Posterous search feature is offline without explanation.  WTF? - <AUTHOR>

<rant> I noticed a few days ago that search wasn't working on my Posterous blog, so I dropped an e-mail to their help desk notifying them of the issue.  Later that day, I got the following response:
"This is a known issue and should be fixed soon. Stay tuned!"
Uh, ok.  So based on this e-mail, Posterous would have me believe that this is a temporary bug and one that should be fixed pretty quickly.  After all, search is a core feature, so it seems reasonable to expect they'd have this problem resolved in no time.  To have such a core feature go down is embarrassing to say the least, and does not inspire confidence in the platform or the company.
Well, here it is several days later and search is still broken.  So I drop them another e-mail asking them what's up.  The response this time absolutely blew my mind:
"We're working on a new search system and hope to have it deployed in a future update. This shouldn't affect searching using google or other search engines."
Really, Posterous?  You have got to be fucking kidding me.  That's the best you can offer?  What company in their right mind takes an existing feature offline that users have come to rely upon while they develop a new version of that feature, especially one with no release date attached to it?
And what is even more galling is the suggestion that I point my users to Google or "other search engines" to search my content.  How irresponsible and unprofessional is that?  What's worse is that they have not made any announcement (that I can find, at least) on the matter, either on their blog or on Twitter.
On the flip side, they did just release a new feature giving readers a "new way to like" posts.  Woop-dee-fucking-woop.  Who gives a shit about "liking" posts when they can't even find them to "like" in the first place?
</rant> <comment><USER2> > What company in their right mind takes an existing feature offline that > users have come to rely upon while they develop a new version of that > feature...

Tumblr? They pulled the exact same nonsense with search -- and other features, too.</comment>


New Apple Patent Shows iPhone 6 Dispensing Ice Cream - <AUTHOR> http://zachholman.com/2011/02/new-apple-patent-shows-iphone-6-dispenses-ice-cream/ <comment><USER2> No pistachio flavor. Less ounces produced than a Kitchen-Aid ice cream maker. Lame.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is just an example of a corporation shoring its bets. If it ever chooses to go in this direction it had better have a patent, and even then, 4 companies will sue Apple for having a similar idea that they patented. Just one example of how a corp is to function when the patent system is completely broken.</comment>


Facebook Audio Posting Via Phone - <AUTHOR> http://www.teletka.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, shameless self promotion! This is a way to use Twilio to post a message to your facebook wall.</comment>


IBM 5110 PALM (Put All Logic in Microcode) CPU from 1978 - <AUTHOR> http://www.rugged-portable.com/history-portable-computers-rugged-bias/ibm-portable-pc-5110/ <comment><AUTHOR> After doing some Googling, I discovered that there was a company called Microdata Corporation: ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_Corporation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdata_Corporation))

They apparently existed from 1969 to around late 1970ish or perhaps early 1980ish, during which time they made computers which were open to Microcode programming by the end user -- they even gave the end user a manual on how to do it:

[http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/microdata/3200/761020...](http://bitsavers.trailing- edge.com/pdf/microdata/3200/761020A_3200_Microprogramming_Ref_Feb76.pdf)

This manual should be entitled "How to build a late 70's style Microcode programmable computer". It really gets into the guts.

<comment><USER2> The Microdata building in LA is a part of the seminal movie Koyaanisqatsi [http://www.spiritofbaraka.com/koyanisa579](http://www.spiritofbaraka.com/koyanisa579)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What other systems did they build similar to the PALM? I remember as a young kid buying a quite large (~3ftx4ftx3ft) IBM minicomputer that was just filled with those modules at a local thrift shop during the late 80s.

No keyboard or screen, although I seem to remember it had an 8in floppy drive. Its been so long I can hardly remember it, but I distinctly remember those cards with the square metal cans, many of them socketed. It had a really nice set of schematics and service manual inside the case also.

edit: After some google digging, it must have been something like a 3274 terminal controller.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is tremendously interesting, if it would have worked (and if I could time travel), then I would have wanted it!

10 or 15 years ago I was reading the classifieds, and a local company was dumping an entire mainframe system with terminals. I don't remember which one it was, but I think I looked up the model numbers and I found it was something like a $150,000 mainframe system ten years earlier. The price? Make an offer! I probably could have had it for a couple of hundred bucks and U-Haul rental charges!

But yeah, I would have wanted one of those if it worked!

It would just be cool to have...

<comment><USER3> Despite my parents being computer illiterate, I'm glad they were pretty understanding. I never had any IBM experience but I had spent plenty of time on MicroVAX, HP 9000 and later with Sun. I did a number of local pickups (ahh the memories of trying to shuffle a HP9000/835 down Columbia tower and into a dodge caravan) of hardware and knew a person who worked with Sun in Seattle who would sell me old demo stock for a $1. I spent years trying to get rid of it all, no one would take it even for free, and unfortunately had to recycle most of it. Although the Paul Allen museum bought some of DEC Alpha stuff. It just cost too much electricity to even play with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Xerox Alto had a custom CPU that used microcode extensively - the CPU actually did most system management tasks like re-blitting the entire screen for every new frame and managing disk I/O, and only when it wasn't handling these scheduled tasks did it execute an "emulation" task that actually executed arbitrary code.

More info: [http://www.righto.com/2016/09/xerox-alto-restoration- day-5-s...](http://www.righto.com/2016/09/xerox-alto-restoration-day-5-smoke- and.html)

Start of story (the part 1 link is not easy to find): [http://www.righto.com/2016/06/restoring-y-combinators- xerox-...](http://www.righto.com/2016/06/restoring-y-combinators-xerox-alto- day.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> Jimmy Maher's "The Digital Antiquarian" has a nice writeup on how these pre-PC small computers at IBM led to _the_ PC:

[http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc- part-1/](http://www.filfre.net/2012/05/the-ibm-pc-part-1/)

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this using "microcode" in the same sense we'd use it today to refer to e.g. "Intel CPU microcode"?

<comment><USER7> In the sense that you have microcode presenting a high-level instruction set that internally is executed as a low-level instruction set, yes. (There are clearly implementation differences, so if you'd pedantically want to find a distinction there are plenty.)

<comment><USER8> It would be interesting to see a history of CPUs in terms of their layers of abstraction. When was something like "MOV AX, BX" invented, and how far is that from physical ones and zeros (ons and offs) in the silicon? Obviously I'm not a CS graduate.

<comment><AUTHOR> A CPU's registers is where all of the "bit transformation" (adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, branching) work that Computers do, is done. Registers are like very small scratchpads, typically 32 or 64 bits (or 4 bytes/8 bytes) wide. Computers with as little as one main register for calculation, and another register for which instruction in memory is executing (instruction pointer) are possible. CPU's as low as 4 bits have existed (Intel 4004), although there's no reason electronically a CPU could use less bits than that (well, in order to execute a program, you need an address in memory, and for that you need more bits for larger addresses, i.e., more memory). Every electronic calculator from the 1970's is a computer IF it had memory, conditional instructions (if results of last calculation were greater than zero, go to (change instruction pointer) to this new address, otherwise, continue with next instruction. MOV AX, BX is an abstraction for programmer consumption only, a CPU's basic instructions are something like: 1) Move value into accumulator (AX, R1 or EAX or RAX or R1 or Reg1) from somewhere in memory. 2) Perform some sort of calulation on it (Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Bit Shift, And, Or, etc.) 3) Store it back to memory 4) Execute a conditional branch instruction which says, as a result of the last mathematical computation, either a) jump to a new address (bypass a section of code), or b) continue with the next instruction.

The Zuse Z3 is probably the simplest Turing-Complete computer that was ever invented (in 1941 no less!); I'd start there:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_\(computer\))

<comment><USER9> The Z3 is a floating point machine... I'd wager that it is more complex than the 4004. While the 4004 has a couple more transistors than the Z3 had relays (about 600 in the "CPU"), the telephone relays used by the Z3 had many circuits and thus can perform more complex stuff than a single transistor in a logic circuit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Wasn't that similar to those Transmeta processors that had most of their instruction set written in software? Seemed like a cool idea, but (as I recall) the Transmeta processors couldn't keep up speed-wise with the existing x86 CPU's.

<comment><USER11> Eh, the Transmeta Crusoe (first gen) processors had pretty decent performance compared to Pentium M at much lower TDP. The Transmeta Efficeon (second gen) had performance comparable to bigger processors but had some thermal issues that hindered it a fair bit. Efficeon kinda lost Transmeta's original goal of decent performance at lower power consumption, and they went downhill afterwards.

They weren't great but for a small, ambitious company without much chance to iterate they definitely weren't bad.

The technology got incorporated into NVIDIA's Project Denver ARM chips, which were very fast… sometimes. Actually, Denver 2 is shipping in the new Jetson devkit, but I haven't seen much about that or been able to get my hands on one.

That's the general problem with VLIW chips, is that they're amazing on some workloads and pretty bad on others. Itanium, for all its faults, was by far the best general-purpose VLIW CPU.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for the rare fair comment. People are quick to forget the difference between concept and implementation. The Transmeta concept was clearly viable, but the implementation needed more iterations to before we can fully judge the concept.

Your comment about VLIW is true, but in this case that was a 2nd order effect. Far far worse was The effect of the JIT (CMS): a small kernel running over a long time (e.g., DVD playback) would work absolutely excellently, even on the Crusoe, whereas a large codebase with relatively little reuse (say, Word) would give very uneven performance. This problem was never solved [at Transmeta].

The irony is that today, x86 compability is irrelevant in most places.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, code-morphing/hardware JIT is extra weird (and probably why Nvidia's Project Denver kinda tanked—turns out, that doesn't work too great for smartphone apps).

One thing I've thought about is having a code-morphing CPU as a sort of _accelerator_ that a single process could be offloaded to (of course, this would require an OS that can marshal processes). Think a database server, a JVM, NodeJS—long-running processes that would benefit from JIT.

Might even be viable with upcoming cache-coherent interconnects like CCIX and GenZ. A more ambitious implementation could offload groups of functions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> There is an absolutely beautiful introduction to microprogramming, by Mark Smotherman:

[https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/uprog.html](https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/uprog.html)

<comment><USER14> Discussed here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11412846](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11412846)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> A few years back I re-implemented a microcode assembler that I had used in a silicon valley startup in the 1980s. I used some of the features of Haskell to do it. See metalasm on Sourceforge. It can now do disassembly of horizontal microcode as well.

</comment><comment><USER16> My first paid programming job was on one of these (the 5120). Too young/inexperienced to appreciate the hardware at the time.

<comment><USER17> My first programming job, also. One Christmas in the late 70s I had three 5120s set up in my living room. I was programming a complete accounts receivable system with reporting and data entry (I was an accounting major, long before small colleges had CS degrees). When all three were running I could turn the heat off, and still have to open a window in the middle of winter. I paid off my college loans with those computers. One thing not mentioned in any of the discussions was how impossibly slow the systems were. I ran the sieve program from Byte magazine a few years later and the results came out in last place. I coded in BASIC and the IBM BASIC had a wonderful ISAM built right into the language that made it very easy to handle indexed files. If you have ISAM, you don't need a database. I took my last 5120 to the the salvage yard 30 years ago. I still have some 8 inch floppies with the code for my very first programs. Unfortunately, I have no way to read them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> More info in here and its related links:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PALM_processor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PALM_processor)

It appears to be based on the System/360 architecture.

<comment><USER19> The 5100 / 5110 used two emulation layers, one for the S/360 architecture, used to tun APL 360, and a S/3 emulation used to run BASIC. Amazingly, these emulation characteristics weren't disclosed in the manuals.

Don't miss to google "John Titor" in this context ...

[Edit] Some links:

1) The sections on SCAMP (the prototype forerunner of the IBM 5100) and on Small Machines in "The IBM family of APL systems" by A.D. Falkoff: [https://web.archive.org/web/20071031134817/http://www.resear...](https://web.archive.org/web/20071031134817/http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/sj/304/ibmsj3004C.pdf)

2) On PALM and 32-bit microcode this talk at Wikipedia: 3) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AIBM_5100](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AIBM_5100)

3) On the John Titor story: [https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.folklore.compute...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.folklore.computers/1KwE6rPwrd0)

<comment><USER20> [http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2011/10/03/john-titor- the-...](http://www.strangerdimensions.com/2011/10/03/john-titor-the- ibm-5100/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Anyone wanting to learn more about Microcode in general, I found two old books that has some information:

* Bit-Slice Design: Controllers and ALUs, Donnamaie White

* Bit-Slice Microprocessor Design, Mick and Brick

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I poured over the Mick and Brick book. Once place where you can find bit slice processors with microcode is early hard drive controllers. I remember also a SASI floppy controller which used the 8x300.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Modules for these machines come up on eBay for lowish prices. I have enough different retro systems already, but it'd be neat to have just one of those neat looking wire-wrapped cards.

</comment><comment><USER24> The article calls the 5120 an ugly beast, but i find it kinda cute.

Also, 1.2MB pr floppy must have been massive back in '78.

BTW, when they say gate arrays, they mean that the whole thing was implemented on FPGAs?

<comment><USER25> Non-field-programmable - what were called ULAs (Uncommited Logic Array - tellingly, wikipedia redirects to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_array](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_array) ).

These are chips with a large grid of gates, which they have in common with FPGAs, PLDs, PALs and the like, but you program them by changing the final metalisation layer during manufacture rather than by feeding a bit-stream into them at initialisation.

They were cheaper and faster to make than truly custom chips. A stock of etched and doped silicon wafers could be held by the manufacturer, so they only needed one mask for the final metal layer to be produced for each customer. This also meant that the turnaround from order of a new design to delivery was faster, as only that single mask needed to be prepared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is there any information about the microcode, or the hardware architecture? I'd be interested in what caliber of today's guns one would require to emulate this thing.

<comment><USER19> See, e.g, this emulation in JS: [http://members.aon.at/~nkehrer/ibm_5110/emu5110.html](http://members.aon.at/~nkehrer/ibm_5110/emu5110.html)

Some resources (including sources for a UNIX/X11): [http://computermuseum.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/dev_en/ibm...](http://computermuseum.informatik.uni- stuttgart.de/dev_en/ibm_5110/technik/en/5110.html)</comment></comment>


2020 cybersecurity predictions, as told by a bot - <AUTHOR> https://www.cyberscoop.com/2020-cyber-predictions-kelly-shortridge/ <comment><USER2> In the "The End to End-User Elections" was this quote: "Drones hovering outside office windows will hijack a Bluetooth mouse to silently install malware on systems to tally who is our next president." And I realized, that's just barely plausible.

</comment><comment><USER3> Security risk is an artifact of specialization. If you build a complex business or system, the greater the degree of specialization in its constituent parts, the more security risk you need to manage between them. It's that simple.

The made up nonsense names for invented problems are basically meaningless woo at this point. We could autogenerate security risk names and descriptions with fridge magnet words with a reasonable degree of accuracy, because the underlying cause is the externalization of risk from the gaps created by the internal incentives of integrating specialized functions.

It's not that all security is necessarily bullshit, but threats and risks that don't acknowledge this inevitable reality are. It's functional integration risk. This is funny, but when a world salad ML script can generate plausible products, the field needs to pause and reflect on what it actually does.

</comment><comment><USER4> I began laughing aloud about here... > Any given cloud at any given time has at least 14 zero-day attacker-controlled lightbulbs (they make them blink SOS in Morse) ...and then I stopped laughing when I realized just how true that probably is.

<comment><USER5> An IoT botnet blinking SOS on all LEDs sounds like a good plan to make people notice the disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ah! yes, Clausewitz's 10 dictums about war, of course. My favorite one is "War is merely the cohesion of 5G wireless to malfunction a nationwide digital.".

Man, this Clausewitz guy sure knew a lot about wireless technology for someone living in the 18th century.

</comment><comment><USER7> My very favorite part is " _Conslusion: Humans suck at security and data protection. ..._ "

<comment><USER8> This comforted me tremendously "Don't be chilled by what you don't know. You ain't cybersecurity."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Teacher: Be sure to mention the most important concepts we learned about in class in your essay

High school me: "Real-time data and analytics and machine learning and AI creates unpreparedness by corporations and Big Tech companies."

</comment><comment><USER10>
       > Don't be chilled by what
       > you don't know. You ain't
       > cybersecurity.

This made me laugh.

</comment><comment><USER11> "Flaws and weaknesses involving the deserialization of untrusted data will be a major concern, particularly in enterprise applications, like ___GRINDR_ __, used directly by vehicle-based systems. " hahah

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd say hosted malware / phishing in large cloud services. AWS, Azure, Google cloud.

Attackers could also utilize DNSSEC to hide their activity.

</comment><comment><USER13> Oh really? There are hackers who go "oh noes, 4G is too slow for data exfil" , reads like satire.</comment>


The future of crowd-sourced news? - <AUTHOR> Despite great strides in democratizing news through social applications like twitter , I still have a hard time getting real-time news that's relevant to me (I mostly find news that are relevant/amusing/interesting on a global scale). How can you envision consuming news say 5-10 years down the line ?
P.S: Wild speculation is encouraged as long as it follows a clear train of thought and reasoning. <comment><USER2> Do you _need_ real-time news?

I enjoy Twitter (and other feed/social interfaces like HN) but many aspects of these designs are abusive/exploitative of attention, creating a false sense of novelty and urgency.

I expect as this becomes better understood, intelligent summaries and filters, at longer controlled intervals, will become more prevalent. The 'Nuzzel' service, which builds a TechMeme-like summary from your own network, is one step in that direction.

A feed service that's loyal to users/developer, rather than advertisers – like App.Net, even if not App.Net itself – could also be an important part of the future. Why? What's needed is client/UX innovation that actually _calms_ the interactions, via reordering/rearrangement/aggressive-filtering leading to less (but higher-quality) engagement... and Twitter/Facebook have strong incentives in the other direction.

<comment><AUTHOR> No I don't. At least not all the time.

I just started with the assumption that getting real-time quality news is the shining light at the end of the news tunnel.

Which seems like a reasonable assumption considering that every innovation/breakthrough in news/information industry has been heading in that general direction.

There are only 3 contexts by which news is relevant time(no one is interested in what happened years ago), location and category. Blogs have clearly favored category and applications like twitter have greatly reduced the time (although I believe twitter is not streamlined to get the most important news out quickest,different discussion). The only way to further reduce that time seems to be by truly democratizing news as in crowd-sourced news.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say the Malaysian flight disappearing/crashing-into-the-ocean is 'important' news. Here it is of global relevance because of the catastrophic nature of the incident, but one could easily argue that a series of break-ins on your street is important as well ,albeit its relevance is local therefore its only important to the people of the locality.

I believe future news/social applications will have to harmoniously marry the global with the local. In all humble honesty I sorta envision these really cool applications that'll be aware of where we are and what we want and serve us relevant content.This idea is exciting to me because we don't have to wait for superior technology to build them.

<comment><USER2> Have you changed anything about your life in reaction to the MH370 news? Did hearing about a new theory, or possible new piece of floating debris, ever improve your day?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Some scary guy tracks every vacation Notch takes. - <AUTHOR> http://i53.tinypic.com/r73yps.png

<comment><USER2> It's interesting how entitled people feel from $10-15.

I'm just glad Toady (of Dwarf Fortress) doesn't have to deal with this kind of behaviour.

<comment><USER3> Make a one time payment roughly equivalent to eating out once.

Feel like you own someone.</comment></comment>


Let's celebrate Hugo's 5th birthday - <AUTHOR> https://gohugo.io/news/lets-celebrate-hugos-5th-birthday/ <comment><USER2> Hugo is nifty. It is in Golang. It is wicked fast.

But.

Like most of the static site generators out there, it is so hyper-focussed on some aspects that it stumbles or completely misses others. I believe that Hugo (and others) take Markdown in precisely their expected format, and layout, with their format of header and, with precisely the correct version of config file and template.. turn it into some really nice looking HTML. Fast.

I guess - even after 5 years they aren't attempting to call it 1.0 at least. Maybe the other things will get fixed before then.

You might even be able to take your existing Markdown stuff and convert it - but be prepared to fiddle with Markdown syntax a bit, and headers, and file layout, etc.. potentially for hours. And hours and hours. And hours and hours. Not so fast any more, is it? Hugo is not alone here.

The number of themes available is amazing! And they look fantastic! But - you're going to have to spend many more hours digging to find one that puts the blog on a separate page, instead of front and center.. because 80%+ of them are oriented towards blogs only.

Now.. a week later... new minor release time. Does the new release work with your existing config? With your existing theme?

Oops - you waited a month and missed a few minor releases.. will everything break now? How do you ensure that your theme keeps up to date with your release? Git hooks, git submodules? What fun! How.. fast? Not if you're futzing with all this stuff.

Hugo isn't alone here - Jekyll, Pelican to name two I've tried also have problems to a greater or lesser degree.

<comment><USER3> Do you have any experience with Org publish/export, and does it suffer from the same problems?

<comment><USER4> Hugo is by far better and more stable than org-mode exporters. Tried all, stayed with hugo, even if I don't like go that much.

<comment><USER5> Can you expand on that a bit? Can Hugo not take other formats?

I use Pelican. It supports markdown and rst out of the box. It's fairly easy to write a plugin to support another format. So I wrote one that takes in Org files (I think it just uses pandoc behind the scenes to convert to rst). Writing posts is _much_ better now that I can author them in Org mode.

So if someone wants to author in Org mode, but not use the clunky Org exporters, consider using a static site generator that allows you to have a custom input format.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I used Hugo for a while, but I feel it's really held back by its templating language.

I've recently moved to Gutenberg[0], which is very nearly a clone of Hugo except for the templating language. After some benchmarks[1], I concluded that it's even faster than Hugo, and the ergonomics of using the templating language are far, far better.

[0] [https://www.getgutenberg.io/](https://www.getgutenberg.io/)

[1] [https://www.codesections.com/blog/gutenberg-vs- hugo/](https://www.codesections.com/blog/gutenberg-vs-hugo/)

<comment><USER7> It is also held back by its implicit stuff, and counter-intuitive internal logic. Jekyll is infinitely more intuitive. I tried both: went from Jekyll to Hugo, and back and I'd never touch Hugo again.

I would also mention that sometimes the Go internals leak and it is also not convenient.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Back in the day, before WordPress sadly became dominant, I made my own static site builder with Perl and Make. Yes, feel free to point and laugh. But it was awesome. It's nice to see static site builders like Hugo gaining momentum. With so much going on on the client these days, having a static back end is a great idea (again).

<comment><USER9> If Perl why not Template::Toolkit? I still use it after 15 years. What I like about it is that it gets out of your way and doesn't assume your site is a blog. It just converts template files to corresponding HTML files and that's it.

<comment><USER8> That's what I used.

<comment><USER9> "I made my own static site builder with Perl and Make"

I assumed you'd rolled your own as TT doesn't require Make.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Anytime I work on a new web project, the first question I ask is how can I make this completely static. Hugo is my first choice to make it happen. It's REALLY nice not worrying about databases / programming environments / user accounts.

<comment><USER11> Maybe this isn't the correct place to ask a question like this but how do you avoid interacting with a database or user accounts? Is it at simple as you don't have any of that in your application?

<comment><USER10> Mostly that. If you take out all of the "social" aspects of most modern websites. Then they really don't require backend databases and accounts. I've been moving back to more of a minimalist/purist approach.

<comment><USER12> Static sites are great for simplicity, but IMO we should be striving for more interaction not less. If I open a blog I want to be able to host comments and not rely on email or third party services.

Maybe we need a hybrid site generator. We could still write the content as seperate text files, but we would have the ability to integrate comment sections, user profiles etc. seemlessly.

Our posts could be parsed and recorded onto a database, for better indexing, search, analytics and reducing redundancies.

The generator would come with a web server and handle everything we throw at it. From ssl to comments to databases.

That's the future I dream of. Not full blown CMSs, but not web 1.0 either.

<comment><USER10> Sounds great, but comments are the first thing I'd prefer just disappear from the internet. I understand that is what brings users, but they are generally cess pools of assholes and spammers.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Comment sections tend to be really hard to moderate. I accept comments via email and then I manually add them to articles as part of the main text. This is a largely self-moderating system because only when a reader honesly thinks their comment is important do they bother emailing. While I always respond, I only include the comment in the article if I think it is of greater value to the community at large.

It's not ideal, but it is as close as I have come to showing someone an article and asking for their comments IRL.

<comment><USER10> That's a massive amount of work though. Is there nothing to come from all of this "machine learning" nonsense talk, putting it to actual good use automating this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Having my Hugo blog up on GitLab, with their CI/CD pipelines hosting and building my site and on every git push, is pretty great. I am only paying for a domain name and nothing else, and not having to worry about a host going away or shutting down is also pretty nice. Even if GitLab went away tomorrow I could have my site back online in minutes.

</comment><comment><USER14> I've worked on projects where Hugo was the chosen tool and I may be missing the forest for the trees but when I encountered the templating syntax I considered it a red flag. Like "this is horrendous, but these people seem to just accept it - I wonder what other painful surprises await me down the line?".

And while it's build-speed is impressive, I'm of the mindset that if your site is large enough that build-speed is a genuine concern, rebuilding your site every time you make a change is a bad idea, and perhaps a dynamic tool is a better fit for the job.

<comment><USER7> I also had the same feeling. I dumped Hugo in the end.

<comment><USER15> What did you use instead? @edem? (& @subpixel, were you in the position to pick sth else?) ... Aha, Jekyll, right? I now found in another comment here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am huge fan of Hugo and I use it for my personal blog and some minor websites.

Has anyone used Hugo for something other than a blog? I am looking for some stories like using Hugo as a REST-API or anything other more creative similar to this:

[https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with- hugo/](https://forestry.io/blog/build-a-json-api-with-hugo/)

<comment><USER17> I used Hugo 0.12 to build a 2200+ page non-blog website a few years ago, with Disqus commenting. Completely different than a REST api, but the jaw-dropping part was how quickly it all got parsed. Like under 2 seconds. Crazy fast.

<comment><USER18> That's insane. My <10 page Gatsby site takes 15-20 seconds :/

<comment><USER19> Not necessarily a fair comparison. A bit oranges vs apples there.

Most of the Gatsby time is usually doing bundling of css, js, etc with Webpack. I would imagine if you did that with a Hugo site you would run into the initial 15-20 seconds to bundle & then a few seconds to convert all your markdown pages into static HTML pages.

That said, I would assume Hugo still wins but not by near as much.

So you can argue that Hugo is much faster, if you don't have a use for Webpack on your site. If you don't want the fancy bells & features Gatsby provides, you should for sure pick Hugo over it.

<comment><USER18> Great point. Hugo does a bit more css processing now, but not nearly as much as Gatsby would.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can anyone recommend a good blog theme? Themes.gohugo.io does not seem to have anything super appealing to me

<comment><USER21> If you have any experience with web development, it's actually very trivial to create your own. I had absolutely no trouble putting together something simple for [https://tomjwatson.com/](https://tomjwatson.com/). The code is available here - [https://github.com/tom-james- watson/tomjwatson.com](https://github.com/tom-james-watson/tomjwatson.com)</comment></comment>


Should I Block Ads? - <AUTHOR> https://shouldiblockads.com/ <comment><USER3> I was on a fresh setup recently and caught a glimpse of the raw internet on my way to install uBlock Origin and uMatrix. There are still fake download buttons everywhere. I can't understand how the non-ad-blocking world tolerates that stuff - no choice and no voice I guess? The amount of autoplaying videos was disturbing as well.

<comment><USER4> This includes plenty of "good" sites.

I kept forwarding Worldometers' COVID-19 data site [1] to friends and families, then later realized it's full of banner ads if viewed without ad blocking.

[1]: [https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)

<comment><USER5> Oh wow, I also forward that site around, and sometimes comment on the great minimal design and information density.

Just had a look at it with uBlock Origin disabled, and wow, how do people browse the internet like this?

<comment><USER6> It really is jarring when you see your regularly visited websites without ad blocking. A news site that I look at has infinite scrolling ads of those "Dentists everywhere are furious about this trick" with a picture of an avocado boiling in water or something equally ridiculous. I realize that ad blocking does take money away from site operators, and I do pay for many of the news sites that I frequent. But honestly a site that is willing to blast me with ads about how I can cheat my insurance company with ONE SIMPLE TRICK doesn't deserve money from my clicks. And I do get that they often can't choose what ads are shown. Perhaps that's the bigger issue.

Edit: elaborated on my final point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So the reason I block ads, or at least started is a book I read called Pre- suasion by Robert Caldini. In it he points out that internet ads are dismissed and ignored by our conscious mind but because of that often will produce an effect on our unconscious mind. Think like the subliminal messaging type thing. People who were shown Kodiak ads on a webpage in an experiment couldn't recall seeing any Kodiak ads simply because we are so used to internet ads we ignore them; however later for the subjects favored purchasing a Kodiak camera over competitors products.

The books final chapter concluded by explaining an experiment they did where simply by showing a particular image in the background, combined with a spaced follow up and increased incentive, they were able to sucessfully manipulate people's political and voting preferences in a manner that lasted over a year.

I decided at that point no one gets to screw with my subconscious but my immense amount of childhood trauma. In my mind every other reason pales in comparison to this one for why I adblock and put it on my wife's computer, and every computer a family member owns.

<comment><USER8> Your imperfect recall of the brand name "Kodak" makes your cautionary message about the insidious effects of ads deliciously ironic. Or is that repeated misspelling actually part of an astroturf campaign to ensure that the notoriously detail-oriented minds of Hacker News readers latch onto the apparent typo, firmly embedding it in the forefront of awareness?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How many people actually disable their adblockers when sites don't allow you to access them if you have one enabled? It's just much easier to close the tab.

<comment><USER10> > _How many people actually disable their adblockers when sites don 't allow > you to access them if you have one enabled? It's just much easier to close > the tab._

Some sites intentionally break if you're using an adblocker. It's really easy to argue to not use those sites.

But...

What about government sites? Government sites don't work with strong ad blockers.

What about bank sites? Bank sites don't work with strong ad blockers.

What about your work related sites? My employer's HR site doesn't work with strong ad blockers. Many of my employer's internal sites don't work with strong ad blockers.

Yeah it's much easier to just close the tab. Unless the site is literally required for your continued living.

<comment><USER11> Hmm, all the bank and government websites I've used work fine (so far) . I've also worked at many companies now, and I haven't had trouble with ad blockers there either.

I'm actually surprised how they could cause problems? Do you have specific examples?

<comment><USER10> > _I 'm actually surprised how they could cause problems? Do you have specific > examples?_

1) use uMatrix and block all scripts and all third party sites

2) go to your favorite bank

3) if you're lucky, you'll get a warm welcome to enable javascript. i don't think that's reasonable, but just enable it to get moving.

4) after enabling javascript, see a few third party sites. some of them are "content delivery networks" (which IMO shouldn't be a thing, and absolutely shouldn't be a different gTLD), some of them are telemetry (hope you trust your bank to vacuum up only what they want), and some are services your bank tries to upsell you on (please sign up for our (third party) rewards to further monetize your purchase habits).

5) good luck trying to figure out which sites to trust

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ad blocking is a security issue now. When the ad networks started serving malware, what were the websites response? Basically nothing, they just said it's not their problem and pointed the finger at the ad networks. Ad blocking is now vital to having a safe web experience. This is not some trivial issue. Computers and the web are critical for modern life now. The same computer that people use for browsing news sites is also used to do online banking, pay bills, apply for unemployment, do work with sensitive data (for example a work laptop), and so many other things.

And computers are also used by minors. Some of these ads are really disturbing and not something minors should see. Again, when this started happening, how did the websites respond? They did nothing.

<comment><USER6> This x10000.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I just disable them via /etc/hosts because I can't tolerate any more useless javascript putting load on my CPU.

My workstation (E5-2640) has seen multiple generations of operating systems, video editing software, DAWs.

Browsers and web browsing in general is the only thing that I can tell it's getting consistently worse year after year.

I know it's an odd metric but 10-15 seconds to fully render a newspaper homepage is more than it takes for my full DAW setup (Cubase + FL Studio as VST plugin) to fully come up with tracks loaded and play button ready. I don't even recall dialup being this bad.

<comment><USER14> Funny because I feel this way about Cubase, it consistently gets worse. My projects take much longer to load than any webpage, fwiw.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> With ad blocking, some sites present you with an overlay, preventing you from accessing content.

A really nice Chrome and FF extension to scrub overlays is named Behind The Overlay:

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/l...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/behindtheoverlay/ljipkdpcjbmhkdjjmbbaggebcednbbme)

<comment><USER16> For people who do not use a browser made by an advertising company:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/behind_the_ov...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/behind_the_overlay/)

90% of the time I just close the tab, if the content I want isn't immediately visible without jumping through hoops. If the content is hidden by a newsletter popup, the percentage is 100.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've had better luck with AdGuard for Safari than 1Blocker. I use AdGuard on both macOS and iOS, and I just use their content-blocking Safari extensions, not any of their other products. I had paid for 1Blocker but found it increasingly let ads through. I wanted a product based off of EasyList instead (which AdGuard filters are).

<comment><USER18> I used to use AdGuard until they switched to an Electron app that needs to constantly run in the background…now I just have a homegrown content blocker I whipped up once and should polish and release someday but am just too lazy to finish.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is missing what in my opinion is the biggest reason: advertisers create perverse incentives where pages are rewarded based on visits and ad-clicks rather than quality of content. This results in extreme forms of clickbait, misleading extreme headlines, and shallow low-information-density content.

</comment><comment><USER20> The answer is obviously yes. You externalize the pain (lost revenue isn't a thing felt by you) and internalize the gain (no ads to view, etc.). It's just like the answer to:

* Should you pirate your school textbooks? Yes, obviously. I did it all through uni and I'm a good software engineer. Oh sorry, that's not right. I meant "It's a travesty that a university I pay money to would force me to spend money on books I could just get from the previous year. The writer barely makes any money on the book anyway".

* Should you pirate games? Yes, obviously. A game that's free is better than a game you pay for. If it's sufficiently cheap then the advantage of discovery and your library makes Steam or Epic worth it. "Store-bought games include intrusive DRM that messes with your system files and is a security nightmare"

* Should you pirate software? Yes, obviously. That's why most paid software is SaaS now. You can't pirate SaaS. "Same DRM argument as above".

Ultimately, the answer to "Should I get something for free which I would otherwise pay for" is always yes.

I mean we still have DRM and shit and once upon a time people grumbled that they pirate games because they don't like always on DRM. Well, Steam is always on DRM and folks love that. To paraphrase big Bill C, "It's about the money, stupid".

I could probably invent a plausible smoke screen for everything from riding on trains for free (why are cars so subsidized?) to not paying for parking (I already pay so much in road tax and income tax) to taking all the Halloween candy someone left outside in a bowl (I never had this stuff as a child, all these kids already have way more than they need).

</comment><comment><USER21> YES.

I think you should block ALL ads entirely, internet and everywhere. They are time sinking distraction and you definitely don't need them in your life.

A specific adblocker somebody needs to develop is podcast ad blocker, just auto-skip or have no sponsored message please.

<comment><USER22> You do realize that most podcasts will go away if they can't make money via advertising, right?

<comment><USER23> None of the podcasts I listen to have ads, many use things like Patreon or have a "first hour free, second hour only for members" model.

<comment><USER24> This and, either way, you shouldn't care.

Heuristically, save yourself time and energy and snap to the game theoretical conclusion. You'll go out of your way and incur personal cost to be a good citizen and prop up this poorly-conceived system that relies on such good samaritanship, but will most people? LOL no. So it's futile anyway. Get the best deal you can and let come what may. :D If all podcasts go belly up and there'll be a post-ad-economy afterscape where all pocasts are somehow paywalled, so be it -- that would have happened anyway, regardless of what you choose to do, and it's hopefully a more resiliently-designed system which doesn't shoulder users with cumbersome ethical dilemmas.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Niche blogger here.

For some time I tried to fight the tide by continuing to publish ads and not using an adblock myself. By being an amateur blogger, I understand that even beer money helps to keep the moral high. However a couple of years ago I gave up and just embraced reality: deactivated adsense and started to use an adblock. I finally acknowledged that nobody likes ads - myself included - specially the ones not related with the content. Did my blogging suffered with it? Certainly it did.

</comment><comment><USER26> Firefox running add-ons on Android made me switch to it on the mobile phone. It makes the mobile experience way better than Chrome and Brave.

<comment><USER27> If you'd like to run decent ad blocking extensions (or any extensions) on the Chromium side of things, give Kiwi a shot. Afaik the current Play Store/XDA Labs release is out of date on the security patches' side of things, but the developer is currently working on catching up. Also, the project went open- source not too long ago and apparently the dev's been working together with some devs of a different browser, so you can expect more Chromium browsers to implement support for extensions in the near future. [https://kiwibrowser.com](https://kiwibrowser.com)

And, well... There's also Yandex with their extension support, they deserve at least a mention. iirc uBO is broken there, but Nano works fine

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Should I invite wasted junkies into my home to use the computer as they please?

<comment><USER29> Most junkies will give you more privacy than what you can expect from the average ad network O_O

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I have actually turned off my Adblocker for LinkedIn and Facebook ad they ads can actually be quite relevant.

I would be willing to on the news sites as well if they didn't spam them so heavily into the page and they didn't shift content to load them. The news sites also allow a surprising number of low quality ads. I'm willing to see ads for Tide or a bank, but no fake download buttons please.

</comment><comment><USER31> If anyone is interested in how to set up a network-wide tracker blocker then I've written some guides on how to configure Pi-hole as a router and Wi-Fi range extender. This means you can force all traffic through your custom DNS, even devices from Google and Amazon that don't respect DHCP.

[https://unop.uk/pi-hole-extended-part-1/](https://unop.uk/pi-hole-extended- part-1/)

[https://unop.uk/pi-hole-extended-part-2/](https://unop.uk/pi-hole-extended- part-2/)

It's still worth installing privacy add-ons to Firefox but this helps with some profiling intrusions in mobile apps and Chromecasts etc. It also helps protect your less technical family members a little, although it obviously can't keep them completely safe from surveillance. Education is an important aspect too.

</comment><comment><USER32> It's a pretty simple equation for me. If you're too lazy to curate ads and rely on a third party service to show any random ad to your users and run any random javascript in their browsers, your ad is probably on an adblock list and will therefore be blocked on my devices. If, however, you give half a shit about your users and therefore choose what ads they see, it probably won't be on a blocklist and won't be blocked on my devices. It's simple, either both of us care or neither of us do and it's up to the content provider which path they take with me.

</comment><comment><USER33> Should you ever find yourself travelling in a foreign country with a _monthly_ quota of just 2 gigs of data, you realise extremely quickly that _every_ ad is an ad too many.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't block ads, I block third-party scripts and trackers, the ads just happen to not be visible without those, which is not my problem.

</comment><comment><USER22> I wish instead of calling them "ad blockers", we had used something like "tracking blockers". The tracking/automation of ad networks is what the issue is, not the ads, yet we've made it more confusing for those that don't understand how these things work.

<comment><USER35> Not at all. I hate ads with a visceral passion. They are a theft of my time/attention for which I am not compensated.

No website has a right to exist, same with businesses. Nor do they have a right to my attention. People all cry 'the world will die without ads!'... no. Some of us have been around since the Internet started. All sites were free and no ads (banner ads came later, and were mostly static)-the sites full of passion, hours poured in for no financial gain. The difference is that now we have a generation of young people who feel entitled to make money off everything.

Now, the tracking is most definitely an issue, but first and foremost for myself and many others is the hatred of any and all ads. Life really is different without them. If someone comes up with an ear/eye implant to block all ads (tv, radio, billboards all of it) I'd pay whatever it cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is a really well put-together site with very reasonable arguments describing the problem with web ads. I'm glad they put this together. It's refreshing to see something in this space that just has the facts without being preachy or screechy.

</comment><comment><USER37> > _Should I Block Ads?_

Yes. Permanently.

</comment><comment><USER38> To add to that HTTPSEverywhere and Privacy Badger are quite useful too

<comment><AUTHOR> Both of those add-ons are quickly becoming irrelevant. Privacy Badger, because Firefox and Safari have tracker blocking built-in, and HTTPS Everywhere, because HSTS preloading is standard in all of the major browsers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Any views on Magic Lasso for iOS/Mac? Seen it mentioned recently. I'm on 1Blocker Legacy, it's fine, but I'm aware it must be getting out of date.

</comment><comment><USER40> Aren't we at the point where displaying rich media ads, especially ones with video, costs more energy than they actually earn?

</comment><comment><USER41> How could this even be a question?

Either you block ads or you don't know that you can block ads.

</comment><comment><USER42> > Do ad blockers stop sites from making money?

The honest answer to this is "Yes!", not a 7-paragraph non-answer.

<comment><USER43> Adblockers stop sites from making money __from those third-party ads __.

They obviously don't stop a shopping site from selling products or from GitLab.com registering users for GitLab services etc.

If the way a site makes money is by __abusing __the visitors, adblockers stop the abuse and the money from _that_ * side of things, which may be all the income they get, but not necessarily.

So, this is not a simple yes/no situation.

<comment><USER44> So they need a set bushiness and tech teams to build an internal ad stack, and try to get advertisers... many who wont buy in without 3rd party tracking to mitigate fraud.

<comment><USER43> There's better and worse in advertising, sure. But third-party ads are a compromised business model even at their best. I'm not saying businesses don't involve compromise, but the goal should be to figure out how to have the most net benefit to the world (I don't think profit as an end in itself is a respectable goal). Thus, choose the compromises that are least detracting within the scope of real-world options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Sometimes a website will break with an ad-blocker. How do you allow ads in such a site when using pi-hole?

<comment><USER28> Blocking JS across the board with selective whitelisting will defeat a lot of anti-blocking. Element zapper to dispose of divs that cover content by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Can I possibly be the only person here who doesn't use an adblocker?

I like buying things. I like seeing ads that interest me. I don't care who tracks me or monetizes data about me that is 100% worthless to me. I like not paying money out of my own wallet to read websites and watch videos.

<comment><AUTHOR> You'll notice that the essay doesn't build its argument around "ads bad" or "privacy good" or any of the typical shibboleths.

It builds its argument around crap like fake download buttons, fake FBI warnings, coin miners, and ads that break the website. These are the reason why University of California and Edward Snowden recommend ad blockers, and they're the reason why I recommend them too.

<comment><USER43> Yes, but the "ads bad" arguments hold up to scrutiny as well, even though it's not what this site focused on.

<comment><USER18> It's an easier argument to reply to with "you're stealing the website's livelihood", which is why it's usually worth bringing up after you explain the many other problems ads have.

<comment><USER43> Yes, I'm not denying the significance of tact. But just because it may be tactfully or politically harder in some cases to focus on "ads bad", that doesn't make it wrong.

And how to fund creative work is indeed a complex question. However, "I won't support business model that is itself _harmful_ " is a perfectly fair position. I can both want a website to get funded and also refuse to play along with funding it through third-party ads which are harmful even without the worst problems of deception and tacking etc.

In short, I think it's really important that we not forget that ads-bad is basically true and has been since at least the old penny-papers and yellow- journalism.

See for one good source Tim Wu's The Attention Merchants. A good intro is episode 16 at [https://humanetech.com/podcast/](https://humanetech.com/podcast/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I think this article downplays the downsides of ad blockers too much. If ad blockers become the norm, much of the current web will no longer be viable. Facebook, YouTube, Google, Reddit, StackOverflow, and countless other sites are fundamentally based on advertising and can't survive without it.

The article tries to address this a little bit with the "Ad blockers do not block all advertising" section, but I don't think it fully acknowledges that if everyone installs uBlock Origin as the article suggests the web as we know it will collapse.

<comment><USER47> There are better, more efficient ways to monetize than ads. Ads are one of the most destructive and socially wasteful ways to monetize content; it's just technically easy. If we make ads nonviable, you can expect things like micropayments to become more common (and I'm happy to make that trade).

<comment><USER48> (Disclosure: I work for Google, but not in Ads)

Micropayments are generally considered to be unviable for the general population (edit: business model wise, not tech). People are unwilling to pay even pennies for an article[0], because now users are facing the burden of choice, constantly thinking about how their browsing is racking up pennies. Not to mention, it boxes you into the pay-per-article model. Sites like Twitter or Facebook don't make sense in this world.

I also think it adds significant barriers to entry, since micropayments aren't accessible, at all, to younger people, or the poor. Information should be as free as possible imo.

If the market decides all ads should be blocked, then sure, things will change, but please don't pretend this won't have huge ramifications - <USER2> will not be remotely like they are today. For the news at least, it'll likely just be the expensive megacorp publications that survive.

[0][https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reuters_digital_news_report.php](https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reuters_digital_news_report.php)

<comment><USER47> > micropayments aren't accessible, at all, to younger people, or the poor.

This is a purely technological problem, not some sort of fundamental problem with the concept of micropayments.

If advertising were really the only way young or poor people could generate value (this is not actually true, but for the sake of argument I'll go along with it), there could be dedicated websites where people intentionally look at ads in exchange for credit in their micropayment accounts (whatever that looks like, be it Bitcoin Lightning or some service from Square). Of course, once you phrase it this way, it becomes more clear that using ads as an indirect monetization strategy kind of doesn't make sense. It's better to have people perform mechanical turk style tasks (the monetization strategy of Captcha clones).

As a parent, I'd be happy to put a few cents in my child's micropayment account so they don't have to get their brain flooded with garbage whenever they use the internet.

<comment><USER48> > People intentionally look at ads in exchange for credit in their > micropayment accounts.

> It's better to have people perform mechanical turk style tasks.

I do like the idea, but I still think the barriers to entry are way too high. I'm worried that what will really happen is people will just download content via other means, which will start publishers off the deep end putting DRM into their webpages. Just look at Steam as an example - it very much reduced piracy rates because it lowered the barrier to entry.

> As a parent, I'd be happy to put a few cents in my child's micropayment > account so they don't have to get their brain flooded with garbage whenever > they use the internet.

Easy enough for someone living in a 1st world country. A child in Bangladesh who just wants to read about maths or video games however... Not to mention, your child is now directly linked to your bank account, whereas before you had pseudo-anonymity.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Should Pay All of Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/facebook-should-pay-all-of-us <comment><USER3> The thing that so many people fail to realize is that the data isn't valuable in and of itself. Excluding the type of information that lets you steal identities (and therefore bank accounts), there's not much you can do with huge swaths of data. There's not really a market for sheer information.

What makes Facebook (and other platforms that use your personal data) valuable is that they have both _information about you_ and a _place where they can show you ads_. These platforms are not, contrary to popular belief, trying to "sell" your information. They're allowing advertisers to use the platform to _display ads_ to you based on that information. The data is a means to an end, which is showing you relevant ads.

If everyone stopped using Facebook tomorrow, the value of all the information Facebook has gathered would be negligible. The real reason Facebook is worth $X Billion is because a significant portion of the population of the world logs in to use same product every day.

In other words, your _attention_ is the thing that is valuable. Your _data_ just lets advertisers be really efficient in how they pay for your attention.

<comment><USER4> What if the model was flipped, so instead of advertisers paying Facebook to cover their operation costs, individual users covered their own operation costs, and _perhaps the advertisers directly subsidized individual users at the time of publication_? This would mean that people who wanted to pay could turn off advertising and just use Facebook as pay-as-they-go service.

I dunno what kind of accounting they're doing at Facebook, but with their current approach of having advertising indirectly subsidizing users, there is no price discovery mechanism. Right now there's no way to price how much a user is worth and how much they actually cost, which seems like a very strange way to run a business.

This type of accounting, where the content itself is given a cost and a value, would mean it we're finally treating what people publish as intellectual property instead of the "user being the product".

\---

Edit, to expand on _perhaps the advertisers directly subsidized individual users at the time of publication_ :

Ah, I think you're assuming that I'm saying they should go to a completely paid-for-in-cash-by-users model... which I'm not! I'm just saying that if they flipped the model, and covered the operations costs directly from users, that the books would make more sense. This would make the accounting significantly more complex, so I wasn't making an argument for simplicity, rather as much detail and accuracy as possible! This information can be later analyzed and acted upon in simple ways. This doesn't mean that there can't be a free to use service on top of a model like this. It just means that advertisers are literally paying on behalf of users for hosting, distribution and other operating costs. This would mean that there wouldn't be advertisements on the read-side, in the "stream", rather on the write-side, when publishing... like with sponsored posts... Like, I personally choose to make my post sponsored by the Buffalo Bills because I love giving my money to the Buffalo Bills and the NFL (which I really do). Or maybe some low-rent ads make you watch a 20 second video before paying for you to upload 200 photos from your phone, but at least you don't have to associate yourself with them. We're smart enough to create the kinds of incentive structures that have made intellectual property function in a market economy for hundreds of years, we just need to revisit some deep fundamentals about how we buy and sell information. It'll work out better for everyone. Facebook could take a percentage of the business for having created the market that introduced the advertisers to the authors. The authors are now free to do business as they please, directly covering their own costs or choosing to have them subsidized. The advertisers can establish better relationships with the authors, essentially treating them like business partners.

<comment><USER5> > What if the model was flipped, so instead of advertisers paying Facebook to > cover their operation costs, individual users covered their own operation > costs,

Why would that be a good deal for Facebook? With current revenue scheme they cover operation costs, R&D, various projects that do not directly contribute any revenue, various internal projects that fail and no one else hears about them, growth and marketing campaigns, various campuses and real estate around the globe and even then have some profits left over.

Why would any software company willingly cut its R&D funnel and profits that can be used as a rainy day fund?

> Right now there's no way to price how much a user is worth and how much they > actually cost, which seems like a very strange way to run a business.

I'm sure there is if you have access to internal data, and entire departments in the company know not only operational cost per user, but can segment the costs by country and/or product (feed vs platform vs messaging vs video).

<comment><USER4> Whatever kinds of creative accounting that they're currently using cannot be as accurate as properly pricing the value and costs in a standard double-entry manner.

While having the overall inputs and outputs accounted for is enough to give earnings reports for public investors, it certainly doesn't give their management very much to work with! How would they have enough information to make strategic decisions on, as a simple example, "should we cater to lower- end content creators or higher-end content creators?".

Compare that to the information say, a spark plug manufacturer, has on their business. They can make reasonable assumptions about deciding to build higher quality spark plugs with more expensive materials and selling to less customers with higher margins or they can decide to make lower quality spark plugs with lower margins sold to more customers (and many other scenarios). They can do this because they know exactly the cost and value of the various inputs and outputs in their business. The miracle of accounting!

<comment><USER3> Facebook isn't optimizing for value-per-user accounting accuracy. They're maximizing profits.

Say they could charge per user, and they would know each user was worth _exactly_ $.20/year. That would make for easier accounting, certainly - <USER2> could pin that down to an exact number.

But what if alternative is more complex, but much higher? It would be something like "Most users are worth $14/yr, some are worth $6/yr, and some are worth $.10/yr." The value per user varies widely, but they can pin the average value per user down to $7/year.

They choose the latter because $7 > $.2; they'd rather have more profits than simpler accounting.

<comment><USER4> Spending time and money optimizing for accounting accuracy is one of the best ways to help maximize profits!

I'm having a hard time following your examples. Are you saying that they can make a fictional $7/user-per-year appear higher than the actual $0.20/user- per-year?

The goal wouldn't be to have an accurate average, rather the goal would be to segment the market in to different buckets, and then perhaps use different user acquisition strategies (with differing costs) for these different kinds of users.

The point is, no matter how management decided to use this more accurate information about their business, they would be able to make better decisions.

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what you're saying anymore; I thought you were advocating that they charge per user to make the accounting more simple, instead of a more variable advertising model. Now I think you're advocating best accounting practices? I'm sure they have great internal accounting.

<comment><USER4> [tried to move to parent, but I lost the ability to edit before I could go back and add the whitespace... so I'm putting it back here so it is easier to read... sorry, I have no idea what I'm doing!!]

Ah, I think you're assuming that I'm saying they should go to a completely paid-for-in-cash-by-users model... which I'm not!

I'm just saying that if they flipped the model, and covered the operations costs directly from users, that the books would make more sense. This would make the accounting significantly more complex, so I wasn't making an argument for simplicity, rather as much detail and accuracy as possible! This information can be later analyzed and acted upon in simple ways.

This doesn't mean that there can't be a free to use service on top of a model like this. It just means that advertisers are literally paying on behalf of users for hosting, distribution and other operating costs.

This would mean that there wouldn't be advertisements on the read-side, in the "stream", rather on the write-side, when publishing... like with sponsored posts... Like, I personally choose to make my post sponsored by the Buffalo Bills because I love giving my money to the Buffalo Bills and the NFL (which I really do).

Or maybe some low-rent ads make you watch a 20 second video before paying for you to upload 200 photos from your phone, but at least you don't have to associate yourself with them.

We're smart enough to create the kinds of incentive structures that have made intellectual property function in a market economy for hundreds of years, we just need to revisit some deep fundamentals about how we buy and sell information.

It'll work out better for everyone. Facebook could take a percentage of the business for having created the market that introduced the advertisers to the authors. The authors are now free to do business as they please, directly covering their own costs or choosing to have them subsidized. The advertisers can establish better relationships with the authors, essentially treating them like business partners.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not the biggest fan of FB or for the fact that I pretty much have to use it to keep up with friends and family these days.

These are some things that you get in exchange for giving up your information:

      A place to store photos
      A platform to publish your photos
      A communications platform (Messenger)
      A platform to stay officially connected to things you "like" and their updates
      Near instant publication of your brain thoughts to a curated group of people
      High availability
      Maintenance of connections to other people
      IRL event management
      Mobile and web applications to use the aforementioned
      Some of the best engineering talent in the world working on the aforementioned

I think the average person does get a lot in exchange. Look at all of the other social networks that tried to solve this in the past and failed. I don't see any legitimate alternatives.

<comment><USER7> I don't have a FB account and I get all those things. I also don't feel like "Some of the best engineering talent in the world working on the aforementioned" is a compelling reason to give away my personal information.

<comment><USER8> > I don't have a FB account and I get all those things.

From where? Nowhere free or not advertising to you or selling your info to advertisers, I'd bet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is silly. Yes, if you're not the one paying, then you're the product. However, I do get things in return - I get to connect with people I don't get to see too often anymore and see what they're up to in their lives. Everyone and their grandma has one, so I know if I'm trying to find someone they're on there. It also reminds me of people's birthdays, which I'm pretty terrible with otherwise.

People do get things out of facebook. Why else would they be on it all the time, checking it at least a couple times a day?

<comment><USER7> From what I observe[1] they're on it all the time because its a diversion. TV is another worthless diversion[2] but at least the TV networks don't (yet) sell your private information. But ultimately there is very little on Facebook that I see as critical or something I can't get from a myriad of other sources.

1: Watching my wife peruse FB but I suspect she is an example of a typical user.

2: I'll grant that worthless diversions have their place when used sparingly. But neither FB nor TV are used sparingly by most people unfortunately.

<comment><USER10> Not everything worthless to you is worthless to everyone. TV might be a worthless distraction to you, but not everyone.

I don't understand how the sell your information argument comes in either. They run their own custom ad network. They aren't even leasing that infrastructure to anyone.

I challenge you, to please go pay Facebook and _buy_ information about where I was on Sunday in the evening. If they _sell_ you that, I'll pay you five times the amount. If you can't buy it, they aren't selling it.

<comment><USER7> Your argument would be right if it weren't of a very large straw man persuasion. Nobody is saying an individual is being sold your personal information. But when Coke comes along and wants it, Facebook is selling.

But even that's not a problem, really. Who cares if Coke knows where you were on Sunday evening? What about Allstate though? Or Humana?

One commenter noted above that our personal information isn't valuable without our attention and he's right. Don't you think that an auto insurance company would just love to know that one of their customers is a fan craft beer and was out partying with Jane Doe on Saturday and that Jane Doe has a DUI? Now they're raising rate on the guy who happened to pay passing attention to craft beer.

I concede that we don't have evidence that Facebook sells that kind of detailed information on an individual. In fact, I believe they probably don't. Right now. I guarantee you that if comes down to keeping your information private and keeping their stock price up, you might as get a For Sale sign tattoo'd to your forehead.

<comment><USER10> No they won't sell the information to Coke. What Facebook does as an advertiser is basically make money off of derivative of surface personal information or a large number of people. Coke would be able to target their ads to you, but will not know anything else about you.

The whole business model of Facebook is targeting, that's the derivative they get out of your information. If they start selling the information, everyone would have the derivative. In your example, if Facebook sells information to Coke, Coke can use any cheap internet advertiser on the street. Why would it buy facebook ads anymore? No company would sell their only value prop, you've got it backwards.

There is slight amount of information leak in terms of ad targeting and public profiling. Insurance companies can just put up fake beer ads and try to extrapolate how many 25 year olds are clicking in each area. But that's what you get for not living in a cave. The same insurance company can also sit on the highway and count beer trucks. They can also sit outside a shop and see how many 25 year olds are buying beer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Similarly, newyorker.com should pay us. Their site seems to be running Adobe DMP, revenue science, Facebook, google ads, parsely and pointroll, so they've certainly got quite a bit of info on us.

(Incidentally, privacy badger is a pretty nice plugin.)

</comment><comment><USER12> I don't trust Facebook. At one point I even deleted my account. But, FB has allowed me to get back in contact with friends I made in college and at my first job (in Panama). The reward to me has been tremendous. It has meant so much to me. Prices are not just a function of costs, but also what consumers are willing to pay.

Also I think this article over-values personal information in a world where your local supermarket, Amazon, ad networks, the government, etc. already know so much about us. In that context, you aren't giving up that much additional privacy by also sharing with Facebook -- the price you are paying may not be that great.

</comment><comment><USER13> I went to a conference last month where software vendors would do an RFID scan of your conference badge.

My coworker (I do not have facebook) had companies that had scanned his badge show up on his Facebook advertisement feed the next day.

To me, this was the real eye opener. Facebook doesn't just sell to advertisers the promise of groups of users. They can offer to sell to you, specifically, by name if they want to.

<comment><USER14> Specifically, it's by email or Facebook ID.

Most likely, your friend was targeted for advertising using Facebook's custom audiences. FB let advertisers upload a list of email addresses or Facebook IDs to show ads to.

Personally, I consider this much further on the creepy scale than it is on the genuinely worrisome scale, more creepy than harmful. It's pretty creepy though, so.. relativity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Surely, if you value your privacy then don't bother using Facebook at all.

 _More precisely, she wants the company to offer a cash option (about twenty cents a month, she calculates) for people who value their privacy, but also want a rough idea of what their friends' children look like._

They could just email with their friends. It's unclear to me, at least, that a 'feed' of data about people I know is an important service. Clearly, I must be an outlier given the number of people I see looking at Facebook every day.

<comment><USER16> I also want this option- last I checked fb earned about USD $0.95/month/person. Charge me $25/year and double profits from me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This will not change until regulators step in and force companies to disclose what they store, how they use it and most importantly, what behaviors they are actively attempting to coerce their users into.

Much like the agriculture industry, tech companies that deal in user data use the shield of trade secrets, NDAs, lobbying etc to hide their actions from the public as they all know that if they general public knew what they were truly doing, they would have a much more difficult choice when deciding upon using that service.

It's not that users don't care or think they are getting a good value for their information, it's that users have so little information about how it is being used.

</comment><comment><USER18> Once again, someone has proposed that an ad supported company offer subscriptions for exactly its revenue-per-user, without seeming to realize that not all users are equally valuable to advertise to, and only the most valuable ones will opt out.

<comment><USER19> Ha, imagine how creeped out said people would be if the company calculated personalized fees for opting out.

"Ehhhhhh? Why am I worth $76 to them?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Facebook IS paying us: through the free use of their service.

<comment><USER7> Except significantly fewer people would use it if it weren't free.

<comment><USER21> Isn't that true for many (if not most) free services? Would you pay to use Google?

<comment><USER22> People (and even more companies) used to pay for services which now are replaced by Google searches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would reckon that the market for personal data is lot bigger. 45 billion e-mails, 10 billion text messages and submit 95 million Tweets are sent in an average day. Now according to this article:

[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528866/researchers- test...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/528866/researchers-test- personal-data-market-to-find-out-how-much-your-information-is-worth/)

each piece of data is worth about $2. Now, simple maths would tell any company that making money off that data is a lot more profitable than collecting $0.20. Also, how many people would actually want to enrol in such a premium service? It would not be every person that uses Facebook, for sure. Plus, selling off the data is lot easier than soliciting people to buy their premium product (people give them the licence to do so through the ToS).

<comment><USER19> Why not set the bar at $2 or greater than? More than a few of us would be happy to pay for that. I definitely would for youtube.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Fun Graph API fact: while it's incredibly easy for any user to scrape data off of public Facebook Pages ([https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post- scraper](https://github.com/minimaxir/facebook-page-post-scraper)), it is _very hard_ to scrape personal data from people on Facebook, even if you are Friends with them or their Facebook statuses are public. Personal data is much more valuable.

I've tried multiple endpoints to do so (for data analytics purposes) and they have all failed. The only way to get data on a person is for them to opt into granting the necessary permissions for the app.

<comment><USER25> You can use the endpoints for the Facebook Android App. You will not comply with their ToS, but you will get all that data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> We should really think about who we give our personal information to, how that information is stored, and why it's being collected because the trend here seems to be that companies are expanding their collection efforts and it's reaching a point where (some) people are seeking alternatives. If you don't mind trading your information like photos, locations, address book, and browser history, then Facebook is a good tool to stay connected with people. On the other hand, if you want that information to stay private, you should still be able to connect and share online with your friends and family.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm surprised there is no mention of tsu.co, a Facebook clone that attempts to pay contributors revenue-share based on their social connections. The site rapidly grew to around three million users last year until people began to realize that 1) they couldn't make any money (too many people chasing too little revenue) and 2) the system encouraged feed spam. Also, as a clone it didn't feel different enough to take people away from FB, which has a lot of value as a free tool for managing your friend and family connections.

</comment><comment><USER28> Just dont use it. I never have, and guess what? I still keep in touch with friends in family, because, those are the people who categorically won't disappear from your existence.

</comment><comment><USER29> In a sense, facebook does pay us: it let's us use its platform for free.

In exchange we give facebook our data and usage patterns and the right to put targeted ads in our feed.

</comment><comment><USER30> So far as I am concerned: Facebook is a token economy broker where users pay each other in likes. Just like all the "major" social networks. That is the elegance of them: the users are providing the gratification.

</comment><comment><USER31> Here is an article refuting the concept that Facebook should pay the people that use it.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/16/the- econo...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/08/16/the-economics-of- facebook-it-would-be-absurd-if-they-were-to-pay-us/)

</comment><comment><USER32> Perhaps people don't value their data because so many business transactions require you to fill out a form with your name, address, phone number, and often more. You can't easily travel without doing that at every hotel you stay at. If you've become used to handing it out for free, it's a bit weird to say that Facebook alone should pay for it.

</comment><comment><USER33> While it is possible to capture some value from data; like heat; most of that data does not actually have value until it is captured.

</comment><comment><USER34> In other news:

Google should pay all of us.

Yahoo should pay all of us.

...

<comment><USER35> Maybe so, or at least it's an interesting thought experiment.

I've thought for a while that the dominant business model of the web is for- profit piracy. I don't mean The Pirate Bay -- those are small time players and are not very profitable if at all. I mean Google, Facebook, etc.

To make that argument work you have to define piracy independently of whether or not it's _illegal_ piracy. In this case we'd define for-profit piracy as the "indirect monetization of content you did not produce or license and in which you do not pay the producer."

Google monetized the entire web. They didn't create the content, but they sold ads on it. It's like having a radio station where you don't make the music, don't license the music, and _don 't even run the transmitter_, but you get to present ads in-stream. Then on top of that you get to charge people for those ads while you are also monetizing them. It's brilliant.

That's not illegal (in this case), but it is perhaps a form of piracy. Google would have had no value had the web not been full of people dumping valuable information online.

Does this mean Google is a value extraction enterprise rather than a value creating one? I'm picking on Google but this applies to a whole lot of the web's business models. I think it's legitimate to question the economic justice of this. Again it's not illegal, but there are many things that are not illegal that are shady. Is the monetization of what began as an open gift culture shady?

Obviously Google's founders didn't think of it this way when they built Google, but one of the things social criticism does is to question what things _really are_ or _really become_ independent of their original intent.

The counter argument is that Google provided a valuable service that made the web more useful. That's undeniably true. But how much effort went into that vs. creating all the web's content? Does building a road to make it easier to reach someone's farm entitle you to 100% of the proceeds of their farm?

<comment><USER36> Your premise is backwards. Does your desire to be a farmer oblige society to build a road so you can get access to the market?

The the internet is a big stack of books in a room, Google is a librarian with a master index who organizes the data. Calling that piracy is a stretch of the term.

Actually, taking the thought experiment further, you could argue that book publishers are the real pirate, taking ideas and making themselves toll keepers.

<comment><USER35> Yes, that's a very valid counterpoint.

The problem being explored by this and other ideas is this: the Internet has massively increased our intellectual wealth, but for the vast majority this does not translate into any increase in _physical_ wealth. If anything, the Internet may actually make it harder for many people to earn physical renumeration from intellectual activity.

Meanwhile the cost of the most necessary physical goods and services keeps rising. We've created a world where a person can be homeless yet have the combined knowledge of all of humanity available to them instantly. We've created an imaginary post-scarcity society online, but that's coming into stark conflict with the very real scarcity of the physical world in which it ultimately exists. Cyberspace is like the Egyptian afterlife: you go to heaven, but someone must guard and bring food to your Ka.

It's truly bizarre, a total inversion of the ancient world where almost everyone could live off the land yet the priests monopolized knowledge and literacy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'd pay more than ten dollars a year for a system that didn't treat me as the product.

</comment><comment><USER38> A typical Facebook is mildly nauseating at first, and this increases the longer you look at it. The privacy sacrifice is unacceptable. I don't use it.

I do use diaspora*. No one I know IRL uses it, but that's fine for now.

</comment><comment><USER39> If they did that, I might consider rejoining after my 5 year hiatus. Second thought...no...never. I will not allow the level of manipulation and control that facebook had over my life again, pay or none.

</comment><comment><USER40> In order to pay us, Google would presumably need our real names, real addresses, and real credit card or bank accounts. I don't like that idea very much.

</comment><comment><USER41> Yeah, I keep waiting for something non-evil to replace - at least - part of Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER42> Seriously, facebook is a federal agents, stalkers and pedophiles dreams come true.

</comment><comment><USER43> Ugh, ridiculous title that is barely touched upon at all, and when it does mention it, doesn't actually explain how or why the proposition 'FB should pay us' makes sense. Why write an article titled with a proposition that you do not at all go into?

tl;dr: FB makes money on our data, so we're 'paying' FB with our data, something that's no secret and everyone who ever cared knows and easily finds out.

It doesn't relate to the title of the article at all. The only thought mentioned is that if we're giving FB our data, then we must get rewarded for it, or 'paid', while blatantly ignoring the obvious, that the use of FB for free is that reward.

Ironically, this article is entirely driven by an event that the writer mentioned about how a sociologist offered to pay FB with actual money, rather than data. This sociologist keeps getting mentioned which one can summarise with 'such a thought-provoking thing to do, exposing the relationship between your data and FB's business model', as if it's anything new.

Yet the writer misses the point which is why it's ironic: the sociologist offered to pay actual money because guess what, FB is actually providing a product, one of communication, news, media, information, entertainment, connectivity, networking, debate, that has genuine value.

And so the notion that FB has to pay money to people for providing them a free service that they value, is ridiculous. It's the consumer who has to pay, and they happen to do it through data instead of money. You can question if they should, but that's not what the article is about.

The only way the writer's article makes sense is if FB was a data collecting agency who did absolutely nothing but provide a form on their website where you could fill in all your data, while somehow verifying it's truthful data, then selling that data to other companies, and offering you nothing in return. Indeed it would make sense then for FB to pay you money for that data.

\----

Anyway, a different discussion I was hoping some people had some insights into for me to read is this... One thing I'd be curious about, is if anyone has any data on the actual value/impact of FB's data on their advertising revenue, versus their service simply being extremely well used and thereby driving a lot of revenue.

After all, FB's average revenue per user is something like 15% of that of a Google user, despite FB reaching ridiculously high levels of daily use, activity, minutes spent, sessions, engagement etc. So where FB has some of the most granular per-customer data ever to drive ads, and has some of the highest activity per user (and thereby, ability to show ads over and over through tons of sessions), they're trailing pretty far. You'd think that their ARPU is more driven by simply being extremely popular (data or no data), than offering advertisers the best data-driven advertising platform.

Surely a big part of it can be explained by maturity, their ARPU is growing faster than Google's so they're slowly catching up, and it's true that Google's data isn't exactly poor either of course. But still, contrary to common belief, common sense and intuition, it doesn't seem their revenue indicates their data position is all that valuable (yet). Would love other people's thoughts and insights on this.

</comment><comment><USER44> "If it's free, you're the product."

<comment><USER45> How much do you pay for your hackernews account?

<comment><USER46> My HN account costs me hours of productivity, and a great deal of imposter- syndrome-feelings, in exchange for a curated list of really interesting things, not to mention every comment by patio11, tptacek, edw519, and just about every highly-ranked commenter on threads. It seems a fair trade, especially when you factor in that I learn about new frameworks and concepts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc. you call all start having my photos and blogs and other stuff if you agree to share some of the profits you make off of me. Until then, no dice.

</comment><comment><USER48> What Facebook _should_ do is open-source all their code, become a user-owned cooperative, and implement policies that actually serve the public interest. Short of that, it should shut down.

<comment><USER49> Why?

<comment><USER48> Because business _should_ (should is a value judgement, remember) only do things that are positive for the world, and if a business is overall negative for the world or unethical, it shouldn't exist. Yes, that means a notable portion of today's businesses shouldn't exist.

And Facebook is overall negative because they are taking things that otherwise can exist without Facebook, like people sharing personal updates with each other, and works to be the gatekeeper "capturing value" i.e. exploiting people for their own gain in ways that severely lack accountability and democracy.</comment></comment></comment>


Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies – Princeton University - <AUTHOR> https://www.coursera.org/course/bitcointech

<comment><USER2> I've signed up. Craving a more formal intro to crypto-currencies. Consists mostly of video lectures and supplemental multiple choice style quizzes. Original course included five programming assignments asking students to build simplified versions of a Bitcoin like system, but its not clear there is any programming involved in the Coursera version.

A draft version of the Bitcoin textbook the instructors are currently working on is available:

[https://piazza.com/princeton/spring2015/btctech/resources](https://piazza.com/princeton/spring2015/btctech/resources)</comment>


Microsoft's Internet Explorer Turns 15 Today - <AUTHOR> http://tech18.com/microsofts-internet-explorer-turns-15-today.html

<comment><USER2> That 'power saving feature' was the most irritating thing since pop-up advertising to anyone not using the mouse to scroll through.. I couldn't focus on the article because of the multiple interruptions and then the constant thought that I'd be interrupted again if I didn't move the mouse. Nice thought, horrible, horrible implementation.

<comment><USER3> Agreed, what a stupid thing to put on your site. It was enough to stop me reading after the first time it came up.

Just out of interest, is there any power saving benefit whatsoever gained from displaying black on a TFT screen? Surely the power usage comes from the back- light and that's on regardless?

Presumably it takes some (small amount of) extra power to download and run the javascript required for the effect so my guess would be that it actually increases power usage overall (a tiny amount, but still).

<comment><USER4> _Just out of interest, is there any power saving benefit whatsoever gained from displaying black on a TFT screen?_

Black pixels on a TFT may even increase your power usage (they must be turned on so that they don't let through any light), if only marginally.

But we will come full circle soon. OLED displays do need more power for white pixels than for black pixels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> IE4 is an awesome browser. Persistent client side storage, AJAX, HW 3D animation, dynamic sound generation, dHTML+TIME, etc. You can even create desktop widgets in HTML+JS on Win98.

<comment><USER3> Well yes, you could create desktop widgets. I think that even worked in Win95 if you had IE4 installed. But then your whole computer became about as stable as IE4...

<comment><USER6> And since IE became an integral part of the operating system, from that point on, the OS was always as unstable as IE. Brilliant idea.

Of course we all new that it was a lie, despite Bill Gates testimony that it was impossible to separate the browser from the OS.

<comment><USER3> I remember using Windows 98 Light Edition or something. It was a hacked version of Windows with IE surgically removed. As fast and stable as Windows 95! :p

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The best part of this article is the screenshot of IE6 downloading Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER8> I was a webmaster, back in those pre-IE days.

It was a crazy time.

</comment><comment><USER9> It reminds me how irrelevant Microsoft is nowadays. They are always trying to push their standards without speaking to the community. It worked great for my father with his entire babyboomer-push-driven-information fellows. I don't believe this business would work again.</comment>


The Quest for the Ultimate Vacuum Tube - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/devices/the-quest-for-the-ultimate-vacuum-tube <comment><USER2> mind getting blown!</comment>


Ask HN: Are spam Apple calendar invites common? Do you receive them? - <AUTHOR> Beginning today I have been receiving a new type of spam, event invites on my iphone's calendar. It's incredibly annoying because I get a notification for something like "You've won $4k!!" that can actually be set as a daily event that I have to decline to off my calendar.
Is Apple's calendar service seriously allow you to send calendar invites to anyone you have an email for? Or have I potentially been affected by malware? Have other people experienced this?
If nothing else this is incredibly disruptive. <comment><USER2> Looks like a fairly recent thing:

[https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/19/report-remove-icloud- calendar...](https://9to5mac.com/2019/08/19/report-remove-icloud-calendar- spam/)</comment>


Employers help pay student loans to attract workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-world-work-studentloans/employers-help-pay-student-loans-to-attract-workers-idUSKCN1J1158 <comment><USER2> It's got several things that employers might like:

* It attracts younger applicants

* It doesn't have to be factored into raises or bonuses

* It goes away eventually

But what about people who didn't need student loans at all? Can they negotiate a higher salary instead, or do companies without this benefit, but higher salaries attract them instead?</comment>


Show HN: AWS Alarms – Android App for Monitoring AWS CloudWatch Alarms - <AUTHOR> Hi Everyone,
I have just published an Android application for monitoring AWS CloudWatch Alarms and providing notifications when alarms trigger.
In particular for providing a summary of the state of multiple AWS accounts in one quick overview.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dolier.apps.awsalarm
I wrote it for my own personal use, but decided to release it in the app store and am looking for any feedback or suggestions you might have for improving the functionality.
The application uses IAM credentials to securely connect to the AWS APIs and only requires CloudWatch read access. IAM credentials are never sent from the app.
When an alarm is triggered you are able to view a summary of the alarm and a graph of the metric.
The application is not intended to provide any management capabilities, rather just a quick summary of current issues across multiple accounts at a glance.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Stephen <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dolier.app...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.dolier.apps.awsalarm)</comment>