, lands on other hunters.

Still, I agree it's pretty impolite to have your shot land on your neighbors property.
Just a stylistic note, I found the word alleged to be a bit overused in the first part. A source of a quote in the article is given as: an interview given by "Jack Marshall, an alleged reformed fake web traffic buyer". How about an interview by Jack Marshall, who says he is a reformed fake web traffic buyer...
I'm also very into the idea of new consumer tech from quantum topics.

I actually have 3 distinct types of display concepts, 2 of them I have very basic working prototypes for. Looking very far ahead I'd say that I see a lot of potential in new branches of organic electronics - the OLED display is amazing in its simplicity - I love to model things after biological systems regardless, whether or not I'm working with organic components.

Then there's thousands of other concepts that I've only written down. I start to research something new and then the flood of ideas comes - then I keep learning based on those ideas and some of them still make sense after a while and others don't - then it seems like after exhaustively studying all those other little 'sub ideas', they kind of come together and sometimes form a larger concept that I start to design experiments for. Anyway that's my process right now but I am always open to evolving it. As for the topics you mentioned I would love to learn more about them and shoot around some ideas.

Anyway - what do you see as your major value to an ongoing research partnership with a few motivated people? I'm also open to joining an existing group - I'm not looking for any stipends as compensation, just a fair part of anything that comes from my contributions. I'd also be down to move into a warehouse/lab and live there full time - I kind of have to live where I work.
"Why do I climb the mountain? Because I'm in love" - William Shatner

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kestt5BI3eg
This isn't news IMO.
> I mean, if you work for GE, does that just mean you can't own stocks

You're allowed to own stocks in this example, but you generally wouldn't be allowed to trade on them.
You are on fire in this thread. Maybe it's time to learn to how to write browser extensions so that people can finally cause united as much pain as they cause their customers.
No not really. Being an employee itself is a 'hedge against risk'. As an employee with this kind of 'insurance' you still want the company to do well and have the stock go up in value because it personally benefits you.
That's a nice story.

The real reason was the US dollar was on a gold standard during that period of time. In the late 50's to 60's the US begin to issue more currency than their gold holdings were increasing, leading the countries like France withdrawing gold from the US (and apparently, inflation, according to this article), and finally the dissolution of the gold standard in 1971.

Since the US dollar was fixed to gold there was little to no inflation, because the ratio of gold price to goods price is much more stable.

In 1950 - A coke was 5c, median household income $4000[1] per year = 80000 cokes per year.

In 2015 - A coke is $2[2], median household income $50500[3] per year = 25000 cokes per year.

In real terms adjusted by the price of coke, the median household income has fallen by 69%. (for giggles).

1. http://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median...

2. http://www.humuch.com/prices/CocaCola-Bottle-20oz500ml/_____...

3. http://www.mybudget360.com/how-much-do-americans-earn-what-i...
And, as "prostoalex" stated in another reply:

> ... the prosecution will assume you had some insider info to trade on. The onus is on you to prove that you didn't.

If you want to tango with people that salivate at prosecuting people which profited from hedging while employed at the company which they hedged, I can only recommend against that course.

It will end badly.
Exactly: Any "successful" gray-too is going to require us to equip it with some novel techniques or biochemistry...

I'd worry much more about us leaking a trait that existing bacteria could transfer horizontally.
In my experience, buyers are usually not sophisticated enough to have this discussion. Often, syndicate salespeople don't understand the issue either. Nobody else in the value chain is incentivised to educate them about the issue, so it doesn't happen.

I founded, ran and sold a digital advertising company in the video space. We sold through various means including networks, direct sales and quasi-direct sales where we would engage a local syndicate to sell on our behalf. These were usually major digital publishers that used to be print publishers.

These people are moving a _lot_ of the volume in this industry. They're battling widespread redundancies and falling budgets. They are not attracting the cream of the crop and are in an unfamiliar industry (tech).
God no, Perth people are incredibly inventive and creative, it's not that we don't expect people to invent things here (and if my first post sounded like that then I got the tone totally wrong).

It's just that in a town where everyone knows everyone, we'd expect to hear about awesome stuff like this happening locally before it hits HN ;)
This happened to me. I worked on a side project in high school that grew into a company after about eight years of work. Three years and a pivot later we gave up due to decreasing traction, and returned whatever funds were left to the investors.

I moved back to my parents for about a year to work on other side projects, but ended up looking for a job and found an awesome small company that I'm very happy working for. I'm still working on market-focused side projects and without the stress of having to make money/gain traction it's a lot more fun. I really prefer this setup, especially since a small company allows me to scratch most product-development itches I have since there's not a lot of bureaucracy.

A lesson I've learned: Quit early. If you feel bad about the project right now, end it as soon as possible As in, tomrrow. Don't stick around waiting for the big break. I've done exactly that, and while we actually ended up with some paying customers after our pivot, we would've had to achieve an insane growth to be worth anything to my co-founder and me due to the dilution of our shares. It's not worth basically building a new company for the smaller fraction of shares you have after taking an investment.
> Regardless, I've replaced both extensions with uBlock Origin

What is difference between uBlock and uBlock Origin?

EDIT: From Google searches I have learned that uBlock Origin started as fork of uBlock, but maintained by the guys who started uBlock.
Edited, sorry for misnaming, and thanks for the insight.

Doesn't this model only work if you are driving traffic/clicks to _your_ site? What is the benefit for bots that are hitting other people's sites?
Great links. Adding one more - Tempest 3000 gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyaeUNAAaXc

Seems like a 3D version of space shooters...?
haha yeah - very cool - (maybe this has already been done) but I always thought it would be cool if 1000 people printed as many parts as they could, paid to send them somewhere to be built - and have kind of a habitat for humanity style situation.... but yeah living in a 3d printed house is probably pretty terrible(y dangerous) right now.
Gerd Honsik: Farewell to Germany’s Horses
If you see banner ads (without clicking) you have the same experience as everyone else who actually sees them.

Maybe the reason you notice them and they bother you, is because the amount of your attention that that experience has to take up has to be so great that your peers' attention is worth the payment even when that attention is divided by 10 (if we assume 90% click fraud.)

In other words, given no other change except eliminating payments to non-person audience members, you might find the Internet is suddenly filled with advertisement that violently takes only 1/10th as much of your attention as currently, since the money is being spent on you and your peers only; and not on you, your peers, and then botnets and other dilution.

Put yet another way: the leakier the transaction between you (real user) and advertiser, the worse the experience you have so as to make up for it.

Let's put some numbers on it!

Let's say everyone is happy to buy a banana online and the profit is 20 cents. Then if click fraud is 0% and the cost of an ad is 1 cent, a 7% click-through is fine: it costs 14 cents to get a customer, leaving 6 cents profit. Any more than 7% click-through is pure profit.

But raise the click fraud to 90% and suddenly 7% won't do it: the real ad cost is now 10 cents, and instead of 7% click through you now need 70% clickthrough.

So the ad will be much, much louder.
"Can an animal be a person?"

According to the definition, a "person" refers to a human [0][1]. Perhaps the better question is should we treat the whales better or differently based on what we learned rather than shoe-horn them into a word that literally means human.

[0] Oxford English: "A human being regarded as an individual"
[1] Merriam-Webster: "a human being"
Even Pepsi had a jingle based on the nickel price for a 6oz bottle of Coca-Cola:

Pepsi-Cola hits the spot, 12 full ounces, that’s a lot, Twice as much for a nickel too, Pepsi-Cola is the Drink for you!
The situation is much much simpler than you're making it. And as someone said, if you were part of a company that provided these jobs in a direct or indirect way, you'd see it much more clearly.

Basically there are people there that need to make a living wage to pay for food, medicine, education, etc. The reality is without the $X/hr jobs they have no other options or worse options.

An external actor like you, me, or a business can sit around talking about how shit it is, or go in and offer something at least slightly better. You're basically trashing the people who decide to take any action at all (giving them a low paying job). If the action isn't taken, they go back to their worse option. From your perspective you are failing to empathize with the Chinese because you don't see their other crappier options or can't imagine that they could possibly have crappier options.
This may help at a policy level, but I feel like it is solving the wrong problem.

Most of the time, poaching is easy to discover because there is a dead elephant on the ground missing its tusks. These game parks already know they have a problem, and often it is facilitated by an insider.

One way it could be useful is if you can trace a set of ivory back to a single poaching network, to understand the network's reach.
This isn't being 'buried' it just isn't that interesting. All of the money the client gives to the agency gets spent, some goes to the agency, some goes to the networks, some goes to the content providers. That isn't news at all.

Fraud is rampant. Also not new, although it is also also pretty easy to spot and block.

Almost nobody pays per 'impression' because, well that went out of style about the same time Yahoo! banner ads did.

Eventually the advertisers are going to pay for performance, and to do that they are going to have to fix the way they do advertising so that their ad, leads to their landing page which identifies who delivered the ad. Then they are going to pay based on whether or not the person who landed on their page actually buys something (service, good, or subscription). No money, no ad payment.

Most companies other than Amazon really aren't set up for that, and Amazon won't do it yet because, as far as I can tell, they aren't being forced too.

Its a shame that "affiliate" ads like the ones they let bloggers use have 100X there ROI of "CPC" ads and yet they have convinced the bloggers they can pay then a nickel and they should be happy when Google gets $13 - $23 for the same result.

I started building this system out of disgust but never finished it. It isn't that technically difficult, but it does have a lot of moving parts, and it does require infrastructure on the advertisers web site which can create durable transaction records. Some day I think.
U.S. Manufactures have access to capital such that they extend net 30 terms. That impact on our working capital is tremendous and outweighs the percentage cost savings.
The Fine Art of Forgery: the Smithsonian is using 3‑D printing to copy artifacts
I love this visualization:

http://condor.cse.nd.edu/condor_matrix.cgi
Rules for writing numbers
Advanced SystemCare Pro Key 2015 Crack Full Download
Hedge funds holding billions of dollars of the island’s bonds at steep discounts are frustrated that the government has not seemed willing to reach a deal to borrow more money from them.

And one wonders how these things come to pass. :(
R is a funny language because there are a lot of things in it that are just objectively bad, yet I still love it. Probably because of the community and CRAN. Of course, R is really just some syntax wrapped over C++, and it is very extendable using C and C++ when needed, so I don't think you can really say, in absolute, that R doesn't scale. Someone has written a package to scale whatever problem in R, you just need to find it.
Does Apple pay bounties for Safari bugs like this? Hopefully he got come cash from them!
Yes, sadly there are. It's not necessarily out of malice, a lot of folks just don't grasp how big spider traffic is. Even Google Analytics doesn't filter out crawlers by default, that setting is buried somewhere in the admin panel.

You're right, "time spent on ad unit" is simplistic but it's not inefficient. It shouldn't be the only thing in your arsenal but it's a good signal.

I reckon you are also overestimating the amount of sophistication that goes into these systems. The ones that are out for purchase in a black market become well-understood within a few weeks and are easy to fingerprint. Since the network is paying on net-30 days, there is some time to retroactively run some analysis and filter out provably non-human traffic.
> In real terms adjusted by the price of coke, the median household income has fallen by 69%.

The price of a Coke isn't real terms though. Because at 5c it was artificially constrained as mentioned in the article.

More interesting would be the price of a house, or daily groceries (of equivalent quality) vs. salary.
Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity
Super handy, Ive applied for air traffic controlling in Australia and these mathematical albeit harder questions are part of the testing.

Can you make a large bank of harder questions?

Similar to the level of the calculation test on http://www.shldirect.com/en/practice-tests
> What is the benefit for bots that are hitting other people's sites?

That's the "convince the network the bot-generated activity is genuine" part. A site where all the "people" clicking ads are never seen on other sites stands out like a sore thumb. Having a bunch of background benign-looking activity lets you hide other kinds of fraud, too: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/07/service-drains-competitor...
Read other comments - they announced it back on May 13
Also realize that innovating/startups are seen differently in different cultures and even 30 years has changed the landscape dramatically in the US as far as big opportunities for people who can do more than just inherit money really really well and/or climb the ladder at huge corporations. Being able to make your own equipment/3d printing is and will continue to be a game changer.
I just started using runit and really like how simple it is. I feel like nows a good time to plug void linux http://www.voidlinux.eu/ which I think is pretty cool, it's the only OS/distro I know that uses runit as the init system.
Jandie's Story
I've been following it and even done some development around 98-99. It was a bizarre system with tools that were not at the level even with the 5th/6th gen consoles available at the time. You pretty much had just a gcc port with some serious bugs, an optimizing assembler (it's VLIW so the assembler had -O option and the bigger number you put there, the better it will optimize, at 6 though it was running out of memory on any non-trivial code) and a broken debugger, written in XLisp for some reason, which I never managed to use productively.

The thing had 4 PUs, each with local memory and a DMA controller to access system and video memory. You could run one of them in a CPU emulation mode, where local memory was used as cache and it was the only target the C compiler supported. If you wanted local memory and/or more than 1 PUs - you wrote assembly and debugged by writing into the frame buffer.

Even then I was wondering how it's going to compete with the DC/PS2 it was coming up against but my bosses told me it's fine because it's going to be in every DVD player and everybody is going to by a DVD player pretty soon so the game consoles are pretty much already dead.
I wonder... what would have happened if they fixed the price at 1c, forcing the bottlers out of business, then renegotiated the contract i.e. void the contract and we'll stop advertising it as 1c. The fountain stuff could have kept Coke in business then it is a war of attrition?
I think saying a human being can be called a "person" - meaning rational agent, is also misleading.

Almost no human being can live out the rest of their lives alone without becoming seriously dysfunctional, (and irrational). The rare human able to do this has terminal cancer or is very old and is about to pass away this very night and/or week at tops.
16fps on my tablet. Still impressive seeing as many WebGL demos I've tried on it have either not worked or even crashed the browser. Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. What make and model is your phone?
Elon Musk, a Man of Impossible Dreams, Wants to Colonize Mars
Don't you think it's a bit risky to be building your startup on someone elses platform ?.

They might be ok with it now, but there’s nothing stopping them from changing their mind in the future.
> Changing the life of one person in a community can change that whole community. The world is not made of numbers, it's made of people. You have the best chance of making a big change in the world, if you focus on helping the people who live right next to you.

This sounds like unsupported platitude. What about helping someone local will help the overall world more than malaria nets or vaccinations? It gives you good feelings, but it's not actually BETTER.

There may be an argument that pulling someone out of poverty in the US makes them more likely to create change in the world themselves than pulling someone out of poverty abroad, but I'd find that to be tenuous.
All I can say is, every now and then I used to request a few grand from a popular network that I won't name but you probably know which one it is... about click fraud, inconsistencies (which I was not making up at all). Every single time,. no questions asked, I was given the full amount requested...

Now I'm not saying that means anything... but it always felt a bit odd like... yes yes we know how bad it is, take your money and shut up and keep buying those ads
Could someone please explain who he is? Not trying to be flippant, but to gain some context.
this puppy is gonna come crashing down...just like real estate bubble a few years ago....what will be the effect? Less online content, I guess.
iOS / iPad / iPhone / Apple Watch Hacker Needed – Drchrono
You're not accounting for the size of the portion. The nickel bottle of Coca-Cola was 6oz. Today's standard vending machine bottle is 20oz.
This article is a mess. The author states, "An entire industry—billions of dollars and thousands of jobs—is at stake," then goes into a completely different rant, "why is nobody talking about this?"

Over half the images are incomprehensible or offer no insight.

>https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Clickpat...

Including an unintelligible graph without an explanation to why it's necessary is bizarre. Even more so writing headers like "Responses to the scandal" and dropping in a stock photo of a gavel. It's like a pull quote, but even lazier.

There is some value in this article,

>Hoffman, the retired ad agency CEO who I quoted at the beginning, puts it better than I can:

>http://adcontrarian.blogspot.co.il/2013/06/the-75-billion-ad...

Even the author suggests to read this one instead.
The tricky part is what to do when it doesn't pay off.. This isn't and has never been my primary line of work - but I can't say that every campaign I ran was profitable, even though the ones that were extremely profitable did make up for those.
Know thyself and accept that you may need a little bit of a mental health break before you're ready to jump back in.

You are probably much more employable than you think. You probably also have more connections than you realise.

As soon as you're ready, reach out to the people you know in the industry both locally and elsewhere. Let them know that you're looking for work and the kind of work you're interested in doing.

What worked well for me when I was in your situation was short term technical work with no managerial component. I found it quite relaxing to just show up, write code for a client, then go home. No team to worry about, no wage bill looming, just some issues in the backlog.

After I'd done that for a little while, I was back in a position to stretch myself again.
If the article is correct, that the robot is parked in a single location and reaches across the building site to place bricks, then it can only be used for unreinforced masonry structures. Perfectly reasonable in West Australia, but not a great idea in places that get earthquakes.

I wonder how much modification it would need to be able to build brick cladding around a timber frame structure.

When I was working for a builder we would show up on-site after the foundation pad had set, and unload pre-nailed frames and trusses from a truck. Stand up and fasten the frames, top-plate and roof trusses. Usually we would put the ceiling battens in at this stage. Another contractor would put the roof on, then we would paper (or tyvek etc) the outside of the house, and install the windows and doors. The soffit under the eaves would go in. Then the brick layers would clad the outside at more or less the same time the plumbers and electricians were doing the pre-wire/pre-plumb.

With the eaves already in place, even a mobile robot is going to have trouble placing the top several rows of bricks.

On the other hand it should be possible to change the build order, in which case the only major change to the brick placing head would be an additional mechanism to install the anchors that attach the bricks to the wooden frame.
That is incredibly cool and great product video too.
> Did you know that the shuttle was mostly intact

The shuttle wasn't intact, just the crew cabin, or the very front part.
Here is a chart that covers the time period in question. The 1880s was right in the middle of a long period of slow deflation, so a bottle of coke was actually getting slightly more expensive for a period of nearly 30 years:

http://www.economics-charts.com/images/cpi-1800-2005.png
I really wonder which network is the primary voice bearer, Sprint or T-Mobile
Why do HN readers whine so much about paywalls?
We all enjoy quality journalism. We all hate with the fury of a thousand suns all web advertising. 99 percent of us make a living writing programs that serve content on the web in some way.

Why do we hate the NYT paywall? Do we expect the NYT to be happy with more exposure? How do they pay their costs with exposure?