The Most Dangerous Writing App - <AUTHOR> http://themostdangerouswritingapp.com <comment><USER2> Here's what I bashed out in a 5 minute session:

 _What makes a writing app dangerous? Is it the blank space set up before the writer? Is it the notion of using a form of communication without context? Does it have some other type of functional definition or characteristic that makes it dangerous?

Well let's have a look - there's a timer, a generic area for typing that appears to be fully justified, and in the lower left hand corner there is some very faint text illustrating typing speed and some other metrics. I'm still not seeing much of any danger as I would relate to the term. There's a bit of mystery - as in, what is the actual purpose of this other than intrinsic use of the language?

Oh, I see. Taking a bit of time to contemplate the next line and the screen starts to fade away. Is it taking the text along? Where does it put the text if it disappears? Will this be chopped up into 140 character components and spread amongst the world a la E-Horse Books? That could be dangerous, at least moreso than a general sense of foreboding that text will be gone if the writer doesn't keep going, and going, and going, which while constructive in its own right, isn't particularly known as the best approach to writing. Sometimes thought should be given a priority.

So, at the end of this five minute exercise, we discover what's really dangerous about the program. It's clever. The reason the app is so dangerous is that it prompts a person to keep typing and writing with minimal amount of active thought. Yay._

<comment><USER3> If we're doing that..

 _Oh, I see.

The point is that you just keep writing.

I actually like this one.

This should be combined with some kind of blogging service? I'd like to see the ones that actually make it all the way to their target goals.

Although, there probably isn't anything worth reading. Do edits count towards my goal?

I'm going to risk it..it looks like they do! But you've only got a few seconds to keep your fingers off the keys, so that's a bit scary.

What if you had to scratch your ass or take a piss? I guess that's sort of the point, you simply don't.

Is this worth reading? I sort of doubt it. It's just an extended internal monologue. Which, I suppose, isn't all that much different from other internet writing services.

WOAH. CLOSE CALL THERE. Seems like "backspace" does NOT count towards the progress! I'm filing that as a ticket. In.. two and a half minutes.

Do arrow key motions count? Probably not.

Another thing I just caught myself doing - I cheated by control-A, control-C'ing. I regret nothing. AH.

Arrow motions definitely DO NOT COUNT towards forward progress.

I like the design of the background fading to red when you're close to the time limit. It's a bit like first person shooter games.

Saving again..

If you keep doing this long enough, I bet a Chuck Pahalniuk book pops out.

Iron Blogger would like this. Turns any given five minutes into a fairly meaningless blog post. If you started with a topic and a few specific thoughts in mind, it'd probably actually turn into something not so shabby. At least something is better than nothing._

<comment><USER4> Properly lol'd IRL at the Chuck palaniuk comment. Harsh but very funny.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Really, they think that _this_ is how you get into flow?

The last thing I need is an unconscious worry that I must-keep-typing.

It's okay to think when you're in flow. But the whole point is that you aren't aware that you're thinking. You're not distracted. You're wholly in-the- moment.

Context: Professional writer and editor for 25 years.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author of the app here. I use this daily, mostly for journalling. I like to think of it as a way to shut up the inner editor, and separate writing and editing into two different steps (as they should be) - and it works amazingly well for that.

<comment><USER6> Question: What are some resources for beginning journaling. I've wanted to start, but I'm blocked at, "Hmmm... these are my thoughts and feelings. Do I really want to set them free?"

Neat app, btw.

<comment><USER7> Playing with some of the methodologies like GTD and others is a good way to get started. A lot of it just has to do with getting thoughts out of your head and into either a text file or physical media. Personally I use a mix, I use digital for things that are nicer to cut and paste, and a journal that I date every page with.

I found the biggest improvement is having separate journals for 'projects' and 'day-to-day' as the writing for both is entirely different. A project in this case is something that doesn't have a distinct end. Watch and take notes on a youtube video? That goes in a day journal. Watch a series of videos on youtube that is going to take you a couple days? That goes in a project journal.

Trying to merge everything into one is what killed me.

<comment><USER6> I keep a developer journal. But that one is very technical. I've not yet been able to jump to non-technical journaling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I love the idea, but I'm not sure if I'm using it right.

The premise is your writing session dies if you go 5 seconds without typing as a means to get you in to flow. When your session 'dies', everything you wrote disappears forever (as far as I can tell) so there's a lot of incentive to keep going whatever the cost. I presume there's some sort of congratulatory messaging/saving opportunity if you last your entire stretch (I didn't last the minimum 5 minutes)

Given these stakes, I'd be too nervous to use it for anything I'd actually want to hold on to due to the risk of something out of my control commanding my attention for five seconds.

I'm still glad the project exists - it's easy to picture it being great for somebody.

<comment><USER9> There are times when my mental dictionary/thesaurus goes offline and I blank on a word/phrase or spelling....

For that reason alone - I would not be able to use this app too well.

<comment><USER10> That's precisely the sort of distraction that this app forces you to ignore. Just insert something like <another word for crap that starts with e> and keep writing.

<comment><USER9> I like the cut of your jib....

That should be something I should practice. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interesting concept, but little more.

Enforcing keystrokes every 5 seconds is a horrible way to facilitate writing.

In fact, this reminds me quite a bit of those algorithmic sites that give interviewees a time limit (ie: 30 minutes) to come up with a solution. As the timer approaches 1 minute or so, the timer turns red, blinks, sometimes increases in size, or beeps. I'm sure if you measured the output during those stressful moments, productivity goes down immensely.

<comment><USER12> I don't see what's so stressful: you're exchanging "sit and think while not touching the keyboard" for "sit and think while tapping the spacebar." The point is to keep you from mentally context-switching to anything else, not to keep you literally pounding out words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Many more options here: [http://writeordie.com/](http://writeordie.com/)

<comment><USER14> oh great, thanks for the link - being able to tweak the config is much better, although I'm not sure I'd want a mobile app for this

<comment><USER15> I was WTFing about the same thing (mobile?!?) It's mostly a desktop app. There's just ALSO now a mobile app! Woo!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Maybe they should let users pay to recover their deleted writing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Evil. I like it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there a pro version that gives you electroshocks a second before the time is up?

<comment><USER18> you could certainly make an extension which could hook into the site and communicate with an arduino and administer these shocks

<comment><USER19> [http://pavlok.com/hello.php](http://pavlok.com/hello.php)

<comment><USER20> I'm wearing mine right now. This could get painful...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those of you that didn't see the tiny, grey-on-grey Help link, it's a writing app that deletes all your work if you don't type something in five seconds.

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember, when the first Titanium Powerbook was released, having something akin to what I must describe, simply, as a "Writers Moment of Nirvana".

I'd just received the machine, a reward for a schedule met, on a Friday afternoon. Charged, ready to go, I put it in my briefcase (in 2000, this was a phenomenon like no other), and .. left the office. With the power supply, box, etc.

So I had a weekends' worth of "fresh tiBook" time .. a very visceral and surreal moment as I transitioned from "Ops-Center" bound, to "can hack Unix code in the park".

I climbed the hills of Griffith Park, and camped out at the (then-) recently burned-out hills, under what was once some old tree. I wish I'd known its species, but I'll never forget the scene; the entirety of the LA basin beneath me, as far as the Pacific, and me perched atop it. Press the button.

BONG!

I had nothing much to run on it, so I opened Terminal, fired up vi, adjusted the font to what was then an amazing degree of clarity, and wrote. For as long as the batteries held out, I set up my personal diary, pure text mode, and got it all out.

Still had power for a few mail-checks and touchups over the weekend, powered out on Sunday evening. The next day in LA, Monday morning, I went on the hunt for a power supply.

Hasn't been the same since.

My point? You don't need an app for that. Just vi.

<comment><USER23> In case someone unfamiliar with vi reads this: do _not_ get the impression that vi deletes all your work whenever you stop typing for 5 seconds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Workaround: Mac speech-to-text app. The timer never starts when you don't use the keyboard. I wasn't trying to cheat, just wanted to save my hands and wrists which have been sore lately from too much typing.

</comment><comment><USER25> I ended up writing 351 words in 5 minutes (70wpm).

I've been meaning to write a weekly blog post for a while now, and I've set aside an hour for research, but I keep talking myself out of actually writing it. This just forced me to type a blog post length document in 5 minutes. It probably needs 15 minutes of editing now, but this actually got me to write and do so quickly.

I like it. It has its place.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hello, I'm just beginning to type, and I have no idea what's going to appear here. The concept of writing under the fear of loosing all the progress is fascinating. But I actually need to first see what it means to 'loose progress'. Ok, I see now, the screen begins to turn red, it reminds me of taking damage in first person shooters. But yeh, this concept can be extremely motivating to carry on. When musicians improvise, they also have this sort of pressure. It manifests in the need to keep the music going, maintaining the rhythm, melody, and the form. It's much more challenging than just writing some text. Although I can do none of music improvisation. The parallel to music would be writing poem under the pressure of loosing all the progress. I'm also not capable of rhyming words. But it's Ok though. Being witty, and creative is a skill. Another skill is being thoughtful and persistent, just at different pace.

I'm wondering if this text can actually be read by a stranger...

</comment><comment><USER27> This definitely did a good job in getting me into the flow, the 5 second timeout forced me into writing something down as soon as I had something in mind, no matter what that turned out to be. In one way, that made me rehash several ideas I had just written, in another way, it forced me to leap into a few weird ideas that I've never thought of before, and that happened because I was trying not to do the mistake of rehashing. Interesting how being put on the spot might even pressure you into getting creative!

</comment><comment><USER28> I was unconvinced at first, but it's actually fun to try to write a story this way:

"Once upon a time there was a girl who lived in the forest. This was a green bushy forest, full of living trees that would sing together at sunset. It was a good place to live.

One day, an army was passing by the forest and they started cutting down trees to make bonfires to spend the night. It was late autumn, and nights were getting cold and damp. The men felt as if they had icy roots delving deep into the ground, sourcing the humidity and the dampness and the cold up to their bones.

So rather than becoming frozen trees themselves, they had started felling the trees.

Many trees had been felled already, when the girl noticed. She had stepped out for a walk, to check that the little birds had enough to eat in the harsh weather. At first, she didn't understand what was going on. Sections of the forest that had been there for all her life, trees that looked as stable, as permanent, as fixed in place as the hills themselves, were now laying on the wet grass, chopped. It was unreal.

Red twinkling bonfires could already be seen by the encampment. A great tent was set in the middle.

In this tent, there was a great general and his son. The general was old and knotty and ruthless. The son was kind of heart, but had grown up in a violent environment and didn't know much better than his father..."

</comment><comment><USER29> My first session:

I have to admit that the idea is rather clever. A writing app that forces you to continue writing without pause, and terminates your session if you don't complete. That's a pretty strong incentive, if you ask me.

One of the problems I often encounter with writing is encountering writer's block. I have a general idea of what I want to say, but I'm worried that the way in which I present it will not be ideal, or that the text will be confusing to the reader. These concerns hold me back from writing as much or as quickly as possible.

One thing I've noticed with this app is that it doesn't force you to keep writing as much as possible, as such, but rather that you keep _working_. Editing counts as activity, and thus going back to revise what you have written is a valid way of keeping the app alive. And although the penalty for pausing too long is that it destroys everything you have written, you can still select all and copy to the clipboard, so you have the text around so it can be pasted into another app.

I think this app is a fantastic idea. It's a great way to put on the pressure necessary to get work done, avoiding the distractions of meandering off to look up references, getting lost reading other material. It really forces you to _think_ hard and actively penalises you for not doing so.

I've now completed the five minutes. I'm pretty impressed with that because normally I wouldn't be able to get this much written without an enormous amount of motivation. Usually I lack the focus necessary to be this productive. Thankyou!

<comment><USER30> For that problem you mentioned (writer's block because worry of presentation or confuse the reader) my solution was to just write it, then keep iterating over it (reading it myself) and rewriting little parts making it more clear.

Basically, it was a work of polishing after I was done with the draft. What I write are mostly tutorials for my blog and found this approach acceptable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like this app because it gets you writing. The problem most of the times is just start to write something. When I sit down to write, I have no idea where to begin with. This would definitely get me in the flow. Yes, I cannot write stuff that makes sense. But it gives me a way to get everything on my mind out and get me into the writing flow. I can then close this app and take that flow to write something more meaningful.

I also like what others have written using this tool and posted here. It is interesting how we tend to write in simple language when we have constraints. That's the it should be. Not the constraints, but the language. Use jargon or too complex words and most of the times you have lost me as a reader. So, in a way, this app really helps you in writing the way you usually think or speak.

I think we can use this app to write proper stuff too. If we set it to 1 min, we can write much better stuff using this tool. Also, it would be great to have the functionality of not having the choice to delete what we have typed. Probably remove the backspace, delete and arrow-keys. I figure that I spend most of the time hitting backspace and deleting sentences. If I don't like the way I start a sentence, I should only be allowed to hit full-stop and start the new line and edit those things later.

I hit backspace many times when writing this post. It considers backspace also writing something. Another option would be to just not count backspace/delete/arrow keys as typing something.

This was really fun writing the whole thing set to 5 sec timer. I didn't know I could write so much without a 5 second gap.

</comment><comment><USER32> I had a project similar to this this a few years ago, but it also organized your writing into chapters, save to and load from Dropbox or Google Drive, analyze your text for word usage and phrase repetition, berated you for not coming back to the site more often, and generated EPUB packages[0]. Two friends of mine used it to write and complete book projects after years of not being successful at motivating themselves to write.

I just recently shut it down, because I couldn't figure out any way to monetize it that wouldn't involve destroying the minimal aesthetic, and I didn't want to keep losing money on the hosting costs anymore.

If you're interested in checking it out for yourself, though, I published the code on GitHub: [http://www.github.com/capnmidnight/JWD](http://www.github.com/capnmidnight/JWD)

It's 100% client-side JS code. It was my first SPA project that I put real, significant effort into. Now, I work on virtual reality junk in the browser.

[0] Though Amazon has an effective monopoly on eBooks and they don't support EPUB, there is a converter from EPUB to their proprietary format. I had always wanted to make it automatic, though.

<comment><USER15> If it's 100% client-side, and it's already on github, why not host it for free on github Pages?

<comment><USER32> Because you have to register a domain with Google and Dropbox to get the sync to work and because it's time to move on to other things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Nice idea was my first thought. Later I was looking for the site again, googled 'most dangerous wrting app' & found this:

[http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/28/10853534/flowstate- writing...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/28/10853534/flowstate-writing-app- mac-ios-delete-everything)

</comment><comment><USER34> So here's what I wrote in my 5 minute session. I like the App, it forced me to do a more introspective form of writing I'm pretty sure I would have not done otherwise. It's also a nice way to see just how much stuff can be written down in 5 minutes if you don't care too much (or at all) about content. I don't know if it has any applications beyond the novelty of the concept but it could be an ice way to do some journaling/get some stuff out of your head.

Lets see how this works. It counts my words per minute. Im slow. I guess. I dont know. Jason sneel seems to be faster than me. hmmm. I¿ve run out of ideas and everything is sloooowing down. also id like a nice mechanical keyboard if only for the hipsterness of it all. and maybe i wouldnt get confused about keyboardlayout then. maybe I would, who knows. All I know is that I should really be working right now. Also: Why am I writing in English instead of Spanish or German? Is this really the language I can most comfortably express myself? I guess 8 years of GIBS and a lifetime of consuming american media has taken its toll. Not that I'm complaining. I like English, its fun, its easy. There is no formal way to adress people and there is only a single article. Using the for everything is great. It spares me from a lot of problems. Also not having accents. Thats super nice. Only the occasional ' which I am completely ignorning at the moment. Oh and capital letters, there are none. Except. At. The. Beginning. Of. Sentences. Thats super neat too. Everything that keeps me from thinking too much about how to write lets me think more about what to write. I wont complain. I am seeing that you can write a loot of stuff in 5 minutes if you dont care about the content. This is probably mostly gibberish but there might be something useful in here. Im still slow though, right now stabilizing at around 60 wpm. I can type faster but I am still thinking too much. Mostly about the keyboard and the placement of my fingers on it. its not entirely comfortable. And im done.

<comment><USER35> LOL, I think I appreciated that more than I should have... very interesting to hear stream of consciousness thoughts on my language from a non-native speaker. Thanks!

I know Spanish and German both have multiple definite articles (el vs. la and... die or der or something?). Is one language native for you and the other learned? Does just the learned one give you trouble, or are you annoyed by having multiple definite articles in your native language as well? Worrying about gender is a constant annoyance for me in Spanish, but I assumed if I were a native speaker I wouldn't think twice about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> (After a couple of tries)

 _You can cheat by just typing dsajlfkjsdlfkjhfsdl when the red mist descends and then erasing it.

It turns out that the easiest mode of writing is "conversational observation mode". What do I mean by this?

Imagine that I am talking to you and just describing my surroundings, and my inner states, and my activity.

Surroundings: office, desk, energy drink, laptop. In that order.

Inner state: bit wired (see above-mentioned energy drink), feeling nice after sauna in college gym.

Activity: testing out this new writing app that is meant to help me get "in the flow" whatever that means. But all it has really done is show me that the only kind of sustained writing I can do is this simple narrative observation mode thingy.

The app is interesting in that it has shown me that the only way that I am able to generate a continuous stream of words that have some chance of having logical coherence is_

</comment><comment><USER37> The last app I need to see is one that encourages drivel.

My killer writing apps:

4x6 index cards. For capturing quick thoughts, identifying references, marking items for verification or further interest. Advantages: you can write a fair bit on them (they've two sides), you can continue to another card, you box them for reference, you flashcard them for reminders. You can re-order, shuffle, or organise them however you want.

A notebook for longer / temporally sequential writing. I'm working on what sizes I like most, though I'm leaning increasingly to large lab-book sized engineering tablets. Smaller ones for on-the-go work. Heavy enough paper for a fountain pen not to bleed (I've picked up a relatively inexpensive but nice one recently).

For online composition: vim. Increasingly, Markdown, though I'm conversent in HTML, LaTeX, and a few other markup languages. The biggest challenge to composing _online_ is that it's difficult to cut-and-paste in the original sense -- cutting out a segment of text and pasting it, whole, in a new spot. Vim's mark-and-move operators are actually among the better option, along with split-window view.

Various online editors almost all pretty much precisely suck. The notable exception is Reddit using RES (Reddit Enhancement Suite), with its full-tab window (better yet with the browser set to full-screen), offering side-by-side source and Markdown formatted output. It's not _quite_ as fluid as vim, but for up to about 40k characters (6,600 words or so), it's doable.

The biggest problems I have when writing aren't _writing_. It's organising. My references. My thoughts. The overall structure of the document. Yes, quick jot-and-file systems are handy (a local email account used to file thoughts to is one of the better modes I've come up with -- everything is datestamped, has a subject, and may have additional metadata added), but ... constant pressure to ... just _produce_ for no reason. Is stupid.

As others have noted here, and as a tremendous literature of experience and research on getting-in-the-flow and true creativity supports, the modality of this particular gimmick is pretty much certifiably bullshit.

</comment><comment><USER38> what an interesting concept: technology as a constraint forcing you to focus. not just focus: focus more than you naturally would. focus more than you're comfortable with. continue going doing keeping on, regardless of whether you're comfortable with how it's going, with what you're keeping. will it all fade at the end? yeah, definitionally it will. fuck: and a word + character + wpm counter at the bottom? really hitting all the unhealthy adictiveness buttons. or healthily addictive in the right quantities? what's the ld50 on a writing app? on an app of any sort? the most dangerous app? i wonder if it'll be entirely different than the most-regulated app, a la chemicals. fuck is that really all i can do? 2:30 worth of content, including rambling digressions? it's a very real possibility. this fades, faster than the normal recession to black/white. ... let's see, what else is on my mind... ... to stay or go? i failed at ignoring politics, in spite of my success since protesting in 'free speech zones' at bush's reinauguration rnc in nyc. (found out years later that many other riders of critical mass got arrested) i'm convinced trump is going to win. it's bad: he's the president the average american deserves. the world doesn't, though; that's nearly narendra-modi- armani-level sad. and likely more negative at scale.

</comment><comment><USER39> I was excited to use this for practicing writing Korean. Unfortunately it looks like whatever regex is looking at what I type does not like Korean characters... :/

<comment><USER40> I had the same experience but with Japanese. It isn't the Regex but that it is looking for certain keypresses, which are being captured by your IME. The IME prevents any detection from occurring.

You can test my theory by typing in Korean then pressing Ctrl+C, which isn't captured by the IME, and registers a "C" press on the site, which starts the timer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I'm not accusing you of anything but this app [http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/28/10853534/flowstate- writing...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/28/10853534/flowstate-writing-app- mac-ios-delete-everything) does exactly the same thing but it's Mac native instead of web based. This Verge article also bills it as "the most dangerous app."

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I know Flowstate, which itself was a copy of "Write or Die". I did not know they used the tagline "The Most Dangerous App" though, and now feel shitty - I don't want to steal their tagline! Need to come up with something different. I wrote this for a friend who doesn't have a Mac but loved the concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I had no idea what this was, or why it might have been dangerous, so I tried it out.

I typed stream of consciousness stuff about not really being sure why I was typing for about two minutes, and then paused briefly.

I happened to spot the words fading away just as I resumed typing, so I typed some more about how I was curious about what happens when it fades all the way away. Then I paused for a moment again to find out.

I found out.

</comment><comment><USER43> I never understood the meme "there is an emacs package for that" till now. [https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/write-or- die.el](https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/write-or-die.el) (obligatory xkcd reference : [https://xkcd.com/378](https://xkcd.com/378))

</comment><comment><USER44> @maebert -- Just tried the app and I love it in every way! I finally wrote a letter that i've been meaning to write for over 2.5yrs!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yay! Congrats, glad to make something useful (and yet silly)!

<comment><USER45> So, how do I win? What's the reward, besides inevitable death?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Similar idea, but I created a text editor that simply blocks you from everything on your computer until you reach a goal: [http://writersblock.io](http://writersblock.io)

</comment><comment><USER47> Imagine using this tool to create your next webapp. Launch within 5mins or your code wiped from the server.

Sorry to be sarcastic about it, but I doubt if I could write anything meaningful if my writing is under such a risky burden.

</comment><comment><USER48> I read the most dangerous App Writing... so I tried making a basic Javascript app to see what would happening... Now I read it again I see why everything disappeared...

</comment><comment><USER49> Or, a more full featured version, that was available a long time ago.

[http://writeordie.com/](http://writeordie.com/)

</comment><comment><USER50> awesome app. just hacked together a desktop version with electron so I don't get distracted by other browser tabs. [https://github.com/lukeinator42/themostdangerouswritingappde...](https://github.com/lukeinator42/themostdangerouswritingappdesktopedition)

</comment><comment><USER51> I wrote something really cool and the application failed to register my typing after about three minutes. Lost my work.

</comment><comment><USER52> The flappy bird of writing apps. Well done.

</comment><comment><USER53> Must be great training for politicians, sales persons and other professional producers of hot air.

</comment><comment><USER54> The win condition is slightly meh. I want to see end stats, words mispelled, maybe a leaderboard.

<comment><USER3> Yes! Even just a green 'ding' to replace the scary red one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Of course, you can use your 5 seconds to hit Strg-A Strg-C so your typed text is not lost.

</comment><comment><USER56> Very neat concept. Will probably use again. Thanks for making and sharing!

</comment><comment><USER57> Gimmick.

</comment><comment><USER58> For capturing your Buckminster Fullerest of notes.

</comment><comment><USER59> Many of us might suck at spellings and grammars to simply pay serious attention to detail. The dangerous editor isnt for us.

</comment><comment><USER18> neat idea

</comment><comment><USER60> The Most Annoying Writing App

FTFY</comment>


Node.js Best Practices - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/i0natan/nodebestpractices <comment><USER2> Best practice:

Just don't install Nodejs. Just don't.

> Wrap common utilities as npm packages

That's how you get things like isEven, isOdd... Leftpad anyone?</comment>


Dung Beetles Navigate via the Milky Way - <AUTHOR> https://voices.nationalgeographic.org/2013/01/24/dung-beetles-navigate-via-the-milky-way-an-animal-kingdom-first/ <comment><USER2> Ancient Egyptians considered dung beetles sacred, and believed that they were responsible for rejuvenating the sun during the night. Egyptians also had a keen spiritual and scientific interest in astronomy.

Now it's revealed that dung beetles can perceive the galaxy. Coincidence? I think not.

Obviously dung beetles are descended from a race of astronavigators who taught the Egyptians everything. _They are the ancient astronauts._ [Cue theremin music]

<comment><USER3> Is this Reddit now?

<comment><USER4> pavlov's account was created 3130 days ago; that's 8.5 years. BartSam's account was created 37 days ago.

¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

<comment><USER5> Everyone should read the guidelines really.

>If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a common semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

<comment><USER3> I am on HN since many years, a user just recently. I was not implying that HN turns in to Reddit. I was implying that this comment is worthy Reddit, not HackerNews - a professional website that strives to hold on to some standards.

I have read the guidelines. Really.

<comment><USER6> There doesn't seem anything in the guidelines saying you shouldn't make jokes. Or it being a professional website for that matter.

<comment><USER7> This is true. However, while jokes are not expressly against the rules, the community moderation rarely favors them. Personally, I read a lot of Slashdot, and to some degree enjoy the level of humor, political debate, and anonymous commentary there. I find that the signal to noise ratio here is somewhat better. I don't think it likely that anyone would be banned for exclusively making joke comments, but generally I think the expectation is that while informative or insightful commentary may also be humorous, the primary purpose here is not entertainment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is less surprising if you imagine evolution to be a reinforcement machine learning system. The dung beetle actors are given all the sensory inputs of their environment. Those that used the inputs (which happened to be our galaxy) where better at satisfying goal and thus had higher selection rate for next iteration of system. The actors, much like machine leaning, AI, don't have any logic nor any reasoning. They simply are a ludicrously complex, but deterministic state machine of inputs -> mess -> outputs. The mess being seeming unintelligible, not rational, with lots of "cruft".

<comment><USER9> I think that's a relevant metaphor, to look at evolution as a kind of machine learning system - especially the aspect of actors not "knowing" or understanding the logic/reasoning behind their (seemingly?) intelligent behavior. That might be a way to explain "intelligent design" in nature, without bringing God or consciousness into the narrative.

<comment><USER10> > without bringing God or consciousness into the narrative.

Are you that afraid of God?

Honestly though, the more you break apart and put together the world through science, the stronger are the signs of a higher order.

The more you take comfort in shallow explanations, the dimmer and darker your world becomes.

Machine learning! Hah! It is nothing more than pattern recognition. Reactions to that pattern are a different thing entirely.

<comment><USER11> Are you that desperate for a God that you recoil when scientists and mathematicians find a natural explanation for some phenomenon?

The more you break apart the world through science, the more you realize that even the simplest of rulesets can give rise to an incredibly complex network of of structure, behavior, and incentives — no deity required.

Enjoy your ever-shrinking God of the Gaps.

<comment><USER10> There is nothing natural about a dung learning to navigate using the stars. Nothing that great either. A creature will always try to figure its way using objects as a reference point.

An incredibly complex network of structures is more proof of a higher order.

Enjoy your belief in a perpetually self-correcting field of science and a perception of the world that never ceases to change. By definition, you'll never find peace.

<comment><USER12> > There is nothing natural about a dung learning to navigate using the stars.

Yes there is, it's perfectly natural as was just explained to you above. No magic required, simple evolution.

> An incredibly complex network of structures is more proof of a higher order.

No, it isn't. It's well established that very simple rules can create incredibly complex network of structures with no higher order whatsoever.

> Enjoy your belief in a perpetually self-correcting field of science and a > perception of the world that never ceases to change. By definition, you'll > never find peace.

Nonsense. If you require iron age superstition to achieve peace, that's you; others don't have that requirement.

<comment><USER10> I honestly wished you made better backup points to your arguments. I'm left with nothing to go on as it is now.

Not natural does not imply magic. Nature by my reasoning is magical though. Simple rules fail in the subject of the Heisenberg principle.

<comment><USER12> > I honestly wished you made better backup points to your arguments. I'm left > with nothing to go on as it is now.

I don't need to, you either understand evolution or you don't; it's not an opinion to be argued, it is how the world works. There's nothing you can refute, any refutation is simply evidence you do not understand the facts of reality. You can't argue with someone who denies evolution, their mind doesn't value facts.

> Nature by my reasoning is magical though.

Then your reasoning is flawed. Magic is that which breaks the rules of nature, like your god for example. Nature is not magical, the natural world is the very definition of not magic.

> Simple rules fail in the subject of the Heisenberg principle.

You don't understand evolution, you're nowhere near ready to approach the topic of quantum mechanics.

<comment><USER10> I give up. An atheist is not an atheist by logic. But rather by arrogance and ignorance. And the nature of your tone seems to prove it. My only advice is to tone down your hate and aversion to all things theological and reduce your pride in the explanation of science. Because when it gets old and stale and the excitement wears off, you will see things in a more "connected sense." Like theology is just another version of science kind of thing.

<comment><USER12> > Because when it gets old and stale and the excitement wears off, you will > see things in a more "connected sense."

No, reason and logic don't get old or stale, and they prevent me from thinking how I "see things" has anything to do with reality. Nature is what it is, it doesn't care about your beliefs and fears and need for an afterlife. Never mind the humor in the one with an imaginary friend he's trying to push on others calling others arrogant and ignorant, lol, don't project your flaws on me. People are here talking about a dung beetle story and you're prothletising, it's disgusting; keep that shit to yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Saw this in the twitter thread where this topic was started

A dung beetle goes into a bar. He doesn't order a drink. He just takes a stool.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I have found the link to the original paper: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.034](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.034)

</comment><comment><USER14> For context: TED talk where navigation via the sun is discussed and shown- [https://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_byrne_the_dance_of_the_dung...](https://www.ted.com/talks/marcus_byrne_the_dance_of_the_dung_beetle)

</comment><comment><USER15> But how do they know it's not based on just a few bright stars? Milky way is pretty hard to see with our large human eyes. Insect eyes are good for panoramic views, but much less efficient at low light acuity.

<comment><USER8> > Milky way is pretty hard to see with our large human eyes.

It's not, at all. It's just become hard to see in the last 100 years or so of massive light pollution.

<comment><USER16> Piling on, a real dark-sky site is worth a visit. First one I've been too is the Cosmic Campground.

I don't have my photos on hand, but it really looks like this to the naked eye, maybe even more vibrant:

[http://www.darksky.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/CC_MilkyWa...](http://www.darksky.org/wp- content/uploads/2016/01/CC_MilkyWay-700x366.png)

(Be careful, at the CC we accidentally were "those guys"\- there were no lights at all except red headlamps, and our car kept lighting up like a Christmas tree)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's the tweet thread that brought this to the forefront today - [https://twitter.com/GeneticJen/status/897153736669356032](https://twitter.com/GeneticJen/status/897153736669356032)

</comment><comment><USER18> That dung beetle helmet is hilarious.

</comment><comment><USER19> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6422393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6422393)

</comment><comment><USER20> Dung beetles 1 Humans 0 There are so many things left to discover and understand on the planet. Great time to be a scientist, or a maker.

</comment><comment><USER21> "little cardboard hats"

I never thought a dung beetle could sound so cute.

</comment><comment><USER22> What wonders we see in nature.

</comment><comment><USER23> Wow, they put the beetles in a planetarium? Nice</comment>


Show HN: Find Problems Worth Solving for Your Startup – Probstack - <AUTHOR> https://www.probstack.io/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have seen successful failures with most of my projects since last few years except 'How's It Like' \- www.howsitlike.com which is doing great! ;) This took me back to the first step of understanding if I'm looking at the right problem at all that needs a solution. Often times, I found majority of the products are solving something that is not actually broken and not worth fixing it.

I started curiously searching for some real problems from users so that I can pick the most pressing problem in that list and work on that. I ended up finding thousands of articles and content on how to find problems that are worth solving but there is no actual platform where this can be initiated. I've seen loads of time, effort and money going into products that ended up failing and most of the times, the reason being the product is not of interest to the users!

This is where our initial MVP started off in 2019 Feb..

Kicked off in February 2019 with a small community of people raising, discussing and sharing problems in an excel sheet.

In April 2019, we have launched 'ProShareUs' \- 'Share your problems with us' through a minimal product and that helped us reach more people.

And in 2020, we are redesigning and rebranding our product as 'Probstack' \- 'Find problems that are worth solving' to better reflect our mission and stand out.

Are you thinking of turning a potential problem into an idea for your product? Validate your problems on www.probstack.io before writing a line of code!

Eagerly looking for your valuable feedback to grow this together!

Just launched on Product Hunt - [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/probstack](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/probstack)

Thanks!</comment>


GraphIt: A High-Performance Domain-Specific Language for Graph Analytics - <AUTHOR> http://graphit-lang.org/ <comment><USER2> As a symbolic AI scientist I am really interested in making graph read/writes faster for fighting the complexity curve.

The graal seems to be graph processors (ASICS) e.g this Darpa project that promise a x1000 vs current x86. [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/darpa- intel-qualcomm-graph...](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/darpa-intel- qualcomm-graph-analytics,34665.html) But I never thought of using à DSL (excluding openCL that I consider far less domain specific) and that is an excellent Idea, the benchmarks are promising !

 _But_ I Wonder How does this compare to those algorithms run on a modern GPU (or even with HSA)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Companion paper:

[https://people.csail.mit.edu/jshun/graphit.pdf](https://people.csail.mit.edu/jshun/graphit.pdf)</comment>


Ask HN: Busy hacker would like to pay less busy hacker to build website - <AUTHOR>

Hey fellow hackers,
I have a website idea I would like to execute, but alas I have too much code I am already in the middle of writing. I am willing to pay cash and/or equity in the website - whatever your preference is. If it's straight cash, I expect to pay a couple thousand dollars for the first version, as defined by a set of wire frames we jointly agree on. There will be no design work required - it can be as ugly as you can imagine.
The idea is this: the website allows users to post that they want to buy things, and then vendors can email the user via a method that keeps the users contact information hidden. I also have a feature for this website that I believe is essential, which I will share with you once we start talking, but I am going to keep it a secret for now.
That's it - it's basically just the "I want" portion of Craigslist, and the website doesn't have to be pretty or complex - it just has to be fast and usable.
I want it built on EC2 or App Engine in Django, so I can participate in development later, and it should employ Django mem-caching.
Drop me an email at firstname.lastname@example.com if you are interested. I want you to show me at least one Django website you have built, or if you are a great hacker, show me something great and I'll assume you can pick up Django quickly. <comment><USER2> really?

<http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/hunter_becomes_the_prey/>

<comment><AUTHOR> That was the inspiration.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> <http://odesk.com></comment>


Saudi Arabia's Curriculum of Intolerance - <AUTHOR> https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/saudi-arabias-curriculum-intolerance <comment><USER2> a lot of the religious stuff is crap, period.

But I agree with the last bullet point: "Include a map of the Middle East that labels Israel within its pre-1967 borders as 'Palestine: occupied 1948'."

and I can sympathize for their narrative on "The Issue of Palestine", excerpted here from the pdf:

Palestine is a part of the Islamic world. It is the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the first of the two Qiblas. See Surah 30. Ever since the Prophet's ascent to heaven, Palestine has been dear to the Arabs in particular and to Muslims in general. When Palestine fell under British rule, it gave the Jews a chance to achieve their aims. Britain made it easy for them to flee there and laid the groundwork for them to organize and train in the use of arms. The Palestinians tried to resist the Jews and their allies. Their jihad almost succeeded, but the American government was biased in favor of the Jews and pressured Britain to allow more than 100,000 Jews to enter Palestine in a single year. The crimes Zionist gangs committed against Palestinian residents caused many of them to flee to neighboring Arab countries.

"The Jews Announce the Establishment of Their State"

Britain withdrew from Palestine in 1367 (1948), opening the door to the establishment of a Jewish state on Arab land in Palestine. And this is what the Jews did. They announced the establishment of a state they called the "state of Israel." Performing their duty, Arab countries decided on military intervention to help the Palestinians. But circumstances in the Arab world and elsewhere did not allow the Arabs to achieve victory over the Jews. Most parts of Palestine came under Zionist rule. The Zionists then gained control over the rest of Palestine, including Jerusalem, as a result of the 1387 war.

...and so on. I might say the teachings in US textbooks on this subject should be equally or more concerning.

<comment><USER3> >Palestine is a part of the Islamic world. It is the location of the Al-Aqsa Mosque

The Temple Mount is also the holiest site in Judaism and was for a good 1000 years before the Islamic guys came and stuck a mosque on the roof.

It would be nice if the Jews and Muslims could both hang out there in peace but certain parties are not very tolerant of others beliefs. I wonder which faith of the two is known for killing unbelievers.

<comment><USER2> >> "stuck a mosque on the roof"

If you've been to the old city of Jerusalem, you will note that there are 4 different religious groups each living in a very small .9 square kilometers walled city, and naturally everything is built right next to each other. Building a mosque on the roof of a holy area shared by two religions seems relatively amicable, honestly. Anyways, it is not a false statement that the Al-Aqsa Mosque is in Palestine.

>> "I wonder which faith of the two is known for killing unbelievers."

Umm...both. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_violence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_violence) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_violence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_violence) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab–Israeli_conflict](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab–Israeli_conflict)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A good documentary to watch:

Adam Curtis - Bitter Lake (2015)

[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hdcji_bitter- lake-2015-ad...](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hdcji_bitter- lake-2015-adam-curtis-documentary-1-of-3-720p_shortfilms)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://thoughtmaybe.com/bitter-lake/](https://thoughtmaybe.com/bitter-lake/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Worry less about what Saudi Arabia is doing within its boundaries and worry more about what it is doing outside the boundaries.

<comment><USER2> but still worry about what Saudi Arabia is doing within its boundaries. And be aware that the US helps prop up House Saud.

<comment><USER6> So be it. Saudi is a problem of their citizens, they should either fight up or suffer. Rest of the world does not owe them anything.</comment></comment></comment>


Unicode Regular Expressions - <AUTHOR> http://unicode.org/reports/tr18/ <comment><USER2> Nice, two pieces of technology which are always implemented incorrectly combined into a single standard.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is not really a standard; nearly any behavior which is complicated is left undefined or expressed with vague, aspirational language ("an implementation _should_ do this somehow, I dunno"). It doesn't look like regex implementers were consulted at any time.

<comment><USER4> As a regex implementor, I am super appreciative of this document. I've consulted it quite a bit, and it helped guide me towards picking and choosing which Unicode features I should support and what their semantics should be. The upshot is that many other regex engines have either inspired this document or been inspired by it, which gives at least some consistency between implementations.

I also think it's clear from reading this document many times that it was very much informed by regex implementors. The text seems quite self-aware of the fact that some features may not be practical to implement in all scenarios.

It is certainly far from perfect, and I bet that if we got in a room together, we could vent about things in (or missing from) this document. But I am determined not to let perfection be the enemy of good, and this document has, at least in my experience, done much more good than harm.

<comment><USER5> Ditto to everything here. UTS #18 is a fantastic map for the implementor. I co-authored a paper about it: [http://www.dfrws.org/sites/default/files/session- files/paper...](http://www.dfrws.org/sites/default/files/session-files/paper- unicode_search_of_dirty_data_or_how_i_learned_to_stop_worrying_and_love_unicode_technical_standard_18.pdf)

<comment><USER3> I still don't agree, although I respect both of your opinions as real regex implementors without a doubt.

It's just too complex a 'standard'. The amount of crap they had to 'retract' by the current version is telling, and features like 3.9 and 3.11 are speculative design by standards committee, which is the exact opposite of how these things should work. It's the ultimate unfunded mandate: "hooray, I'm writing a standard, why don't I shove some random crap in there that no-one implements now in existing libraries in the hope I get to set directions".

The standard should be _minimal_ and _well-defined_. This is neither.

It's also preposterously self-important. Yeah, I'm so fascinated by the history of the Unicode standard I'm going to start introducing an "age" property so I can regex-match on when characters were entered. There's a certain attitude whereby these guys are just blithely shoveling junk into a standard that no-one needs. If you're desperate for all these exotic character properties put them in a godamn file as a character class and blat them in wherever you need them (yes, it would be nice if regex had macros).

Somewhere in all this nonsense is a good standard struggling to get out. They need to shit or get off the pot. Anything that they don't know how to do or that no-one knows how to do should be completely deleted. Anything that they offer 15 different choices as to how to do ... they need to figure out which is the best one and pick that. It's a standards documents, it's supposed to make choices, it's not a potted plant.

<comment><USER5> It has a bad case of featuritis; it reads both discursively and self- consciously, like it knows that there's really no justification for using regexps to specify named properties, but it just can't help itself.

Some of the Level 3 features venture too far afield from Unicode, too, e.g., 3.11 is "implement YACC" and has nothing to do with Unicode and 3.7 is "implement a streaming regexp engine, we dare you" (challenge accepted, Unicode dweebs!).

So, it is a horrible standard by which to judge overall conformance, but no one really does that. I think the value is in lighting the way through a broad array of thorny Unicode topics. And I think that the implementor who grapples with a majority subset of the sensible topics will wind up with an engine that handles users' Unicode needs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you want to work with these in Python, use the "regex" package. [1] Not to be confused with the "re" module in the standard library.

Also, maybe there should be a (2016) or even a (2004) in the title! (2016 is when this document was last revised, and 2004 is when it became a Unicode standard.)

[1] [https://pypi.org/project/regex/](https://pypi.org/project/regex/)

<comment><USER7> I don't think the regex package implements this. At least the hex notation is not supported:

      >>> import regex
      >>> regex.compile(r'\u{3040}')
      Traceback (most recent call last):
        File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
        File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/regex.py", line 345, in compile
          return _compile(pattern, flags, kwargs)
        File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/regex.py", line 507, in _compile
          caught_exception.pos)
      _regex_core.error: incomplete escape \u at position 2

<comment><USER6> Hmm, okay. It seems to just use Python's unicode escape syntax, instead of what the standard says. But the package does support things like the complex character classes, and identifying word boundaries.

(The algorithm for identifying word boundaries in most languages without ASCII/English assumptions is quite complex and useful, as I can say from having tried to reinvent half of it before learning about the standard and the regex package. It's not a panacea -- it won't do anything useful with languages where word boundaries require lexical knowledge, like Chinese, Japanese, and Thai -- but other than that it handles all the edge cases you never would have thought of.)

<comment><USER4> Yeah, basically, the standard is a little sneaky on this point. It doesn't actually require a specific syntax, but rather, simply that being able to write Unicode codepoints in hexadecimal representation is _possible_. Notice that it says, "... shall supply _a mechanism_ ..." rather than "this mechanism."

Of course, it's probably a good idea to follow the sample syntax provided. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Hearing "Unicode Regular Expressions" makes me think of some other "fantastic" technology combinations:

\- XML configuration for Windows DLL dependency

\- CORBA aware DST Library

<comment><USER9> > \- XML configuration for Windows DLL dependency

Oh boy! You're in luck today, you'll learn about side-by-side assemblies and application manifests: [https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...](https://msdn.microsoft.com/en- us/library/windows/desktop/aa375144%28v=vs.85%29.aspx)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This will make a difference how we write regexes. Look at the level 1 properties:

       [\p{letter} \p{decimal number}]

And compare for instance to the POSIX regexp character classes (a reference: [https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Regular_Expressions/POSIX_Basi...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Regular_Expressions/POSIX_Basic_Regular_Expressions#Character_classes))

      [[:alpha:] [:digit:]]

Given that the Unicode standard goes much beyond, proper implementations should help to write regexps for the modern web, encountering problems we are typically faced with. It's a pity the standard goes not into detail there, thought (for instance, similiarity of characters).

<comment><USER11> > This will make a difference how we write regexes. Look at the level 1 > properties:

> [\p{letter} \p{decimal number}]

> And compare for instance to the POSIX regexp character classes

> [[:alpha:] [:digit:]]

No need for the future tense; Perl's had that at least since v5.12: [http://perldoc.perl.org/5.12.0/perldelta.html#Unicode- overha...](http://perldoc.perl.org/5.12.0/perldelta.html#Unicode-overhaul) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is there a limit to how complicated and ornate a character can be, besides pixels. It's amazing Chinese characters can be rendered so well across many browsers and websites

<comment><USER13> It depends on the font format. If TrueType doesn't let you code something, you could use an SVG font etc. etc. Almost all fonts in the wild are outline/scalable, so that imposes some limitations.</comment></comment>


Why startups use Ruby on Rails - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/gyU0me4.png

<comment><USER2> I have never seen such an accurate image in all of my life. I honestly don't get why Ruby has the hype that it does.

"Elsif" \- a Ruby statement that makes you think, "Why the hell didn't they just bother to put the other 'e' in there? There's already one in the beginning..."

The OOP in Ruby is confusing to many, as well - it just ruins the relationship pattern of language orthogonality.

<comment><USER3> > I have never seen such an accurate image in all of my life.

I wonder if you ever tried Ruby/Rails yourself on even a small project. What were the things that actually put you off?

Also I am a bit saddened of how boring your life can be for "not having seen such an accurate image in all of your life". If you want my advice, leave IT for a second and go read a literature book or romance like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. You'll see way more incredibly accurate images there.

> "Elsif" \- a Ruby statement that makes you think...

Wow this is really a big thing to point out as a language problem, isn't it? But anyway, since we must talk about this important matter, I myself have never felt it as a bad thing because to me "elsif" is also more easily readable than "elseif"... but again, what a big point...

> OOP in Ruby is confusing to many...

Wat?? Confusing to who? Have you ever coded in Ruby at all? Ruby has one of most nicely laid off object modeling representation, which is probably the best part of Ruby and the one which makes pure joy to code/model a lot of things.

It looks that for some reason you are being highly biased and have lot of prejudice and the things you've pointed out are so much out of track, unrelated and silly, that they really make you come off stupid (as much as the linked text), because they really show how so much selectively you tried to learn Ruby "facts".

You should really review your approach to learning.</comment></comment>


Pregnant mother's fatty diet "may alter baby's brain" - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25864893 <comment><USER2> > They argue this could explain why the children of obese parents are more > likely to become grossly overweight.

Ugh, wait, what?

No evidence presented for "eating fatty food makes you fat".

No evidence presented for the diet of parents of obese children.

Hint: it most likely wasn't rich in fat, but rich in sugars.

> These mouse pups were more likely to become overweight and develop type 2 > diabetes than the pups of mothers given a normal diet.

So correlation? The mouse's own diet has no effect, only what the parents ate is relevant? Gah.. I'm just going to flag this nonsense.

<comment><AUTHOR> nkuttler, don't be a nutter. Stop denying science.

<comment><USER2> That's cute. I didn't see any science, just badly written infotainment.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Liberals and Atheists Are More Intelligent - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/blog/2010/02/24/why-liberals-and-atheists-are

<comment><USER2> PZ's response:

[http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/stop_patting_your...](http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/stop_patting_yourselves_on_the.php)</comment>


The Ad Blocking Wars - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/opinion/sunday/the-ad-blocking-wars.html?smid=tw-nytopinion&smtyp=cur <comment><USER2> Arguments seem to glaze over the ethics of advertising and imply that it's a benign, acceptable practice.

Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, minimal usage of ad-supported apps).

Quite frankly I'd rather have more subscriptions. I pay for Spotify, ad-free magazines on my Kindle, and local journalists (through Patreon). And that's good enough for me.

<comment><USER3> > Yet the more I read psychology, the more I am aware of ways advertising can > manipulate the thoughts we have towards brands when we're not aware of it. > So to protect myself, I try to avoid ads in any circumstances (ublock, > minimal usage of ad-supported apps).

How much are you really worried by this? Amazon know my purchasing history for over 5 years and the best they seem to do is show me offers for things similar to what I've already bought which I'm not going to buy again for a long time.

I admit seeing brands and advertising will introduce a bias but I can't see how it would influence me much when for important/expensive purchases I usually do a lot of research first.

I don't love advertising but if it's only unconsciously influencing me a tiny amount in return for many free services it doesn't really bother me.

<comment><USER4> Do you have young children? It's far more noticeable in children under 10... but I see it at times in adults too. Just little points of perception that a little shift can mean significant gains to advertisers.

<comment><USER5> Well, my kids simply don't watch commercial TV. Everything used to be DVD based and now its all streamed, so they never see ads. I remember the first time they actually saw and advertisement - my son screamed! "Where did my show go??" "It's OK .. it's just an ad". A few seconds of silence passed and then he asked:"What's an ad?"

<comment><USER6> Your kids and yourself see ads all the time, just not on TV. There is no way to avoid ads, all ads are not evil either. Even if we talk only on TV, there are probably plenty in the shows / movies you watch.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes they _are_ the shows you watch--as in, you may be watching a large advertisement with several smaller advertisements inserted into it.

Example: the Disneyland 60th Anniversary TV Special. Disney/ABC is particularly fond of advertising cross-medium Disney properties/investments on Disney-controlled television and radio broadcasts. For instance, Radio Disney definitely plays a disproportionately high number of DMG (Walt Disney Records + Hollywood Records/DMG Nashville) recordings.

My spouse was watching it. I saw 30 seconds of it and said, "this is a long format ad for Disney parks," before tuning it out.

The long-format ads are rather common on the local news broadcasts. Some stations show more than others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Online advertising is a perfect example of the tragedy of the commons, where that commons is the general public's attention. Any individual publisher or advertiser can do a little bit better by surpassing what the general public finds acceptable, but when enough of them do this some of the general public resorts to ad blockers - causing overall ad revenues to decline, which causes more publishers and advertisers to push the boundaries in search of higher revenue, which causes more people to install ad blockers...

No matter how or what you feel about advertising and tracking, this cycle is well underway, and I believe it's no longer capable of being stopped. There's still short-term wins out there, but I'd be long-term bearish on anything involving ad tech or analytics, and structure your career accordingly.

<comment><USER9> At the end of the day, we all agree that shining shit is their job.

Media/Ad buyers and sellers need to realize that there are 2 issues (intrusive ads and tracking) at play, not one. The IAB can't deflect on "bad actors" too much longer and they know it - that campaign has run it's course. They have to correct their own behavior and not modify ours as they're naturally inclined to try.

<comment><USER10> Let's add a third: security. You can't let a 3rd party advertiser send arbitrary web content to your customers, and then just wash your hands of it and say "It wasn't us, it was the ad network" when it eventually gets used to deliver malware to your customers.

It's like if you hired a housecleaning service and they told you "Whoops, looks like somebody took a dump on your living room floor. Not our fault though. It was a subcontractor."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Supposedly blocking ads is immoral because ads provide funding for the so called valuable content.

Here is the thing though: most pages do not have any such content.

One reason I don't want to see the ads because I didn't want to see the page in the first place.

I only landed on the page because it's stuffed with keywords that duped the search engine indexer.

The ads are part of the delay and bandwidth waste which stands between me ... and hitting the back button after seeing that it doesn't have what I'm looking for.

Yes, dear Webmaster, your site will die without your ad revenue.

But every visitor wishes for that outcome.

If I could not only automatically suppress ads, but your entire page, I would gladly do that instead. As it stands, the blocking technology suppresses only half the garbage.

<comment><USER12> By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all...

I don't quite get fundamentalists like you. I cannot see how people can deny that the New York Times, Wikipedia, or even HN, Reddit & XKCD add something valuable.

<comment><USER13> >By that logic, you shouldn't be online at all...

That's a strange leap of logic.

>Wikipedia

Asks for donations, it doesn't show ads.

There are many other websites that are internally funded in other ways that exclude direct ads.

<comment><USER14> And there are many that are. For those that are you really have two or three options morally:

1) Don't visit the site 2) Visit the site and don't use an ad blocker 3) Pay for premium service (e.g. youtube red) wherever it's available

I refuse to accept that there's some moral high ground to using an ad blocking service. Especially for people like us (I assume you work in tech) where a huge percentage of our salaries is paid for by these ad systems.

<comment><USER13> I work in tech and I am not supported by ads. If you are in tech and are supported by ads, find a different line of work in tech.

If you work in tech the first thing you should do is take the moral argument and throw it out the window. Moral systems of obligation do not work well on the net. You run into one of two conditions quickly. The first is immoral operators/providers will push moral operators out of business (free services where you are spied on by unknown agents, but the spies pay for your usage, such as free email has been for years). Or, immoral users sharing other people's work for free. Some of them want to share everything freely. Other just want to share work that is difficult to find legally. Paid services don't work well because they quickly become fragmented leaving the user to buy Youtube Red, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, etc because each content producer wants to maximize their profits. Digital piracy succeeded because of its utility. There is low to no cost to the end user and the end product had more utility than the paid product. Pirated movies didn't have ads. They could be played on more players. They didn't have country content restrictions. DRM didn't randomly fail. They by definition are a product of a free market competing with other piracy groups.

Of course Hollywood has a huge amount of power and has the FBI as their lapdog to prevent their product from being infringed. The ad industry does not. You will see more of a push for them to push ad blocking as a type of legal infringement.

<comment><USER15> If you don't mind my asking, what industry are you in? It is very hard in the modern economy to find things not supported or at least augmented by advertising (or at least marketing).

I'm a touch reminded of the Lloyd Dobbler buy/sell/process monologue from "Say Anything".

Full disclosure I we work in ads...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Why should others control my monitor?

If they detect my software and don't let me on their site, that's their prerogative, but my computer is my property, not theirs. If their business model requires them to control other people's computers, plenty of other entrepreneurs will be happy to overtake them in the market.

Once they feel entitled to control my monitor, they start lobbying for laws to support them, making their readers their enemies, trying to force their business plan on others.

<comment><USER17> Things started to go downhill, and they consider themselves too big to die, too important for the current infrastructure. Any business will have this inertia - gripping their shaky hands on the past, and showing the fangs at the present and the grim future - it's like the will to survive of animals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Time for advertising go (mostly) go away.

\- 10+ years of Google not giving a damn over all the "Fake Download Button" ads, "Click here to Play" ads, "fake Next Slide" ads and me un-installing malware my parents accidentally installed by clicking on those ads.

\- Google not giving a damn about fake clicks from competitors and bots when honest businesses purchase adwords.

\- Websites with 3mb of advertisements loading.

\- Video ads that start playing automatically.

\- The days when TechCrunch.com has almost 10mb of scripts loading (during the Sarah Lacy John Carr days). Yes. 10MB of all sorts of analytics and javascripts loading on TechCrunch.

\- Me paying $300 for a top banner ad and making NO sales of my Calendar ToDoCal on a design website. Then for the hell of it, paid $20 for a sidebar ad on porn network and get 2-3 paying customers from it.

\- Spending $200 in Google Adwords competiting with 20 other businesses for a $1.50 click that doesn't even turn into a customer.

Yeah, we're pretty pissed at ads and the ad industry and they deserve exactly what they're going to get. Expulsion from people's lives. It's sad a lot of good content fueled by moderate ads will get caught up in it but. Hey, that's life. The moderates are punished by the actions of the extremes. All 7 computers in the house have ad blocker and will continue indefinitely. It's been storming for a while. Let it rain.

</comment><comment><USER19> Most people probably would not install add blockers except that ad volume and lack of quality have reached the point where they make it difficult to browse the web. Installing an ad blocker is a necessary act of self defense.

In my own case I installed Ghostery after finding that ads from particular websites reliably caused Chrome to crash or consume 100% of CPU on Mac OS X. www.sfgate.com was a particular offender but suffice it to say their numbers are legion.

At some point enough is enough.

</comment><comment><USER20> I don't see this as an issue. I've been blocking ads on the web for over a dozen years and now somehow it's an issue? No, it's not. The publishers who can't make it in a world where people increasingly use ad blockers won't and the ones who figure out how to make it will. Economics 101. I've been waiting for this play to start for awhile--it's amusing--but I'm not really interested in reading about idiots who see this as a moral issue. The advertising industry has had a good dozen years to reign unchecked. They've gotten used to having nice things that shouldn't have been theirs. Now, either adapt or die. Truthfully, no one outside of the advertising industry cares either one way or another.

It's possible nowadays to live an almost completely ad-free life. Outside of live sporting events and billboards, we have so many ad-free choices, that choosing something with advertising at this point has to be deliberate or simply out of laziness. The world of web advertising is gone just like many worlds that are now outdated: CDs, DVDs, etc. It's just a matter of time till the companies involved realize this. They're like the coyote who, chasing the roadrunner, has run off the cliff but hasn't looked down at the abyss yet and thus hasn't yet fallen. Google and Facebook will at some point realize they're in defiance of gravity and start plunging. Perhaps they can rescue themselves with native mobile apps or other closed ecosystem allowances, but on the open web, they are finished. I'm just amazed it took this long for the final act to start ...

<comment><USER21> You can't afford to be too complacent because ad agencies know this too and will come at you sideways - 2nd hand advertising is going to become a recognised thing. Advertisers reaching you and me through celebrities we respect, through hijacking friends or just through corrupting children.

<comment><USER22> Not to mention embedded advertising.

Kevin Spacey on House of Cards: "is that a PS Vita you have there?"

Anything from Hollywood: "Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, look it's an Apple. Apple."

Aggregator: "New Java framework Zaxybar; The true cost of OOP abstraction; Link'dOut is hiring engineers; How ride-sharing is reshaping cities; Weekly Dealmaster; The myth of the 10000x programmer"

Future news article: "Hundreds evacuated the area after the hurricane ravaged the eastern parts of $city. Thankfully, many had followed city officials' advice to stock up on Dasani water bottles and flashlights powered by Duracell long-lasting batteries, so the harm of no access to fresh water and power was greatly minimized. The local damage to crops was... (article continues)"

This is not a war I want to keep escalating.

<comment><USER23> Funny thing is, Apple doesn't pay a dime for product placement.

<comment><USER24> Source? ;)

<comment><USER22> Apple's just that kind of company. For some reason, they don't seem to need to advertise their products. Not sure why that is ...

 _Sent from my iPhone_

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> There would not have been such a uptick of ad blocking software if advertisers had "self policed" just like the consumer ISP market so I have very little sympathy for them. You made your bed, deal with it.

So I'm all for the FCC to come down much harder than before and advertisers to feel the pain, the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a result of these events.

<comment><USER26> > the lack of good privacy protection in the US will hopefully improve as a > result of these events.

Nope, it will be not. Facebook, Twitter and Google depend on lax privacy laws for their business, and the NSA/FBI/CIA/... depend on private companies mining and analyzing the data for them.

Two very politically powerful entity groups that will do everything neccessary to prevent proper privacy on the Internet.

<comment><USER27> Yup. And the people complaining about it will then obediently re-elect the politicians who give in to those groups. Nothing will change.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "It's the worst players in the web publishing world that's driving this."

You mean it's only the 95% that is making the rest of you look bad?

</comment><comment><USER29> As a musician, I remember 10/15 years ago what online medias told my kind "Adapt, go sell t-shirts". The irony.

<comment><USER30> As someone who has been involved in media production and online publishing, I'm wholly on board with "Adapt or die" here too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Ah, the ad war wages on. I say no to ads because they exist in opposition to visually clean pages, no tracking, no malware.

As a lot of online content falls under entertainment, if it came down to it, I'd be happy to unclutter my mind/reduce procrastination by restricting my browsing to non-essential content, rather than eat ads.

Seems part of why the frenzy is heating up is that many media sites merely regurtitate news and do not produce any unique content, but are ad and tracker heavy. So, they stand to lose, even in better-case scenarios where some people are willing to pay for content they value.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think it's far past time to stop calling this "ad blocking". It's computer security. When a site like MSN continues using an advertising organisation that has _already infected its readers_ , and get stung again by the same organisation, we should start using the correct language. It's not just a choice a person makes to keep their web browsing distraction-free: it is a necessary security precaution.

What used to be "ad blocking" is now part of an anti-virus solution.

</comment><comment><USER33> I don't know why they don't just show what's on sale near me geographically. You know, two for one Kraft mac and cheese up at Publix. You'd never know that I might buy mac and cheese by data mining me, I don't even really like mac and cheese, but shit man two for one!

The whole targeted advertising idea seems like something cooked up by computer programmers and doesn't seem to actually work on humans. But if ads showed me that toilet paper was on sale somewhere nearby, that's something I might whitelist.

<comment><USER34> Yes! Now I have to to actively search for grocery and various small stuff sales on my local markets by visiting their sites one by one. The main problem with ads that they are irrelevant. If I did a research on Google before buying a new laptop, please, don't spam laptop ads for the next 6 months or so, I already have one, thanks, I don't buy them daily. Especially from sellers that don't ship to my country anyway.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> My thought is that we should be replicating the "pull" based commerce process of the shopping mall but doing it electronically.

So instead of bombarding people with stuff they don't want in a context that doesn't make sense - ads for products on the sidelines of other unrelated content - we build a platform where people can get as close to the in person shopping experience as possible from their home. Obviously there are limitations to this from a tactile standpoint, but by and large consumers have shown that they don't really need that to such high fidelity.

<comment><USER36> I like this idea, with the caveat that you need to ban paid placement within the virtual mall. I'd like a list of product categories in a nice hierarchy, and a list of products in random order. No games or manipulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Here's what the ad industry dreams of: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Blac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifteen_Million_Merits_%28Black_Mirror%29)

</comment><comment><USER38> If all ad methods hypothetically disappeared, what would be the alternatives for businesses to promote their services and goods?

<comment><USER39> Funny you should ask....

If I'm looking for something to buy:

1\. I'll search for it directly. In particular, I'm interested in solid reviews. This quite often means _not_ giving much credence to review mills -- CNET, Yelp, etc., -- where the nature and intentions of reviewers are quite often suspect. Amazon have this problem as well, though to a very slightly lesser extent.

2\. Map-based systems (OpenStreetMap, Google Maps) are often what I use when seeking a specific option _locally_. I suspect thes are underappreciated.

3\. Classifieds systems. There's a reason Craigslist took off like it did, though its quality/relevance have been lagging for some time. It's still ground zero for housing ads.

 _High quality recommendations mean a lot._ I happened to be reading a blog through one of my rare unfiltered browsers, and realised it included book recommendations on the sidebar, for which the blog editor was highly qualified to offer assessments and endorsements. The state of advertising is _so bad_ that I had missed these previously. The blog would be better off putting those recommendations into posts or other content less likely to be filtered. First time in quite literally _years_ that I'd had the least sense of missing something.

<comment><USER40> It's quite telling, but by no means surprising on Hacker News, that you completely failed to address the question.

The question wasn't "What would you do if you were looking for something to buy".

The question is: "What would you do if you were a business and had something to sell?"

<comment><USER41> But the answer to the latter depends on the answer to the former. For example, if people tend to rely on review sites to make their choices, you should make sure your product compares favourably to the competition, and then solicit reviews for it. (And if you can't do that, maybe your product isn't worth buying.)

<comment><USER40> People tend to rely on watching television commercials to learn about new products. So you should buy more TV advertising. Correct?

<comment><USER41> The question was in a hypothetical context of a world without advertising. My point is that you can't talk about what a business should do in that situation without first clarifying what the alternative to advertising is in this world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Thinking it over, the end result if this arms-race is a death of sandboxing as advertisers will require back-end access to the service you're hosting so it's completely indistinguishable from your content. Any other proper isolation of ad content will be detected as ads.

<comment><USER43> The real sins, the true annoyances and the routes for malware, come from ads brought in from off-site. Ad copy served directly from the domain to which you've gone are rarely a problem. But when that domain sublets part of their page to an agency, which in turn sells exposures to anybody including malware vendors, then you need to block. Your innocent visit to wanteddomain.com ends up with literally hundreds of scripts and images pulled in from tens of unrelated domains. So an ad-blocker needs only to block cross-domain calls to be effective _without affecting display of ads from the source domain at all_.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why don't sites just serve up the ads from their own domain?

<comment><USER45> Fraud.

The dozens of domains and tons of javascript are all there as part of an effort to establish that the ad has been served to a human who might concievably be a customer for the product, and not a robot or some sort of third world ad-viewing farm.

<comment><USER46> That's true for click campaigns but what about view campaigns?

Couldn't Samsung, now releasing their new phone, buy a website's entire ad space for a month or two, let's say techcrunch, and tell them to serve their new phone's ad themselves? Samsung is in for the eyeballs just like when they buy those huge outdoor ads, but even better, no intermediaries.

The publisher would even optimize the HTML5 ads for loading and rendering speed, and have a selection of them so they could rotate them. I believe it could work well for physical items.

<comment><USER47> You're underestimating the general underhandedness of people. If I can sell all my website's ads once, why not try to sell them twice? Double my income.

If Samsung's marketing people are in Korea, I'll show all Asian IP addresses their ad, and then show some other ad (or ads) to the rest of the world.

Of course, Samsung may notice the low volume, so a better scheme is to also load their ad elsewhere, but placed on the page so it's not visible.

If you look at the Javascript that gets served with the ads, there is generally a hunk of logic that tries to confirm the ad is genuinely visible, to try to deal with that last bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> ad blocking is such a simple topic. I don't know why they call it a war. War requires two nearly equal powers. Here we have the whole world who is willing to pay NOT to get free ads served, and then there are a few people who got free money in the past and now cry because they need to find a real job. Just find something people are willing to pay for, or go broke. It's your decision, the same as everybody elses.

And for us it's also quite simple in my eyes. There are ads and we block them. There are ad-block-blockers and we just don't visit that page again. There is enough other content to read. If you don't believe it yet, have some faith. I avoid paywalls and ads since I was able to use a keyboard and never lacked stuff to read. (And in fact if you look at my amazon history you'll see that I actually pay quite a big percentage of my monthly income on written content, it's just not blogs I'm paying for)

If you look at both paragraphs it's easy to see why there is no war. We don't need these content providers who push ads onto us that we don't want. So there is no way they can achieve their goal. They can fight as much as they want. The same as the copyright industry.

</comment><comment><USER49> > ..."the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-Shing"

That's the most awesome billionaire name I have ever seen.

<comment><USER50> Nominative determinism strikes again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> The objective of the entire ad industry is basically to determine what it is you're in the market for. Funnily enough, I'd have no problem telling someone/thing what I'm in the market for providing the offers received matched my specified criteria.

On any given day of the week, we're all in the market for something, right down to a tube of toothpaste. I've always thought that if advertisers knew, from the source, what that item was, their focus would shift to the value of the offer versus today's focus on identifying potential buyers.

<comment><USER17> The problem is - every minute of every day, they'll show their wares, while I'm interested only seldom to buy things. Most people buy their toothpaste, brushes and toilet disinfectant at the supermarket, when they do their weekly shopping - why would I have to be bombarded with it constantly?

It's like in those movies when they tie you down to a chair, forcibly open your eyes, and blast you with tormenting images.

I never even once bought something I saw advertised online (in sidebars, for example), because I mostly think they are scams - my parents are more gullible though, and I feel bad for them, so I block their ads to protect them.

Video reviews from some people I trust are other story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I see it as a fundamental issue of who will pay for the content. For example the New York Times has to pay people to write articles. People do not want to pay to read the articles nor do they want ads. So how does the NYT pay its staff? Until we find a good answer this battle will continue.

And for those of you who say you would pay, how many subscriptions are you currently paying for? How many paywalls have you tried to bypass? Paying for content just doesn't work because people are too use to free :(

</comment><comment><USER53> I don't understand where the disconnect for ads is.

1) I have money. I got the money _specifically_ so that I could use it to buy things.

2) Give me options of things to buy, and I will buy them.

3) Show me things that are relevant to my interests, and I will probably buy _those_ things.

Advertisers seem to be failing (badly) at 3. Ads that I see are not only intrusive (full page CSS popovers have gotten to the point where I just disable javascript), but they're also _irrelevant_ to me.

WHy?

<comment><USER54> To help with #3, Google lets you help them fine-tune the ads they show you:

[https://www.google.com/settings/ads](https://www.google.com/settings/ads)

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I'm a subscriber to the NY Times. Out of curiosity I disabled Ghostery and reloaded this article's page. It took 5.5s to load the page and then almost 30 seconds to load the _49_ trackers/widgets/beacons etc. This all over a 25Mbps connection. Page load time with Ghostery installed; 1.08s. I want to support the sites I value, but I'm not going to stop using ad blockers anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER56> Display ads have a bunch of issues; bots, accidental clicks, and now ad blocking. I've worked for a large DSP and saw this first hand, even on closed platforms like Facebook there were bots. Change is coming, I think that content marketing will be a better option for brands to get their message out, esp on social media platforms (not via display ads).

</comment><comment> blubb-fish Most people wouldn't mind ads if they weren't animated and moving or popping up and down - that's simply distractive.

</comment><comment><USER57> What ad blocker leaves that message? "This ad has been removed." ? Mine just give connection errors in cute little boxes.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'll be super interested to see where this goes. Every company capable of it that I know of is headed toward native advertising. Ads as part of their content. That might end up being an outcome the ad-blockers are ok with (i.e. it should at least force more integrated and possibly well-behaving ads)

</comment><comment><USER59> Wait "war" sounds like it's an even fight. If I wanted to I could remove 90% of ads from my life RIGHT NOW. In fact I've already removed ~70% of them just by adding an ad blocker to my browser and by not having a tv (opting for streams etc).

</comment><comment><USER60> It used to be, that to research a purchase, you would have to buy a book, go to the library, etc. (And, of course, talk to family, friends, neighbors...)

Newspapers and magazines were the "tablets", the "browser" already in front of us.

Ads on those didn't move and shout at us (well, not aurally). And they gave us at least some idea of what was out there. And yes, they did "plant" impressions in our minds.

TV and radio made (from my perspective) the ads more obnoxious. Something they continued to ramp up in an escalating war for attention.

These were still one-way communications: Broadcast. Although, a "primitive" ad-blocking did arise there. Push-button presets on radios. And then, that device dreaded by advertisers: The TV remote control.

And, ads started appearing across channels in the same timeslots. They became harder to escape, en masse if not in the individual. Except for "saturation" scheduling. And, suspected at least per some of my viewing and listening, synchronized slots across channels.

These ads were seemingly more intrusive. LOOK at me! LISTEN to me! I will own your children's will -- and yours, despite your disclaiming, subliminally.

And technology brought the next form of blocking: In addition to time- shifting, home recording devices allowed us to fast-forward, eventually to click past ads. Notice, here, the influence of advertisers. Ad-sensing software in VCR's (remember that?) was challenged and, where possible, crippled. The elusive "skip ahead" button was contested and crippled. I seem to remember that it worked somewhat well on my parents' Tivo. But, Comcast put the kibasch on that, and with their Comcast box they are back to fast- forwarding.

Now, on the Internet, advertising is a two-way communication. Both overt and covert (e.g. analytics). It can also now serve multiple, covert purposes, e.g. malware.

And... people are seeking to escape it.

1) Because they can initiate the communication, search out information, immediately, themselves. 2) Because the ads are actively hindering their attention, focus, and consumption of the information they are seeking. 3) Because the ads can actively screw them over.

Are we going to get measures that "lock down" our devices and web delivery, to serve the roll of advertising? Or, are we going to alter the model in the face of this paradigm shift? Is that two way conversation going to be leveraged to better serve the consumer -- THEIR definition of better served? Or, are entrenched interests going to just keep shouting louder? Creeping more into our personal lives? Putting our data at risk?

Locking down the Internet, for the sake of their money?

Someone's going to find a way to leverage that two-way communication in a fashion that gets adopted.

I reach back to one of my favorite tripes -- an accurate one: Opt-in.

When people start opting in, of their own will, then you'll know you have something.

It's not going to be based on trickery. It's going to have its foundation in being genuinely useful, for both/all sides.

Finally, I'll say that I'm very glad for the open nature of Internet and Web design and protocols, up to this point. Leaving the smarts at the end-points has enabled this challenge to come forth. It's left "the small guy" with a good measure of control and choice. Up to this point. It is _my_ client, and it will do what _I_ want.

So, I actually have the choice to opt-in. Now, give me something worth opting- in to.

</comment><comment><USER26> Advertising is the maybe best example of Capitalism going raving mad.

We consumers tell the media with every single installation of Adblock: fuck off, we don't want to be data-mined. We don't want to be interrupted every time we open a new tab that we might like a penis enlargement.

And especially: WE CONSUMERS FUCKING HATE THE LIES OF ADVERTISING.

Prior to the internet, people tended to actually believe what advertising told them (e.g. that smoking is good for your health)... now, thanks to the Internet, people can inform themselves and are ready to look through the veil of ads and see the shit.

And we don't just turn on adblockers because ads are intrusive. We turn them on because we want to be free. Free of lies, free of bullshit, free of having proxy wars executed with us (e.g. Coke vs Pepsi, BK vs McD)... we want to live _in peace_ of the non-stopping torrent of crap that screams "BUY BUY BUY" at us, every second. The sheer amount of advertising is Too Fucking Much.

Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average Western person saw a day and how many today... I'd roughly guess that the amount of time a person had to spend with ads in the 60s in a year is about 1/12 of the time he has to waste (!) with ads now.

There's only one solution for companies that will be long-term successful: create high-quality products that consumers can tell their friends about.

<comment><USER61>
        Just look back 50 years, how many ads an average
        Western person saw a day and how many today...

50 years ago the average western person had access to maybe 1/50th of the information they access to now thanks to the internet and in large part thanks to advertising. Advertising allows businesses to outsource the consideration (and associated decisions) of the value of their users. A business dependent on advertising doesn't need to consider which of their users are most dollar valuable, a business dependent on advertising can focus on creating a product that reaches the most people and that in turn will provide their growing revenues. Advertising provides a subsidy that supports the people who can't afford $20/month to use each website they care about.

Advertising is an equaliser and the experiences of those half a century ago are a meaningless comparison.

        create high-quality products that consumers can
        tell their friends about

My company provides a product that our users _love_ , tens of millions of loyal users use our products every month, they tell their friends about our products, they send us emails saying how much they appreciate our products... but most of our users aren't in a position to pay $15/month for our products so we use advertising. Yes, we could cut advertising tomorrow and remain profitable if we charged $15/month for access, but we'd cut off 95% of our users access to products they care about because they can't justify $15/month to access it.

That's not fair.

<comment><USER62> You make it sound like your users are getting a free service. They are not. They just do not pay you directly.

Why are advertisers willing to pay you $15/month per user? Because those users buy the advertisers' wares with a hefty "advertisement-tax" on top of the "real" price.

<comment><USER61> You're misunderstanding the example. Advertisers do not pay $15 per user, that's the amount we would need from 5% of our users to replace the revenue lost from no advertising. The example puts the value of each user per month at $1, which is what advertisers pay.

<comment><USER63> Are you assuming that the majority of your users don't consider your content to be worth $1/month?

<comment><USER64> Penny Gap: [http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html](http://redeye.firstround.com/2007/03/the_first_penny.html)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Anti AirBnB Propaganda Spreading Through Union Hotels in SF - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/XXhLCTZ <comment><USER2> This is why the Unions aren't as good as everyone seems to think.

They prevent new technologies and industries from starting and it only hurts the overall consumer. This is one example, another is the prevention of Tesla from selling to consumers directly, and yet another is the fact that Detroit has no public transportation (the Unions used their lobbying power years ago).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The original thread [https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/37w0wp/anti_a...](https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/37w0wp/anti_airbnb_propaganda_spreading_through_union/)</comment>