Hacker News Reader

diffractionon Forbes Tests New Tactics to Combat Ad Blocking

Ok. Forget malware. How about malicious behavior? Stop Taboola and Outbrain from serving pornographic ads and I will gladly disable Adblock.

Sorry, until your industry sets professional standards I will continue to block ads and not feel bad.

diffractionon Forbes Tests New Tactics to Combat Ad Blocking

It's a misleading metric.

At home I block all ad server domains with a host file on my router. This triggers the Adblock wall. When I am at work or on the road I get a message "Thanks for turning off your adblock."

However, at least Forbes is only deluding themselves and not their clients. There are eyebrow raising demographic issues with internet ads.

diffractionon Alphabet slides 5% after missing earnings expectations on revenue of $20.3B

I block ads because "native" ad producers like Taboola, Outbrain, Revcontent, ... you get the point. These advertising companies like to show NSFW content at the end of news articles at some sites. Therefore I block ads for the same reason I block pornographic sites.

This was pretty liberating because before "native" ads I felt a pang of guilt for blocking ads.

If Google wants to stop ad blockers they should hide sites that use these obnoxious "native" ad networks.

diffractionon Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs, Forecast Misses Amid PC Blight

you have "turtles all the way down" of bubble mentality

diffractionon How a Diode Changed My Life

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HvLmJGM_T3M

Try listening at night maybe?

diffractionon Norway's $860B Fund Drops 52 Companies Linked to Coal

Only, but only a little gas gets out. It's ok. Coal is the enemy mainly because you can see it. Natural Gas requires infrared camera to detect. No this isn't snark/cynicism: we regulate the opacity of a scrubbed coal plant's output.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

diffractionon Norway's $860B Fund Drops 52 Companies Linked to Coal

here are some images for you to meditate on

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HrtQUEgYjKs

http://media.mlive.com/saginawnews_impact/photo/12375884-lar...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ECqpbqbT3UA

diffractionon Norway's $860B Fund Drops 52 Companies Linked to Coal

There's no futures symbol because coal is inherently worth different values based on location. It's a solid, it doesn't spoil (sometimes it spontaneously combusts), you need a whole lot of it to do anything useful. These difficulties fragment the market. For example there are futures for: Australia coal, South Africa coal, Wyoming powder basin coal, Illinois basin coal, etc. It is transported by train or on a dry bulk ship.

diffractionon Norway's $860B Fund Drops 52 Companies Linked to Coal

coal is in the process of consolidation/deleveraging/bankruptcy and they would be making this decision anyways. congrats on extracting social justice points from your business decision.

diffractionon Late sleepers are tired of being discriminated against

If you have this problem in only winter, this gadget actually does a lot for me:

http://www.amazon.com/Philips-HF3520-Wake-Up-Colored-Simulat...

It simulates a sunrise and sunset with bright LEDs. I always wake up before the audio alarm starts. Before this I was very difficult morning riser. I may be more light sensitive than you, but it works for me, and has some medical research to back up the idea.

diffractionon Silicon Valley Asks Mostly for Developers with Degrees

Yowza, sick burn on your coworker! Since we are talking about hiring practices have you read this section of Joel's Guerilla Guide to Interviewing?

"People who are Smart but don’t Get Things Done often have PhDs and work in big companies where nobody listens to them because they are completely impractical. They would rather mull over something academic about a problem rather than ship on time. These kind of people can be identified because they love to point out the theoretical similarity between two widely divergent concepts. For example, they will say, “Spreadsheets are really just a special case of programming language,” and then go off for a week and write a thrilling, brilliant whitepaper about the theoretical computational linguistic attributes of a spreadsheet as a programming language. Smart, but not useful. The other way to identify these people is that they have a tendency to show up at your office, coffee mug in hand, and try to start a long conversation about the relative merits of Java introspection vs. COM type libraries, on the day you are trying to ship a beta."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing...

diffractionon Microsoft deletes 'teen girl' AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot ()

Oh does this ever make me thrilled for the Ray Kurzweil-inspired AI overlords. The best we can hope for, it seems, is to "make anime real."

diffractionon Here Are Google, Amazon and Facebook’s Secrets to Hiring the Best People

east coast version: order the wrong breakfast, hit 'em right in the grits (http://www.businessinsider.com/charles-schwab-ceo-takes-job-...) (not satire, but should be)

diffractionon I've Just Liberated My Modules

kik has lawyers all over the world... because it is the platform of choice for pedophiles and sexual predators. there are many billable hours spent responding to doj/states attorney subpoenas. (http://www.trentonian.com/general-news/20140728/pedophile-on...) (http://woodtv.com/2015/02/02/sexual-predator-warns-parents-a...)

diffractionon Tech workers are increasingly looking to leave Silicon Valley

Performance bonuses?

diffractionon Tech workers are increasingly looking to leave Silicon Valley

If you live in a hilly deciduous area often times this is the only time of year you can see the grandeur of your surroundings.

diffractionon What Google Learned from Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team

In short: andrewcommando commented without reading the article

the military and google are very different organizations with different goals, so it's unlikely they will be run the same

a perfect team in the military will not look like a perfect team at google.

both organizations will wisely punt to other organizations when they come up against a challenge outside of their domains of expertise.

for example: the military does not design and build its own aircraft/weapons/tanks, nor does google engineer and build its datacenters

diffractionon A band you can book via GitHub pull request

it worked for they might be giants

diffractionon Morocco to switch on first phase of world's largest solar plant

If they only switch in one phase won't that cause imbalances on their power grid? Hyuk.

diffractionon 'RuneScape' Can't Escape 2007

It's a problem of economic inflation. The games start out easy at release, but developers see the need to tighten their belts to prevent game currency/abilities/skill from being worthless. So the template has been in MMO land for developers to let a few early adopters climb the ladder to the top until they patch the ladder away. Or the opposite, like WoW, just keep it easy and let everyone into the top.

Runescape has a good place to see this with holiday items: http://runescape.wikia.com/wiki/Holiday_rewards

The right way to solve this problem is to keep the game as easy as it was at release, but to implement economic atrophy and redistribution of outcomes. I'm not aware of any game that does this other than Eve Online. I do not play these games but I like thinking about their economics.

diffractionon Tell HN: Don't post if you're not actually hiring

They're probably looking for yahoo-ers.

diffractionon Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2016)

I am not a programmer, but I am a fan of this. I like transparent markets. With that said the "Michael at" is not part of the email address.

diffractionon Springer Textbooks More Than 10 Years Old Available for Free Legal Download

While this may have been true when it was posted it is no longer true. If you think about it the idea doesn't make sense because the still living authors still want a cut. It's unfortunate because it's very difficult to find good textbooks just by searching yourself because the prices are so high.

diffractionon Pyrobuf: A Cython Alternative to Google's Python Protobuf Library

you are dismissing an old and proven technology because you feel it is not marketing to you effectively, which is the backend to the global telecom system (ss7) for the past two decades? why is this a movement in computer science to throw out old things that work? this is confusing to me like nosql. but "good marketing" is something that is called cap'n proto, sounds like a joke?

if you are curious here is a good blog post https://ttsiodras.github.io/asn1.html

i am working with asn.1 the protocol MMS

diffractionon Pyrobuf: A Cython Alternative to Google's Python Protobuf Library

you are using it all the time without realizing it. http://www.marben-products.com/asn.1/market.html

protobuf, swift, etc happened when an advertising company thinks it is an engineering company

diffractionon Pyrobuf: A Cython Alternative to Google's Python Protobuf Library

why do we keep reinventing the wheel and not use asn.1?

diffractionon Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies

Utopia? It's nothing that dramatic. Even with traditional currencies its pretty obvious that we are headed for a period of negative interest rates. It only makes sense that the shortest term government debt, or cash, has a negative interest rate as well.

diffractionon Freicoin - easy-to-use demurrage currency

How is this technically implemented -- is the demurrage subtracted once a year, or when you send a transaction?

Where do the coins taken for this fee go?

How can I apply for a grant from the foundation?

diffractionon Freicoin: a P2P digital currency delivering freedom from usury

No, because that would be illegal, and a possible conflict of interest for me.

diffractionon Freicoin: a P2P digital currency delivering freedom from usury

People are right now. This currency is live, transacting, and secured by a rapidly increasing amount of computer power. On the subject of their rationality...