Nasa's Visual Universe - <AUTHOR> https://artsexperiments.withgoogle.com/nasasvisualuniverse <comment><USER3> Hundreds of NASA photos. Arranged in a new and unique way. Never before you had to wait so many seconds watching sliding animations to view the next picture. Am I missing something?

Random link shows just a gray background under firefox then I have to wait 30 seconds to watch the initial animation again (ok, I can skip it down to 10 seconds).

I don't know what did they use machine learning for. What's good about having small bubbles as links instead of a clear list of albums?

I'll drink coffee just in case but I think that's not the problem here.

<comment><USER4> This is what happens when the designer works on it for too long - <USER2> flipping the pages back and forth but with only lorem ipsum on them, you would optimize for the experience of sitting there and flipping the pages back and forth instead of the experience of browsing content.

One big thing you have to watch out for in design is the difference in experiences between you while activating the transition animation for the 1,000,000th time versus the user seeing it for the first time.

<comment><USER5> > One big thing you have to watch out for in design is the difference in > experiences between you while activating the transition animation for the > 1,000,000th time versus the user seeing it for the first time.

This. 100% this!!

It's sometimes hard to not want to make pretty user interfaces - in fact why _shouldn 't_ we have pretty user interfaces?! But the problem I find some designers suffer from is they're so focused on an initial short term wow that they completely forget (or simply don't care?) about any longer term usage.

They say first impressions count but so does long term exposure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Not being able to click through the images quickly gave me temporal space to think. Slowing down and appreciating the amazing things the images depict. The teamwork, engineering, bravery that went into making the images boggled my mind once I stopped seeing them as just more lolcats. It made me conscious of the clickclickclick way I ordinarily view images. It made me uncomfortable with the way I treat the world. What more could I ask than to have my mental habits questioned and my awe of the universe brought fore.

<comment><USER7> Really appreciated reading your comment. I had a similar realization about the way I consume internet media in the past and your post brought it back into my consciousness.

It really is awe-inspiring what NASA has accomplished. They are still doing amazing work, but I'm not sure anything in my lifetime will have the mystique of the first man walking on the moon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Bad. Wait 5 seconds between clicks to see a photo with everything whizzing about the screen giving you motion sickness. It's technically slick, but the number of people who will use it actually view lots of photos is basically zero, because the user-interface is so bad. Maybe that's not the point, maybe this is just a technical demo.

<comment><USER9> That initial animation induced motion sickness for me and very rarely get motion sickness from video games, VR, movies, driving, flying, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really enjoyed the presentation of the content. The transitions were very cool (maybe a tad long but nothing worth complaining about in my opinion). Plus the transitions probably acted as a filler for loading time instead of having a traditional loading spinner.

Really impressed with how polished, smooth, and immersive the whole experience is.

How content is presented is just as important as content itself in many cases. I welcome and appreciate creative explorations like this.

<comment><USER11> I usually prefer simple and efficient, but the complaints against this intentionally-artsy website really remind me of people who don't see movies as a valid art form.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Once you get past the fluff and into a gallery, it's just a themed gallery. I habitually use screen zoom to make up for weak cision. The gallery carousel breaks, becoming inctrollable or blank once zoom (on mobile Safari) is engaged.

</comment><comment><USER13> They've obviously put a lot of work on this, but the drawn out long transitions are horrible and really take away from the images that should be the focus of the experience.

<comment><USER14> I don't think so.

It's just a cloud word with photos associated that have captions which is kind of lame.

Found "Mates" which is a weird clicked on it and the related photos are when in the description the word "mates" appears, as in, "John and crew mates were picked up by a chopper".

This seems to be just a AI buzzword abuse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I expected some kind of map of the visible universe. NASA got my feelings hurt

</comment><comment><USER16> Breaking news: artsy website with animations - HN doesn't like it.

People over here have such a hard-on for efficiency and speed. I'll give it to you, transitions are on the long side - I wouldn't mind the transitions taking half the time they do now, or the image descriptions taking less time to darken. However, if the idea was just to be a simple image gallery they'd just give us a .zip file. It's obviously meant to be a laid back and slow experience. IMHO here it's definitely too slow, but people over here seem to hate everything that's not a blank site with 0 animations.

I work back-end dev, I used to think everything flashy on the frontend was a waste of time. I then worked in a web agency, I've seen the thought process - usually, with _good_ designers and UX specialists, the overall experience is tailored to whatever feel they want the site to have. I worked on a virtual expo site with a museum once, it was _meant_ to be contemplative and slow. You guys would have immediately hated it, while if you took two seconds of your life to just let yourself be immersed, the whole thing was a great experience.

People over here also love to rave how this is anti-user, but you people are misunderstanding the average user. Power users like you are the minority. Most people don't mind the animations, and a lot of them actually enjoy it.

<comment><USER17> I couldn't disagree with you more except the complaining usually takes over the HN thread.

It's not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants something for the "power user". It's that we want simplicity in design. We want to get rid of _decoration_ and get to the essence of _what_ is being presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the content.

"Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience" is not the answer. It's condescending and out of touch with reality. How can the user "Chill out" if the browser comes to a crawl, phone heats up and is confused about what is going on.

Do you remember Apple's "Cover flow" where you can scroll through album covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS releases. It's not about "power users".

<comment><USER16> > It's not that nerds, geeks and technology-savvy audience of HN wants > something for the "power user". It's that we want simplicity in design. We > want to get rid of decoration and get to the essence of what is being > presented. Animations, fancy loaders, etc get in the way of enjoying the > content.

My whole point was that "decoration" can be enjoyable.

> "Chill out, this is supposed to be a relaxing experience" is not the answer. > It's condescending and out of touch with reality. You haven't put forth a > compelling argument besides taking an anti-cliche stance.

You're assuming all users have this stance, and that's what's actually condescending and out of touch to me. You haven't really put forward any compelling argument that doesn't fit my description of HN users assuming what they are looking for in a website is in any way representative of what the average user wants. It's the same thing as the tech crowd getting shouting at phone manufacturers because they're removing the headphone jack: surprise surprise, the average user doesn't care enough about plugging in an adapter that they won't buy the phone.

> Do you remember Apple's "Cover flow" where you can scroll through album > covers? This website reminds of how designers get carried away by fancy, > novel ideas. It was a massive failure, everyone used album lists, it was > slow as hell and Apple finally killed it in one of the recent MacOS > releases. It's not about "power users".

Cover Flow was a failure as part of a music organisation software. This is part of Google's "Arts Experiments". It's _meant_ to be pretty and flashy.

<comment><USER18> I am not assuming.

I spent several years working in A/B testing. Based on behavior, none of the artistic branding made any difference to whether users got engaged in sites. Make the site fast. Put your action items in prominent places on the page. Make them big and obvious. Make the site usable. Make it easy for people to get to what they want. Those things mattered again and again. But pretty aesthetics? Never once have I seen it matter.

Want to piss off a designer? Subject the designs to an A/B test. Want to really piss off a designer? Show the resulting null result to the designer afterwards.

As far as I am concerned, anyone focused on the look and feel of webpages serves the purpose of making the people who own and run the site happy. If they talk about what the users want, I have to ask what testing they have done with actual users. If they can't produce tests, then I conclude that they are spouting BS.

If this does not sound possible to you, I would suggest that you explain the enduring popularity of minimalist websites like craigslist, plentyoffish and google.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting, but the site made my computer crawl almost to a halt. Computer which is used for (and good at it) advanced rendering and simulations. A 12 core machine with two modern GPUs inside. Modern Web, and chrome, is a travesty.

<comment><USER20> Interestingly runs fine for me on Safari 12.0.3 on a midrange 2017 MacBook Pro 15".

<comment><USER21> Same here on a late 2013 bog standard 21" iMac

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I understand the UI is not to everyone's taste, but I think the idea of using machine learning to create an engaging "window" into large sets of public- domain images is a good one. It would be interesting to read more about the process used to tag and organize the content for this project.

There are lots of other repositories of high-quality free content (museum archives, Flickr, Wikimedia Commons, etc) that could benefit from this kind of machine-aided presentation.

</comment><comment><USER23> The bad thing about this way of presentation, is that the circle bubbles are dispersed, at any level. So I need to pan around just to read the text on each, which is very annoying.

</comment><comment><USER24> Odd to see so much complaining when the page works beautifully on mobile.

</comment><comment><USER25> I have not seen such lags for a long time. NASA could try better.

</comment><comment><USER26> There's a "rust" category

</comment><comment><USER27> The transitions are extremely annoying.

</comment><comment><USER28> pointless forest

<comment><USER29> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

<comment><USER28> ^ "The Humorless One"</comment></comment></comment>


MultiMethods for Python - <AUTHOR> http://alexgaynor.net/2010/jun/26/multimethods-python/

<comment><USER2> The difference between this and true overloaded methods (which, correct me if I'm wrong, is the what he meant by "MultiMethod") is that an overloaded method is created at compile-time and does not incur the added cost of determining the type of the object at runtime.

That being said, I didn't know that Python doesn't have function signatures. Would someone care to comment on how a function is identified?

<comment><USER3> Multi-methods are not overloaded functions (in the C++ sense). You are correct that overloaded function calls are resolved at compile-time while multi-method calls are resolved at runtime, but if you want to make a C++ analogy, you'd better compare them to virtual methods. Multi-methods work almost like virtual methods, with two exceptions:

1) multi-methods are declared outside the class definitions; it is important since it allows you to extend a class without directly modifying its definition or implementation.

2) virtual functions do dispatch by one argument (`this` in C++) while multi- methods could perform dispatch by an arbitrary number of arguments.

That said, I don't like this implementation that much since it does not respect class inheritance. Suppose you defined a MultiMethod with two registered implementations, for class A and class B, where B is inherited from A. Then the result of the multi-method call with an object of type B is undefined. A proper multi-method would call the most specific implementation in this case.

<comment><USER4> In C++, methods are only dispatched by the _type_ of the arguments. In, for example, Clojure's multimethods you can dispatch on pretty much anything: type of some or all arguments, their values, function of either (or both)... etc.

Quick example:

        (defmulti foo #(* % 100))
        (defmethod foo 0 [_] "passed in zero")
        (defmethod foo 100 [_] "passed in one")
        (defmethod foo 200 [_] "passed in two")
        (defmethod foo :default [n] (str "passed in " n))
        ...
        >>> (foo 2)
        "passed in two"
        >>> (foo 5)
        "passed in 5"

(written off the top of my head, so excuse any mistakes..)

I'm only using a single argument here and I'm dispatching on a function of its value. I could just as easily dispatch on multiple arguments (or an arbitrary amount).

<comment><USER3> I wonder how Clojure deals with ambiguities when dispatching by arbitrary predicates. Also in this case, the overhead of of generic call will grow linearly with the number of methods, right?

In Python, you could limit generic dispatch to argument type only without losing generality since you could override the `isinstance` operator. For instance, you could define a `const()` type so that `isinstance(x, const(100))` is true if and only if `x == 100`. Then your example could be written in Python as:

      foo = generic()

      foo.when(const(0))
      def foo_0(x): print "passed in zero"
      foo.when(const(100))
      def foo_100(x): print "passed in 100"
      foo.when(const(200))
      def foo_200(x): print "passed in 200"
      foo.when(int)
      def foo_default(x): print "passed in", x

This is not as elegant as in a language with native support for generic functions, but it works. I wish mainstream languages started to adopt multi- methods; it's conceptually very simple and much more extension-friendly than traditional OOP. Sadly it doesn't seem to happen.

<comment><USER4> _the overhead of of generic call will grow linearly with the number of methods_

As far as I know, no. I could be wrong, but I think how it works is this: each method is added to a map for that multimethod. When dispatching, the dispatch function is applied to the arguments and the result is used as the key into the map of methods. I'm pretty sure that the compiler could optimise the lookup too, though I don't know if Clojure does or not.

Thats just what I would do if I wrote Clojure - I don't actually know how Clojure manages it in real life (and am too lazy to check).

Yeah. I've always wished that languages like C++ had two things: multimethods and ML-style pattern matching (well, three things - I guess you'd want ML- style parametric types to go with the pattern matching).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> You shouldn't test for arguments with isinstance(). Better test for specific functionality. It's like FreeBSD developers being angry that people use tests like 'somecmd --version' in autoconf scripts and thus software not compiling even though required functionality was available.</comment>


Optimizing the any function in python - <AUTHOR> https://oliverspohngellert.com/Optimizing-Any.html <comment><USER2> So you're artificially building something that's gives you some of the benefit of using a generator expression in a list expression, instead of just using a generator expression?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wouldn't call it artificially building something, but I suppose yes. I also find this code to be much more readable than generator code. Once you understand the function, all you have to do is pass it a function that returns a boolean.

<comment><USER2> How is

        any(function_takes_time(i) for i in range(10 ** 3))

harder to read than

        fast_any([(lambda x: (lambda: function_takes_time(x)))(i) for i in range(10 ** 3)])

<comment><AUTHOR> The first one is clearly easier to read than the second. However the first one is slow. I believe fast_any is easier to read than generator code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, apologies I see now. I always associated generator's with the `yields` keyword, but maybe I have to look into them again. Thanks!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Carbn.app – Passively manage your carbon footprint - <AUTHOR> https://www.carbn.app/ <comment><USER2> It's a browser extension that monitors my purchases (like plane tickets) to compute a carbon footprint, then sells me the ability to purchase offsets, or recommends behavior changes?

Really interesting idea, I could see this doing well.

I'd personally need a ton of detail about how it collects data. If anything is sent back to a server then I'm out, the industry lost my trust by misleading about data sharing/usage. Also need a ton of data about the offset I'm buying, and what sort of cut the app takes from that purchase.

</comment><comment><USER3> This reminds me a lot of Carboniferous[1], which is a project that was done recently by another team at a hackathon I went to. They just focused on the carbon footprint of travel, and how to minimalise the amount used in a trip using different modes of transport. I think tech has a big opportunity to help us optimize our resource usage and make it more concrete to think about.

[1] [https://devpost.com/software/carboniferous](https://devpost.com/software/carboniferous)

</comment><comment><USER4> How does Carbn passively track carbon footprint? The website is scant on details</comment>


There are no acceptable ads - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/fivefilters/block-ads/wiki/There-are-no-acceptable-ads#wrapper <comment><USER2> I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4/month for access. I decided it was time to start putting my money where my mouth is.

I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. Even the content traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it.

I've got £50/month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy/able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there's a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I'm hopeful that we're seeing the start of the return to journalism.

<comment><USER3> > I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it.

Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way.

That's why I don't like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say "I'd pay for high quality content". And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution.

Unfortunately, that's simply not the reality we live in. The vast majority (95% or more) of internet users would rather have their content subsidized by ads than have to pay. This has been proven time and time again by the countless subscription model failures over the last decade. Sure, some sites have found success, but those that do are the extremely rare exceptions, not the rule. And _none_ have found fantastic success. How many subscription model websites are in the top 10? Top 100? Top 1000?

Subscription models just don't work. Nuff said, really. There's 10+ years of data to back it up.

<comment><USER4> There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site. If I had to pay $4/mo each for all the random sites I visit each month... I wouldn't visit those sites any more.

What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.

(And, as an incorrigible cynic, I always wonder whether comments like mahranch's are made by people with a vested interest in the online advertising industry. They certainly wouldn't stand to benefit if the Internet switched to micropayments.)

<comment><USER5> That sounds like Brave's bitcoin protocol they are working on.

Thing is, if sites are automatically compensated once users visit how does that change the motivation away from click bait?

<comment><USER4> It doesn't. Does it need to?

I think it's up to the user to avoid click-bait. Possibly, knowing that they're directly (or very nearly directly) paying for visits will make some users think twice before following a click-baity link.

But TBH, I'm not convinced people in general hate click-bait as much as people on HN seem to. People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.

<comment><USER6> I don't see how clicking on click bait means you pay/nearly pay. You're only paying if money leaves your bank account. You're just wasting a little time (not much though; just click the back button) and feeling a little stupid for falling for it. Just don't click on linkbait, and make a note not to ever visit that site again. Actually, it'd be nice if adblockers let you blacklist sites and turned their urls into the text "linkbait url removed". I think people DO hate linkbait generally because nobody likes being lied to, which is essentially what's happening.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I agree entirely that there are no acceptable ads. I have only one life and the entirety of the value I derive from it comes from that which I pay attention to. Thus I highly value the extent to which I can control my attention and the thoughts swirling around in my consciousness (and in my subconscious, since that has a significant effect on what ends up being promoted to conscious thought.)

I consider advertising to be robbing me of ME. I understand that this is a cost I am incurring as payment for a service, but I consider it an extremely high cost, and exploitative of the fact that it is difficult to see how high the cost is.

This view is informed largely by popular books on how the brain/humans work, like Thinking Fast and Slow and Consciousness and the Brain and podcasts like You Are Not So Smart, etc. It is also somewhat informed by meditative experience, which I think has given me at least a little insight into the workings of my mind.

I'll note that I do think there is some amount of informational value in advertising. But as long as advertising is created and funded by people working hard to drive me to a specific conclusion rather than to inform me, I'm not interested. I'd rather pay services like consumer reports to deliver this information to me.

<comment><USER8> >I consider advertising to be robbing me of ME

Okay fine but the alternative is working longer hours to produce the money to pay for your consumption. Which is as much robbing you of you as advertising is with the disadvantage that you can't consume concurrently.

<comment><USER7> If that's true, I think I'm willing to accept it. I'm much more capable of evaluating how much to consume vs how much to work than I am of evaluating advertising.

I'm not sure it's true, though. Advertisers are confident they make money from me by taking my attention. Like everyone else, I don't directly perceive that to be true -- but, amazingly, it is.*

Advertisers split those profits with the content creators/distributors.

I'd rather that money come directly from a conscious, informed choice on my part rather than by intentionally manipulated behaviors. That does mean I'll consume different things than I do when I'm advertised to, but it also frees up money. I believe this just from looking at "sinks and sources" \-- removing advertiser profits is removing a big sink (and a small source of informational value, which I've mentioned I'd rather get elsewhere.)

I don't know what the solution is for getting that money into the hands of content creators and distributors, but I'm sure there is one.

* And this apparent contradiction, where basically nobody directly perceives the cost, but advertisers realize the value anyway, is consistent with everything psychology tells us about the myriad of systematic human bias, and is a big part of the reason I say the cost of advertising is difficult/impossible to evaluate from an experiential perspective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that, as the majority of 'content' is complete rubbish. The web used to be populated by hobbyists who made their own websites not expecting compensation, and they were generally high quality. Now it's ruled by clickbait and ad infested contentless garbage, I'm happy if it all dies.

<comment><USER3> > Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content > will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that

Except it's more of a butterfly effect than people realize. Not just "article" type content, but also innovation. I doubt sites like reddit would exist (at least in their current form) without ads. Hell, they barely get by _with_ ads. Google wouldn't exist without ads, etc etc... Sure those sites exist now, and you take ads away, they're already entrenched, but what about the future google or reddit or facebook?

A lot of innovation has been spurred from people's passions and their hobbies, but much more innovation has taken place as a result of people trying to make a quick easy buck. And that's what ads promise.

Everything from your favorite news website to your favorite android app wouldn't exist (or likely wouldn't exist) if not for ads. I don't think people (hackernews users) really have thought about how much innovation on the internet is directly and indirectly related to ads. If you actually stop and think about it, the complexity can boggle your mind.

<comment><USER10> So Google, Facebook, and Reddit might not exist, so what? Other services and models will take their place. It reminds me of this Jack Black clip on piracy[1] where he essentially claims if artists can't make loads of cash, there will be no more art.

This argument is simply a scare tactic employed by monopolies of every kind. "Too Big to Fail" banks say the economy won't exist without them. The MPAA claims art won't exist without them. Advertisers say internet content won't exist without them.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkWKvMCzqA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkWKvMCzqA)

<comment><USER3> > Other services and models will take their place.

You're missing the point. You fail to grasp the scope and size of the reach that ads have on the internet. I saw what the internet was like before the masses arrived, I was here online back in 1995 and while the lack of ads was nice, "the internet" was a ghost town. Those sites wouldn't, couldn't exist without ads. Hell, google isn't a search engine, it's first and foremost an ad company. That's where 95% of their revenue comes from! Their search feature is just a vehicle to display ads. _Literally_.

> This argument is simply a scare tactic employed by monopolies of every kind.

Except it's not a scare tactic and it's not an argument, it's a fact. Even if it it was both, it doesn't make it any less true. Advertisements actually _do_ spur innovation and there's tons of data and studies to back it up:

PDF warning: www.voez.at/download.php?id=1152

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I no longer visit websites that block people who block ads. Not out of spite, but because the content they produce is of such low value that I have no incentive to pay for it if offered (either with money, or with my attention for your ad supplier). And this is my contention with 99% of content produced on the internet in general.

<comment><USER12> Could we move beyond adblocking and start blocking such sites directly? I don't want to even visit websites that only grab content from other sites. From bots making nonsense pages for getting in your search results to news sites grabbing a story from another news site and rewriting. I've seen plenty of sites that just copy Wikipedia or StackOverflow content to show it with ads and with no added value on top.

<comment><USER13> In theory, Google should be penalizing these sites left and right, however, since many of them appear to slip through the cracks, this would indicate that the problem is much more difficult to solve than it seems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't have a problem with ads per se. I have a problem with profiling. Besides been scary, I also find it annoying. If I'm visiting a site about video games I'd rather see related ads, not an ad about a product I happened to search a couple of days ago. Just because I searched for shoes doesn't mean it's the only product I'm interested in. I also have a problem with web pages that load half a dozen ads that eat too much space and make readability a pain in the behind.

I'm not naïve to expect that a $50bn industry will just disappear. What I'd like to disappear though is the gazillion of sites that steal content from major venues and monetize through AdSense. Which begs the question why Google accepts them in the first place. In the long term I don't think there will be tectonic changes in the adverting industry. If publishers start serving ads from their own domains the whole ad blocking thing will become obsolete, or we'll have to think of more aggressive ways to block ads. I would though like to see some adoption of micropayments. For the time being no publisher seems to be heading that way, they all ask for ridiculous subscriptions of something like $1/week which if you read a couple of articles per month becomes too expensive.

The other thing that I also don't like and I rarely see it mentioned, is affiliate marketing. I wonder if there's a plugin to render affiliate links obsolete by stripping away the referrer part. I don't like when sites become salesmen because it gives me the impression that the whole purpose of the content was to promote a product.

</comment><comment><USER15> > If ad blocking continues to grow, which we hope it will, other ways of > funding will be found.

What ways can you imagine? Within a few minutes I came up with:

1) Someone else paying for you seeing ads.

2) You paying for using the site or an associated service.

3) Someone else paying for influencing what the site does for you.

4) Someone else paying for your data on that site.

And, the one that people rely on too much:

5) Someone else paying for nothing, hoping the site can be sold later at a profit.

One that can realistically cover only a small portion of sites:

6) The site being run as part of a charity.

Do you find one of those generally more preferable than 1), or can see a point I'm missing?

<comment> grey-area Most companies charge people money for goods or services they value and gladly pay for. For them ads are an adjunct to marketing, not a business model. Some other people host stuff for free, some sell content slots (like the job ads here on HN), some give content away to attract other business. That diversity is great, and none of it is threatened by ad blockers. There's more to the world than ads, a lot more.

In contrast the rise of ad companies like taboola is actively degrading content and experiences and debasing previously respected sites. If you insist on showing intrusive advertising, users will go elsewhere. The failure of that business model based on ads is simply not the reader's problem to solve.

<comment><USER16> _Most companies charge people money for goods or services they value and gladly pay for_

That's the whole problem. Most of the pablum you see on the internet isn't worth enough for people to pay for it.

Sure I'll read it if it's free (ad subsidized) but if it wasn't there I probably wouldn't miss 90% of it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Ads are the lazy way to monetise anything. I love Duolingo's example, where they've built out a translation service on top of their language-learning platform: while learning a new language, people contributed to the translations Duolingo could sell to their clients. I bet they make %% more than by running any amount of ads.

<comment><USER18> _> > Ads are a lazy way to monetise anything_

Ads can be also a way to monetise something that doesn't reach the value threshold where people will pay directly.

E.g. Niche blogs sometimes have a lot of visitors (they are providing some value) but not enough to get paid directly. Even patreon most times doesn't work.

<comment><USER19> Many interesting niche blogs are essentially job ads for the writers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I disagree. The best monetized site I've seen had a direct relationship with the advertiser, no ad blocking as the banners were local content, spot on topic and tasteful.

<comment><USER21> Have to concur. Some time ago I wrote down a list of ground rules that would make display ads acceptable, at least for me: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10521930)

When ads are served locally, avoid tracking, remain kept out of the way and are kept strictly within the topic of the content - then we are talking about a reasonable starting point.

Unfortunately the current ad ecosystem seems to be diametrically opposed to this. As far as I can see, the ad vendors brought this situation upon themselves.

EDIT: typofixes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This medium (Internet over HTTP) is built in a way that I can choose how I render that information using the programs of my choice or the code that I write. Those who wish to prevent this can create a new medium, device, protocol, file format, or program, to push their advertising so that there is no choice.

The Internet is not a one-way broadcast nor is it newsprint. The browser is not a television. This medium is new and it is different and we shouldn't put up with having the old forms and methods being forced upon us.

<comment><USER23> What's your view on websites denying access if an adblocker is detected?

<comment><USER24> I'm fine with that. I don't visit them, and these websites will find out the hard way that antagonizing their audience isn't going to work. The Ad revenue mana isn't going to last, people are tired of all these ads on the internet, the security issues, the ads killing the battery issues, the webpage performance issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >"'Non-invasive advertising' is an oxymoron. Truly non-invasive advertising would be no advertising at all. Why should any of us put up with being advertised to when we have no interest in giving our attention to advertisers?"

I don't find well done advertising invasive, I actually rely on them sometimes, like when Adwords started... it made sense in the context.

The author say later that as ad blocking usage grow the websites owners would find other forms of funding. The thing is, we have been there already. The majority of the volume traffic don't want to pay, and the ones that do aren't enough to support a big website operation.

</comment><comment><USER26> These articles are really getting tired. What people seem to continously miss is that there is no objective "quality" standard. Value to YOU is not the same as to someone else. While we can all subjectively say stuff like celebrity news isnt as important as the latest scientific breakthrough, people are free to, and will, read whatever they want to read - and it's their actions that determines what content holds value to them.

Now, regardless of quality, all that content does cost money to create and advertising is a great system to subsidize those costs. It's fast, passive, egalitarian, and efficient compared to any form of direct payment (where funds are transferred directly from you to the site). Giving the reader the choice is of course the best option, but short of that, it's far better to have ads then closed access.

The problem today isn't advertising the system but rather the _implementation_ \- it's the low barriers to entry, weak standards, lack of regulation or any enforcement and misaligned incentives that has caused this massive proliferation of crappy ad networks with bad code, scammy ads, malware and fraud.

Acceptable ads is absolutely the right start, it just needs to be done by an industry group or even the FTC/government itself so that it holds some power. Not an adblocking company that is paid to whitelist because clearly this leads to a conflict of interest as can be seen in what is already let through. Combine real regulation with a vetted list of approved vendors who do the right thing that advertisers are only allowed to use and we can finally move on from this silly war between readers and ads.

<comment><USER27> I don't agree with this.. I compare the internet ad situation with my TV (in the Netherlands): since about 10 years there's been more and more ads on many channels, and i stopped watching at ALL of them. There are currently about 5 channels (of 100+ total) that i still watch, the ones without ads.

And I don't mis much because in my opinion most of the commercial TV channels (the ones with ads) also have low quality content.

I really hope ad blocking keeps growing and all the bad quality content on the internet dies together with the ads.

And i'll hapily pay for quality internet content without ads, at an acceptible price, just as i buy apps in Apples appstore, and pay for Netflix.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure what part you don't agree with...

If you don't feel the ads are worth the content in exchange, then you are free to stop consuming that content. Which is exactly what you're doing.

Again, there's no "bad" quality content. Bad to you might be what someone else is interested in. As for everything else, it's just an implementation problem with the market being flooded with shady advertisers and ad networks that operate without oversight. TV/radio/print all have much stricter standards which is sorely missing online.

Paying for content is a perfectly acceptable system, it's just not as scalable or equal to all users as ads are. Payments are a valid option, but it's far better to be a choice rather than the only option compared to advertising.

<comment><USER28> > Again, there's no "bad" quality content.

But that's wrong.

There is content that has purely no content, and which is engineered to make people click, despite providing no benefit.

Think about all the Buzzfeed upvoted etc sites, providing next to no benefit at all.

<comment><USER26> Those sites are read by lots of people who do like that content. Content is content, you can't just engineer constant attention without actually producing anything.

The fact is that the mainstream does like reading what Buzzfeed puts out and are getting plenty of value/benefit from it - regardless of your subjective judgement of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I can stretch as far as saying that if a blocker can detect it, it's too invasive. That includes, for example if it is served from an ad network.

I don't mind ad pictures in magazines. The same should be ok on websites.

Im not sure what fraction of the Internet is paid for by ad-network revenue, but I really don't care if half the content on the Internet suddenly dies in a fire because their measly income from ad networks dries up. I'm happy with only truly free, properly monetized (affiliate links, proper sponsoring), or paid for content.

</comment><comment><USER30> Unfortunately, this gist is based on the same fallacy that the one it opposes is based on: the idea that visiting sites and consuming their content is a primary need for visitors.

The so-called "other ways of funding" are paywalls. If every blog, YouTube videos, online newspaper, start-up, etc, were behind a paywall, people would just nope out because it wouldn't not worth it, at all. Disabling ads wouldn't result in other ways of funding, it would result in people not working on creating content because they wouldn't be able to make a business out of it.

On the other hand, and for the same reason, content creator shouldn't complain that people block their ads. We don't need to visit your site, we don't need your content, it's a bonus. We don't care whether you make money or not. You chose not to make a paywall (and that's probably a good idea since nobody would pay) and hand over your content for free bundled with ads. We can technically cut out the ads. If you don't want us to do so, make them so that their annoyance isn't worth the effort of cutting them out.

</comment><comment><USER31> This is ridiculous. I'll be first to admit a lot of the advertising models are broken, but there _are_ acceptable ads. Many of the advertising structures on iOS, for example, work well. There are websites that do simple advertising, without trackers, like Daring Fireball that are more than acceptable.

Can we stop with the repetitive anti-advertising FUD, please?

<comment><USER32> There are acceptable ads. But has the internet's sites overall used best practices remotely? Nope. They've used auto-play video and audio, performance and bandwidth hogging schemes, even malware, and countless other things. The trust is lost.

I agree that this _is_ ridiculous. The fact some ads are OK doesn't mean the pool isn't poisoned and users are done with it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Just because you can do something about it easily, doesn't mean you are entitled to it.

It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are.

Don't like the ads? Don't consume the content. Or at least treat adblocking for what it is: a hack made easily available to you by the Web. If you consider them as part of the content (which they are) you'll see that the argument for the entitlement to remove ads falls flat

<comment><USER34> >It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are.

I would disagree, as many others who do not even own a TV. Or people who record broadcast and fast forward ads. Streaming is huge. I go less frequently to the cinema, because I have to watch 20 minutes of ads (+trailers) before the actual movie.

<comment><USER33> I also don't own a TV, not because of the ads, but because the content and consumption model sucks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I use uBlock origin and love it. But I have a mental conflict. I run 135+ university web sites (for one university) with no ads and no flash. But we do use google analytics and include some 3rd party fonts on specific sites. Many ad blockers block google analytics and some block the fonts.

I haven't started counting how many users are blocking google analytics. I'm less worried about the fonts because the designers have accounted for that and they downgrade to something that is acceptable (at least to me). We are seeing a decline in new users to our sites but college applications are up. I'd love to know if that decline is false and is just because google analytics is blocked.

I think it is time to put some code in and see what the real numbers are for ad blocking on our main site.

<comment><USER12> Maybe move to a self-hosted analytics tool? I've seen some like piwik that use JavaScript just like Google Analytics, but I wonder if there's any that can simply be added as a plugin to Apache or nginx or as a middleware for node.js, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Linking to a github page is an (implicit) advertisement for github

Saying "no ad is acceptable" is just so out of reality it's not even funny.

I do use Ublock and I do deactivate it for sites I think are worthy.

</comment><comment><USER37> There are no acceptable subscription fees. Why should any of us put up with paying for content when we have no interest in giving away our money?

</comment><comment><USER38> I dislike nearly all ads and want the ability to block any ads I dislike.

But the fundamental question is: without advertising, how do you learn about products you might want to buy? Ad-funded search is not a good answer, and in the limit, proprietary search result ordering would be just another type of advertising.

Word of mouth is slow and unreliable, especially if you are looking for unusual things or if your preferences are often unusual compared with the people you ask for reviews.

The only thing I dislike more than ads is social media, so that's not an option.

When I personally bear a higher cost conducting a product search to fit my needs than the costs of viewing ads, then ads _are_ better and they do add value.

This is not a heroic defense of the abject shit ads that litter the internet, the rampant malware or tracking, the creepy attempts at unnecessarily specific personalization, or content creators selling out.

But it's also not reasonable to say the Platonic idea of an ad is intrinsically unethical or intrinsically cost-ineffective.

<comment><USER39> I find it very hard to believe that ads out-perform your personal search of whatever you're looking for, even currently.

I have never, not once, found a product because of an ad that I wouldn't have found otherwise in looking for the solution to a problem I was having. I have, countless times over my life, especially when I was younger, bought something based on judgement directly based on ads, that turned out to be the wrong choice.

When you go to a mall, there's a directory. It'd be even nicer if there was an automated directory so you could peruse at arbitrary granularity before entering stores. Why isn't there a global directory of products, with a reputation system? Why is there no directory online for all the stores within 15min of my home, including people selling out of home, that I can search through? Isn't this driving everyone crazy?

I don't care that there exists some Platonic good side to ads, because that good side is not how they're used in the big picture, at all, anymore, and it's just looking the other way from a serious flaw in modern markets.

People buying stuff for no good reason other than that they wanted it, not needed it, has gotten an entire planet into a heap of trouble. Let's do less of that, maybe? And let's start making a system to enables people in need of a product in touch with those who can provide a solution, NOT the other way around.

<comment><USER38> Here's one example. I like listening to comedy podcasts from Ear Wolf. I heard an ad for Leesa Mattresses, and happen to need a mattress.

After buying mattresses in the past, one of the major pain points for me is actually physically hauling the mattress and carrying it up steps to an apartment.

Leesa sells mattresses that are compressed in a special way into a box the size of a mini-fridge, and can be relatively easily carried up steps by a single person.

This shipping detail alone makes me much more interested in their product, and I could potentially compromise some on price or quality to get that unique shipping service.

I didn't even know any brand did this, and basically had completely put it out of my mind. Some time ago I wrote it off as something I couldn't find, and the activation energy to get my brain to generate a desire to actively search for this feature became really high. Then, sometime later, Leesa came into existence as a seller.

My activation energy makes it unlikely that I will choose to search for this feature (I searched before, came to the belief it didn't exist, and don't want to deal with the search cost again under this belief).

Thankfully, an ad was pushed into my ears as I listened to a podcast I like, which alerted me to a new company with a new service that I did want, but for which it is extremely unlikely I would have thought to search on my own.

Even in the case when I did remember that I want that feature, overcome my belief that no one provides it, sluggishly open a new tab in Chrome, and type out that search, and I find Leesa via a Google search, that's really no different than an ad. It's a function of how many others heard about Leesa (originally through means other than themselves just searching directly) and successfully interacted with them, and the effect of increased reputation as a seller. However, it _does_ rely on me sort of exogenously coming up with the cognitive wherewithal to do the search, rather to be passively advertised at. There's a _ton_ of stuff where this trade-off between relying on manually searching vs. being passively advertised at is in favor of experiencing passive ads.

I was very happy to be passively advertised at in that case. Whatever research Leesa did to determine that audio ads through that podcast had a good chance of successfully reaching people who might want that service, it was good work on their part, and made a certain tiny corner of the economy slightly more efficient in a certain way.

There is every potential that online ads could be used the same way, and it seems efficient to me to place the research cost burden of how to best place ads onto the advertisers, not onto consumers who then have to overcome activation barriers to engage in searches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Intrusive ads are not some new phenomenon. Print, radio, and TV ads are all definitely intrusive as well. I don't generally hear the same crowd advocating the end of all such advertising.

<comment><AUTHOR> You would if it was as easy as installing an ad blocker.

<comment><USER37> No, I wouldn't. (Do I know you?) I don't even use ad blocker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Advertisers are willing to pay more money for the right to put an ad on a webpage than website visitors are willing to pay to view the webpage.

Until that math changes, ads will prevail.

</comment><comment><USER41> What about Privacy Badger? How does that compare? Is that OK to use?

[https://www.eff.org/privacybadger](https://www.eff.org/privacybadger)

I've used Adblock, Adblock Plus, Noscript and Ghostery. Since several months I've changed to Privacy Badger. The first time I tried it, I thought it didn't work, but it seems it needs a little time to collect info and start blocking. Since then I've had no issues with it. It's easy to unblock individual sites, if something doesn't work, and then re-blocking it again.

The only problem is that when I want to unblock one specific functionality on a website, it's very difficult to find out which scripts to allow. At first you see the PB has four items blocked. Easy you think, you can try four times, and then it should work. But those four items load another twenty, and then it gets complicated. This is not Privacy Badger's fault, just the complexity of websites nowadays. But if you could allow specific services, instead of specific scripts, that would be great.

I can't give a useful review, nothing more than that it works for me like Adblock and Ghostery have worked.

<comment><USER42> I use Privacy Badger and AdBlock and NoScript. But I feel like my secret weapon is self-destructing cookies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I understand that ads going away means loss of jobs in industries supported by advertising. It means sites may no longer have ways of supporting themselves easily.

If lost jobs and less web content is the cost of having no advertising, it's a cost I am okay with. I think. It's an internal mental debate I have on this topic from time to time.

The one and only case that I have a hard time with myself is for people that really can't afford to pay for content, people who barely can afford internet in general. If suddenly most content online becomes paywalled (though this isn't maybe a given in an ad-less web, hard to say), then a lot of underprivileged people will be left out of access to the general web, and if we want the web to be a place of easily accessible information for everyone, then this becomes a problem.

Personally, I've had enough family members' machines affected by malware from ads, and I've been to enough intrusive ad-cluttered pages across the web that I will continue ad-blocking myself (and for my family's machines), despite any particular larger consequences for the web that my result. The performance, readability, and security differences between not-ad-blocking and ad-blocking are staggering.

If all of our ad-blocking eventually kills the web... well at least short-term I didn't have to deal with ads.

A selfish, short-term view. I don't deny that.

Acceptable ads maybe is some kind of special middle ground we can all arrive at, but the problem is that "acceptable" is arbitrary depending on who the arbiter is... and so far ABP's ideas of "acceptable" are not acceptable to me. Ads from something like "The Deck" ad network are closer to what I consider acceptable.

</comment><comment><USER44> They keep changing the definition of "we" in this.

 _Why should any of us put up with being advertised to when we have no interest in giving our attention to advertisers?_

But then admit that some people may indeed like and appreciate ads. Please don't speak for the universal "we" \- some of us actually do enjoy (some, but not all) and appreciate (some, but not all) ads.

</comment><comment><USER45> You can disable the "acceptable ads" in adblock plus. This seems like... an ad for uBlock Origin.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can, but why not opt in to acceptable ads? Why do we have to opt out? uBlock Origin does the right thing - assumes you want all ads blocked.

By the way, we're in no way affiliated with uBlock Origin. Just think it's currently the best ad blocker out there for users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The adblocker test isn't very thorough. It just checks whether an image can be downloade from gstatic.com. It told me that I don't have an adblocker installed when in fact I have ublock origin with the setting that it can download images from gstatic.com

<comment><AUTHOR> No, it consists of 2 tests at the moment:

1\. Tries to load a file called ads.css which is usually blocked in default installations of many blockers relying on Easy List.

2\. It uses gstatic.com to check if acceptable ads are being allowed - gstatic.com is whitelisted by Adblock Plus, so we test for it and warn users that acceptable ads are being let through.

We're going to be updating the detection to detect use of other blockers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> > There are no acceptable ads

That is laughably and trivially false. I'm in the market for a good and affordable house cleaning service. An ad that could hook me up with exactly what I want, when I want it would not only be acceptable, it would be fantastic.

<comment><USER48> > An ad that could hook me up with exactly what I want, when I want it would > not only be acceptable, it would be fantastic.

It's telling that you don't seem to have found one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> There are acceptable advertisements as far as I'm concerned. Ones that are static and register the user in any way (including cookies) and don't get in the way of content consumption.

It's been a while since I've seen ads like that.

</comment><comment><USER50> Can someone explain how Google makes so much money with their ad system and how its related to these kinds of ads? Google originally planned never to do ads. They changed course I think 2002 or so, and are now worth 500B$.

<comment><USER51> I'd venture to guess: no looping GIF ? No video ads with auto-play ? That's why I use an ad-blocker. I didn't care about static images/text but animation prevented from reading the actual content. I am sure I am not the only one.

<comment><USER52> Even static images can be an annoyance.

Just because i occasionally browse gaming news do not mean i want a face full of glowing eyes or rotting flesh wherever i go.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> Meanwhile, everyone who pays for cable TV is shown ads, even on the premium channels. And, everyone who buys a magazine is buying a periodical stuffed with ads.

If anyone here believes that by installing yet another ad blocker, regardless of who made it or where it's hosted, that it will somehow curtail online advertising or improve you online experience, as Mr. Rourke would say, "Welcome to Fantasy Island."

<comment><USER34> using a content blocker improved my online experience the very first time I clicked on a youtube video

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I think with computers we can make a system that makes it easy for website to charge a small fee (per article or per website) and that notifies/promts the user in a simple way with the cost. It doesnt have to cost much, since advertisers are not paying big amounts per pageview either. You can build a strong paywall, or you make it a gate where visitors can easily go through.

<comment><USER32> It won't work. This is the internet, it's not some single country or smaller community you can just push a transaction system onto at this point. It really just doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER54> The internet can handle it, there are lots of services that make payments across the globe possible. This system would be rolled out per website that wants it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think arguing whether acceptable ads is an oxymoron is just about semantics. Is there a notion of acceptable spam? Selective consumption is a reaction to ubiquitous and obtrusive content. Ad companies have to come up with an adequate response, or face decreasing revenues, it is an evolutionary process and will correct itself.

</comment><comment><USER55> So is uBlock origin legit?

I'm not that opposed to ads, but browsing without blocker frequently brings my Computer to a halt.

Doesn't Google offer a way to pay instead of seeing Google ads?

</comment><comment><USER56> First time I hear about uBlock Origin. Anyone has been using it?

</comment><comment><USER48> Excellent work. Cloning it for my own website as soon as I can.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! :)

<comment><USER48> Now added (with tweaks to fit the static-site generator and templates I'm using.) I _love_ the idea of turning the functionality of adblock-detection on its head.

To my mind, ads are, in the absence of my _prior informed consent_ , an outright theft of the computing and networking resources _I_ pay for. (Not to mention the attention thing and the propaganda/pernicious-psychology things.)

I could not agree more: There are NO acceptable ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I map Taboolah to 127.0.0.1 in my hosts file.

</comment><comment><USER58> this is fantastic!! Loved it.

</comment><comment><USER59> I find discussions on HN about advertising very amusing. If advertising would magically disappear tomorrow, most of the people visiting this site would be jobless.

Something to think about.

<comment><USER18> That's what I keep saying also (at expense of some downvotes).

As most people, I don't like ads. But this is capitalism, a system fueled by consumption. Without changing the system, ads will never disapeer, they will always come back with a different form, they are a necessary 'evil'.

[edit/disclaimer] I don't work on ads, I only curate a niche blog.

<comment><USER19> Consumption is the final purchase of goods and services by individuals. What other direction or purpose ("fuel") should a system have?

A system that doesn't end in consumption either doesn't produce anything, or produces for no reason, which seems wasteful.

<comment><USER60> One of the problems with pure capitalism is that it favours those that are buying. i.e. those with money. The direction of progress under a capitalist system is governed by the desires of the wealth-holders (whether that is millionaires, the middle class, or some other cross-section of society), not humanity as a whole.

<comment><USER19> That would be a lot more powerful argument if capitalism didn't so readily churn out ever-cheaper (ie, directed at the poor) offerings of, well, everything. Walmart and Spirit Airlines (to pick a few out of many such offerings) aren't exactly pandering to the rich.

Anyway, this was not the point the GP made, and thus not what I responded to.

<comment><USER60> That's not a counter argument - cheap products exist because there is a market for it (whether the market demographic is rich or poor, it doesn't matter). It still hinges on the exchange of money to decide what should be produced. It's far from perfect, but it does seem to have a blurry correlation with what humanity needs (in my opinion).

<comment><USER19> I guess it's not a counter argument as much as disagreeing with the premise. If the outcome is good (a wide range of products available to the poor) then why declare the mechanism by which it happens (exchange of money) problematic? At least, let's focus on concrete problems.

The problem with declaring something "far from perfect" is deciding what perfect looks like. The fact that even the poor has a Walmart-sized vote in what gets produced looks like a pretty strong vindication of the system to me. Sure, there are always areas that can be improved, I'm not declaring the current state of things perfect, but I'm appealing to a focus on specific, practical improvement, rather than a yearning for an abstract perfect state that epistemologically probably can't be known.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Paid "acceptable" ads lists are a joke, but ad blockers that don't allow control of which kinds of ads you want to block are also a joke too.

</comment><comment><USER62> This is like people who want to repeal Obamacare and have no alternative. If you advocate blocking all ads, you should at least have a vision for how you're gonna pay for your fucking content. I block ads too (I'm ADD and moving objects in my field of vision make it hard to enjoy content), but I'm not going to be fucking self-righteous about it.

</comment><comment><USER63> I just made an account to say this is utter BS. If someone provides a service that costs them money to run, they have the right to make money off of it. If you don't agree don't use their service. Whatever. Or block ads and donate to the service. Just don't be a freeloader.

<comment><USER64> No, they don't, because they're marketing their service to users under the false pretense that it's "free" thereby explicitly associating it with "costs zero money" while in reality it does cost money that they do charge, only someone else in some other way.

Consumers have the right and ability to completely destroy this business model and should exercise it, sooner the better. Most companies compete by stating prices on products, it's absurd that a select few get to state prices in long ToS and/or privacy policies that we know nobody reads.

It doesn't matter one bit if it's a mom-and-pop store or a tech giant that goes out of business because people are fed up with tracking, malware, and advertising.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> If you don't like ads either don't use the site or ask them for a paid ad free version.

Blocking ads is actual petty theft. The authors asking price is the ad load. If you disagree with the price, it's not ok to just to take it. Taking something for a price the provider didn't agree upon is out and out theft.

You don't walk into a shop and steal a pack of gum just because you don't like the price. "He was charging too much so I stole it" is not a moral argument, and certainly would not hold up in court. Just don't buy the gum.

I truly want to hear your contradicting world views. I want to hear how taking something and not paying the asking price is OK.

<comment><USER24> > Blocking ads is actual petty theft

Since when blocking content on the web is theft ? Providers don't own the web, don't own my browser. People don't want to see ads, it kill their phone's or laptop's battery, slow down their browser and make web experience in general poorer. Providers will have to move to a new business model because their audience are not willing to put up with ads anymore.

<comment><USER66> > _Since when blocking content on the web is theft ? Providers don 't own the > web, don't own my browser._

They own their own site though, and they work and give access to it in the provision that the ads are also shown.</comment></comment></comment>


The Aesthetic-Accessibility Paradox - <AUTHOR> https://uxmovement.com/thinking/the-aesthetic-accessibility-paradox/ <comment><USER2> > Aesthetics isn't a subjective and trivial attribute used for ornamentation. > It serves an important purpose in the user experience. It determines whether > users trust your app, perceive it as valuable, and are satisfied using it.

I have to ask: how much of that is that there is an inaccessible visual brand that has been pushed into general use and that people have come to recognize, and how much is actual perception?

When I stare at the AAA accessible and the "aesthetic" versions of the form on that page, the biggest difference I perceive is how easily my eye can chunk and pass over it as a piece. In the aesthetic one, I can easily grab "Sign Up" as the relevant header and then focus my attention to pull up the rest. In the accessible one, I don't have as easy a time with that. Which makes me think that both versions have typography problems, since we've managed to make black and white print pages that allow that kind of chunking for quite a while now.</comment>


Linux Inside – How the Linux Kernel Works - <AUTHOR> https://0xax.gitbooks.io/linux-insides/content/ <comment><USER2> Every time I start to fall into the conceit that I'm an exceptionally good developer, I look at things like kernels or low level hardware programming and eat a big ol' slice of humble pie.

<comment><USER3> Why? It's just a different level of detail than you're used to. It's not magic.

<comment><USER4> As someone that used to do kernel and RTOS development for many years and then migrated into web and app dev for a living because it allowed a more flexible lifestyle for paying the bills - this equivocation is disingenuous.

There is some room for disagreement, but I agree with most of the following. [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Da...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/keepout/keepout.html)

Kernel development, similar to algorithmic trading (incl HFT), some types of games, various embedded, actual production compilers etc requires a higher level of rigorous understanding from a variety of areas compared to the vast majority of webapps (often CRUD) and most software that IT professional work on. Kernel dev similar to other performance critical or safety critical systems has a much reduced set of tradeoffs and more numerous constraints, for one.

Of course, most applications require knowledge in disciplines such as design and domain specific knowledge that kernel development does not require, but that is besides the point. It requires a different type of thinking overall (one that is more unforgiving to lack of rigor and not as open to subjectivity cf. design) that low-level systems development/engineering and most app development are virtually unrelated disciplines outside of trivial similarities relating to them both targeting computers.

I don't say this to discourage anyone. But these reductions are unhelpful and outright condescending to those that might struggle to learn (oh it's just a slightly different domain than your JS TODO app....um no it's not.. it's harder for you to learn because it is actually harder and more complex).

<comment><USER5> > this equivocation is disingenuous

i'm super confused. what equivocation are you refering to?

<comment><USER6> I think he may have meant equiparation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice. Way back in the day, maybe 20-25 years ago, I had a first look at the boot process and wish I'd had something similar to the first chapter then. Man, it was hard to find information and ones you did you realized understanding it meant learning an entirely new subject.

Those were the days really. Barely having started my English studies I went looking for a single piece of information and found so much else on the way.. The tinkering and nights of frustration gave insights and a feeling of accomplishment that set me on the path to the profession I have today.

Then I started high school and someone showed me a shaded and textured cube they had rotating on their screen and I found out what math is good for :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Besides some scattered text files and the Linux man pages, there is this: [https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/](https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/)

It's fairly new - started about a year ago, but there's quite a lot of stuff in there already (bootstrapped from the old XML stuff, I believe).

<comment><USER9> ... That guide is actually fucking hilarious.

'However, that's not too bad, because even the makers of GNU indent recognize the authority of K&R (the GNU people aren't evil, they are just severely misguided in this matter)'

<comment><USER10> _but the preferred way, as shown to us by the prophets Kernighan and Ritchie, is to put the opening brace last on the line, and put the closing brace first, thusly:_

So much for the idea that kernel developers are super-smart programming "gods". Formatting code that way is brain-dead and Kernighan and Ritchie are false prophets. The _real_ prophet, Allman, tells us the Truth - curly braces go on a line by themselves, aligned vertically and indented to the same level as their corresponding control structure.

<comment><USER11> These theories were ultimately settled by trial by combat between the champions representing each: Linux and BSD. Linux has clearly won this battle, and thus, the gods have spoken. ~

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've taken a class in college about the Linux kernel, and it's still amazing to see how complicated it actually is.

I've got a fairly good idea of how many pieces work, but the whole thing together still puzzles me at times.

I think that it's one of the biggest achievements of the internet as a tool for progress, and it shows that good intentions and pragmatism (together with some good Linus insults as well) can go a long way

<comment><USER13> > I've taken a class in college about the Linux kernel, and it's still amazing > to see how complicated it actually is.

Complexity doesn't necessarily mean it's a masterpiece. A lot of it is just old and has been incrementally changed without being simplified in the mean time.

As a concrete example, the guide goes through the rather complicated mess of how syscalls worked. That complexity was the result of a series of optimizations and features added over time, but it wasn't a good design. These days Linux syscalls (on x86_64 anyway) are a good deal simpler than they are in the guide.

(Hey 0xAX, I don't suppose you'd like to update the guide?)

<comment><USER14> I'm not 0xAX, but care to make a pull request to get the ball rolling?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I love this work, it inspired me to work on Inside LibreOffice.

[https://www.gitbook.com/book/chrissherlock1/inside- libreoffi...](https://www.gitbook.com/book/chrissherlock1/inside- libreoffice/details)

<comment><USER16> _In fact, StarView was in essence what we now call the Visual Components Library (VCL)_

Any relation to the Borland/Delphi VCL?

<comment><USER17> Does not look like it.

[https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/tree/master/vcl](https://github.com/LibreOffice/core/tree/master/vcl)

But I can see clear lines for confusion.

<comment><USER18> clear lines. confusion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Oh my God, the first article has a link to Ralph Brown's Interrupt List. Good ol' days!

[1] [http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int.htm](http://www.ctyme.com/intr/int.htm)

<comment><USER20> Holy shit, yeah. Last time I looked at those pages was like 15 years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Torvald's thesis on portability of Linux is also a quite interesting article

[https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/index_files/linus.pdf](https://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kutvonen/index_files/linus.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER22> Is there any documentation that talks about x86_64 and the modern UEFI boot process? This guide still talks about BIOSs, MBRs, real mode, 16-bit registers, etc.</comment>


Restoring the Salvator Mundi - got-any-grapes https://airmail.news/issues/2019-10-12/a-450-million-snub <comment><AUTHOR> If you are interested in art restauration, I can highly recommend the Baumgartner Fine Art Restauration channel on YouTube:

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ)

It's extremely relaxing to watch. I guess I chose to wrong profession.

If you understand German, there was also a good 45 min documentary about a restaurator a few weeks ago on SWR:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-hbYKyyWiI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-hbYKyyWiI)

His gilding skills are superior to Baumgartners.

<comment><USER2> I came here to recommend the Baumgartner channel. Seeing how this has already been taken care of, have my upvote :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> There's a detailed breakdown of the restoration process from _page 66_ in this Christie's online magazine:

[https://www.christies.com/zmags?ZmagsPublishID=7baedae9](https://www.christies.com/zmags?ZmagsPublishID=7baedae9)

</comment><comment><USER4> Short, but nice article. If you're interested in restoration you might enjoy Baumgartner's YouTube channel

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvZe6ZCbF9xgbbbdkiodPKQ)

<comment><USER5> I wholeheartedly second this recommendation. I love that channel, and I don't even understand why. The videos are incredibly soothing and pleasing. They speak to the craftsman in me.

Apparently Baumgartner and his techniques are under some criticism from other restorers, but all I could find was a somewhat angry Reddit thread.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wasn't this the painting that Michael Lewis suspected that it isn't by Leonardo?

Edit: It is, indeed: [https://news.artnet.com/art-world/michael-lewis- salvator-mun...](https://news.artnet.com/art-world/michael-lewis-salvator- mundi-1530448)

</comment><comment><USER7> Her adulating tone frankly undercuts her claims, namely that the Louvre is not questioning the attribution.</comment>


Women's Unwillingness to Guess on Standardized Tests Hurts Their Scores - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/03/females-unwillingness-to-guess-on-standardized-tests-hurts-their-scores/

<comment><USER2> I'm not particularly satisfied with how this story is presented. The link goes to a paragraph on a website that asks me to complete a survey. This paragraph makes several claims I would love to see expanded on, but they aren't. The piece simply ends. Fortunately, the claims are sourced- via a paper behind a paywall. The abstract for that paper does not support several of the claims made by the original piece.</comment>


ARM co-founder starts 'Save Arm' campaign to keep independence - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/14/arm-co-founder-starts-save-arm-campaign-to-keep-independence-amid-40b-nvidia-deal/ <comment><USER2> If you develop proprietary technology and then sell it, you should not be suprised when your technology eventually ends up being used in a way that you do not like, or that you cannot license it back.

</comment><comment><USER3> You're going to crowd fun 40+ Billion dollars. Lol Good luck

<comment><USER4> Where are you getting that from?

<comment><USER5> nvidias's pockets</comment></comment></comment>


Privacy restrictions on Facebook posts are visible to users - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/110402443423554417660/posts/YgQGEZPWvPk <comment><USER3> Hey folks - thanks for the post. I'm an engineering manager at Facebook and worked a bit on this issue earlier today. As some people have pointed out, we've since pushed an update to the Graph API.

A bug in a recent update to our code caused this unintended availability of some metadata about the audience of posts. Keep in mind, the intended audience of the actual posts wasn't affected. So far, this is the only report we've received about the availability of the metadata, and we addressed the situation within a few hours.

As always, developers must abide by our Platform Policies, including obligations that protect the information they access through our APIs. For example, developers may not use someone's information outside of the application without the person's permission. Additionally, people can control whether applications have access to their information and posts through their settings.

<comment><USER4> What kinds of systems are in place to make sure private information stays private? Facebook invites so many people to spill their personal lives on the internet, and many of them are under the impression they have privacy and control over their data. When this trust is gone, everything about facebook will go through a mental-filter consisting of "What happens when Facebook's permissions bug-out, and my boss has full access to my profile?", and conversations will go the way of small-talk. I guess that's what people should be asking, but it seems only the tech-savvy realize there is no privacy.

<comment><USER5> Be assured that Facebook's permissions will bug out time and time again. Just like when Facebook changes or adds a new feature - permissions get clawed back to being public.

Why are people so forgetful about this? Maybe the answer is similar to why some people stay in abusive relationships.

<comment><USER6> > Maybe the answer is similar to why some people stay in abusive > relationships.

As someone who was in an abusive relationship for a couple years, who found himself giving everything for nothing in return and not understanding why everything sucked: I can sort of see your point. The bits and pieces are there. But it's a really, really stretched metaphor.

Abusive relationships involve deeply personal manipulation and that's why they get such a hold over you. Consumer apathy is not even close to being directly convinced by someone you love - often using your own fears against you - <USER2> stop caring about your own needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I am one of the biggest fan of facebook's privacy settings and bat for them for providing such granular control. However, this has creeped the fuck out of me! I make extensive use of this feature and am going back through a bunch of posts reevaluating the settings knowing the person can see it.

Almost 100% of my posts in past 6 months have custom settings but there is no way I can go through each one of them.

This is HUGE from my perspective. I am typically the guy to tell others constantly bitching about fb's privacy settings to move on. But alas, the day has come when I am officially scared to use facebook.

<comment><USER8> > This is HUGE from my perspective. I am typically the guy to tell others > constantly bitching about fb's privacy settings to move on. But alas, the > day has come when I am officially scared to use facebook.

Um, what kinds of friends do you have on Facebook? Maybe you shouldn't be friending these people in the first place.

<comment><USER4> Maybe privacy controls should offer privacy, instead of tricky-dick shenanigans.

<comment><USER8> This isn't "tricky dick shenanigians", it's an oversight of one team working on one small part of the entire Facebook infrastructure. It is cool to hate Facebook on HN now, because they make a lot of money and the audience here is predominately trying to bootstrap a startup but that doesn't change the fact that one of the most popular and largest sites on the Internet has an issue which was developed most likely by a few engineers.

These amateur hour type comments which seem to always follow Facebook posts anymore seem to say more about the fact that more and more HN commenters have no experience working in an enterprise environment and believe their 10 instance AWS based startup they are currently involved with somehow is comparable to the Facebook ecosystem.

<comment><USER4> Who's hating on Facebook because they have money? I'm hating on Facebook because they can't secure a CRUD app, and don't really seem to care much either. This isn't the first occurrence of a permissions snafu, which tells me they should invest some more of their bundles into QA and testing. But then again, click-bots probably offer a better ROI.

<comment><USER8> They do care, note the top post of this story now is from a FB employee stating they've fixed the error 7 hours after it was published.

Also Facebook is slightly more complex than a CRUD app.

<comment><USER4> Damage control != caring. Caring would be fixing their systems after the first few privacy fuck-ups. Why are you so determined to paint FB in the best of light?

Honest question. How many more breaches have to occur before you consider FB reckless? Or is your allegiance unconditional?

<comment><USER8> I'm not defending Facebook I just have actual experience working in real world enterprise size companies. My previous gig was as an engineer for one of the largest websites on the Internet. It employes thousands of engineers and software developers working on hundreds of different small teams who all release early and release often.

There isn't some magic wand that Zuck can somehow wave to prevent software bugs from occurring. That's how things actually work in the real world.

<comment><USER4> You're evading the question. How many more privacy breaches have to occur before you consider FB reckless? I'm not talking about security breaches, I'm talking about code being pushed that breaks expected privacy functionality.

This is especially pathetic considering they're "enterprise". You would think they engineered some kind of security test to check for these things. Why it's not in the build-process points to negligence in my eyes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> While them showing the Except list may be a bug, them listing out individual users you have made something visible to is a feature. I only started seeing it yesterday and just went back to delete any individual user-only post that I could easily remember having made. Here is what I see when I click on some of the custom icons:

"These are other people who can see ----'s post. When you share with a specific set of friends, they can see the audience. However, your friends can't see when you put them on a list like Close Friends or Acquaintances."

This feature makes NO SENSE. Please remove this, facebook.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think this may be already 'fixed', I'm seeing "privacy": {} in all of my json results..

<comment><USER10> Good thing Facebook has a rigorous and innovative hiring process that gets them the best of the best.

<comment><USER11> You don't need best of the best to modify, most likely, one line of code. I'm pretty sure anyone who can code would modify it correctly. You need the best of the best who won't do this sort of issue in the first place.

<comment><USER7> I used to think I can tell fixes that require one line of code edit. But after having worked on couple of somewhat complicated projects, even the smallest of edits often impact at least some other system and even if they do not, because of the possibility that they may, you have to do rigorous QA. So yes, while this could easily be a 10 second fix for a new product with few users; facebook likely spent several hours to implement a fix for this,

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I saw discussion of this a while back but unfortunately can't find the original link. The essence of the argument boils down to the purpose of privacy settings on postings; the concept of an "everybody can see this except Bob" setting is completely stupid from a traditional security perspective, but it makes sense if you're planning a surprise party. You don't expect Bob is going to try to circumvent the security AT ALL because it's like punching through a wet paper bag. It's like subtly tapping your watch at a party. It's not an unbreakable code, it doesn't need to be, it isn't meant to be.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let's say you're upset with someone, want to vent so say it anonymously and restrict said person from seeing it, so you can vent publicly, and not embarrass anyone (presuming people wont be able to figure out via the post itself who you are talking about).

Because of this, your efforts might be wasted.

<comment><USER13> As soon as that person sees your Facebook account using the mobile phone of another friend of yours, the jig is up. Don't "vent publicly". Vent privately.

If you do this a lot, you will have publicly offended a lot of friends of yours and it will backfire one day. One day someone will know who you are venting about, and copy it and send it to them just for fun.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> also added to the g+ but...

<https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/bounty/>

<comment><AUTHOR> oh well, didn't know about that. This isn't really too complicated, I just can't believe no one has looked at the json for the newsfeed before!

<comment><USER15> I went through this as well, but it turns out that an outside perspective is all that is required to noticing that something is unusual or not right.

Don't underestimate what you may consider to be normal or obvious, as it may not be to others.</comment></comment></comment>


Some recent startups from istanbul, turkey - <AUTHOR> https://www.infopadd.com/article/turkish-startups/1598 <comment><USER2> i'm sure there are more

<comment><AUTHOR> well, you can edit title there and add more</comment></comment>