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More specifically: The guy that's currently running and in charge of Hacker News doesn't like tl;dr.

I agree with you about specialized content, but this has nothing to do with "tl;dr".

The best HN threads are already great at giving context and making clear what a story is about. (That's usually how I learn what stories are about.) And yes, no one has time to read every specialized paper or the expertise to understand all of them. That's why we often prefer a high-quality popular article, when one exists, to specialized literature. Original papers typically get linked to in the comments anyway, for those who want them.

All of this is good and necessary. But none of it requires "tl;dr".

"Tl;dr" is an equivalent in comments to the linkbait gimmicks that we edit out of titles, and it should be kept out of HN comments for the same reason. We're not asking you to make the effort of reading every article or understanding every specialty, just the effort of looking at an HN thread for its content, without gimmickry.

Of course there can be value in a synopsis. The synposis in your comment was fine. But "tl;dr" doesn't add anything about the topic at hand. What it signals is: "you don't need to read anything else". On HN, readers should be reading for themselves, thinking and deciding this for themselves.

We want users to have to work a little. The key is "a little". It's not like it's hard, but it requires engaging one of the slower cognitive gears. That gear shift is annoying if we expect everything to be laid out for us. On HN we try to thwart that expectation. Why? We want fiber—thoughts and comments of substance.

It's fashionable to talk about opinionated design. One opinion baked into HN's design is: this should be the kind of site that people who don't want to be reflective find boring. When pg was showing me how to moderate HN he said the front page should be "bookish".

You wrote something here that I find fascinating:

> We all of us value substance and content, of course. (Need I really write that? Really? C'mon man.)

What's fascinating is the "of course". It seems so obvious that it's irritating to have to say it. It's such a cliché that there's even a cliché follow-up: "But we are all of us limited in our time and attention".

But, on reflection, it's not true. We mostly value a stimulus-response reward cycle. We value having our preconceptions mirrored back to us. We value the feeling that we understand things (recognition) more than the effort of working through material in order partly to understand it. This is also the dynamic in flamewars, so substance and civility are related.

There can't be many of us who are free from this—certainly not me. But HN is an experiment in trying to grapple with this problem on the internet (https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html). That's what this site is. It may not do it well, and is probably doomed, but the driving idea has always been "maybe we can stave off doom a little longer".

Have you modified your trusted issuer certs? EFF's cert was issued by "StartCom Class 2 Primary Intermediate Server CA"

if you've modified your roots or are behind invasive proxies and the site uses STS or iframes then exceptions won't be offered.

The host based approach won't block as well as Adblock (Edge/Plus) however as those plugins can block ads at the DOM element level.

There are many sites that host/proxy their ads on their own domain name but AB can block the <divs> and such by name or by other properties like size.

And lastly, we now know that the ‘Aurora’4 attacks on Google were at least partially about intercept. One thing we’ve learned from those attacks is that the Government is running intercept systems on their networks, and not only that but other ‘eavesdroppers’ are trying to get access to those intercept systems. So what we are seeing is as more and more data accumulates in these places, it becomes more and more valuable. And so ‘eavesdroppers’ move to those places and even ‘eavesdroppers’ without a legal backing also try to move to those places. So I think we are going to continue to see that as a problem as these become more and more valuable over time.

http://privacy-pc.com/news/changing-threats-to-privacy-moxie...

So the primary form of collection that should concern us most is media that spy on us while we use them. Books that watch us read them, music that’s listen to us listen to it. Search boxes that report what we are searching for to whoever is searching for us and doesn’t know us yet.

There is a lot of talk about data coming out of facebook: is it coming to me? is it coming to him? is it coming to them? They want you to think that the threat is data coming out. You should know that the threat is code going in.

For the last 50 years what has been happening in enterprise computing, is the addition of that layer of analytic on top of the datawarehouse that mostly goes in enterprise computing by the name of "business intelligence". what it means is you’ve been building this vast datawarehouses in your company for decade or 2 now you have only information about your own operations your suppliers your competitors, your customers now you want to make that data start to do tricks. By adding it to all the open source data out there in the world, and using it to tell you the answers to questions you didn’t know you had. That’s business intelligence.

The real threat of facebook is the BI layer on top of facebook warehouse. The facebook datewarehouse contains the behavior not just the thinking but also the behavior or somewhere nearing a billion people. The business intelligence layer on top of it which is just all that code they get to run covered by the terms of service that say "they can run any code they want for improvement of the experience". The business intelligence on top of facebook is where every intelligence service of the world wants to go.

Imagine that you are a tiny little secret police organisation in some not very important country. Let’s put ourselves in their position Let’s call them I don’t know what, you know ... "kirghista".

You are a secret police you are in the "people business" secret policing is "people business". You have classes of people that you want you want agents, you want sources you have adversaries, and you have influencables, that is people you torture who are related to adversaries wives, husbands, fathers, daughter you know those people.

So you are looking for classes of people. You don’t know their names, but you know what they are like you know who is recrutable for you as an agent you know who are likely sources, you can give the social characteristics of your adversaries, and once you know your adversaries, you can find the influencables.

So what you want to do is run code inside facebook. It will help you find the people that you want it will show you the people whose behavior and whose social circles tell you that they are what you want by way of agent, sources what their adversaries are and who you can torture to get to them.

So you don’t want data out of facebook the day you have data out of facebook it is dead. You want to put code into facebook and run it there and get the results you want to cooperate.

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...

Why? If company X tracks all the websites you visit, it's really not that hard for the government to get a hold of that data. It doesn't matter who collects the data or what it is initially used for; as long as the data is collected you're at risk.

Governments do directly use ad network tracking data for surveillance.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/nsa-turns-cookies-and-...

(I was a coauthor of this blog post, though not of the underlying press reporting. There was another article on this topic recently underscoring that there are other programs to use these cookies this way.)

In this case the problem from the point of view of a user concerned with government surveillance is not necessarily the ad network tracking, but the fact that it wasn't protected with HTTPS so other people were able to take advantage of it for their own surveillance purposes. Unfortunately, ad networks have not generally responded by making HTTPS mandatory, or even optional.

Apart from exposing users directly to government location tracking programs, ad networks often know that some users don't want to be tracked and deliberately track them anyway.

http://www.techpolicy.com/FlashCookiesPrivacyII.aspx

Sounds like a good time for users to adopt countermeasures.