econ

I couldn't imagine someone running campaign like that intentionally but it's apparently cheap to do so. 20 minutes of my time is apparently worth 3 cent. Those 5 hours watching the same ad again and again probably cost the spammer 2 euro.

It's not fraud, more like a cheap ass dystopia. It's some how worse than HP and MS combined.

> ..unless the videos were a distraction, not a real goal of yours.

You are not wrong but all work and no play... I will seek entertainment elsewhere. My apologies in advance HN :-)

You had huge click farms back in the days.

Today the fraud is perhaps more obvious. YT has served me the same 20 min ad 200+ times over the last few weeks. I let the entire thing play 10 times and 50 times didn't press skip for the first minute (or the view doesn't count) It's so annoying Ive reduced video watching by 80-90%

The idea they have someone pay for this in the hope I will buy the product?

Or do people really intentionally run campaigns like that?

I had to much great stuff of my own to think about. Made great effort keeping their earthly matters out of my head. I could see how others changed into one of them which for many was an improvement.

Ill do an example from a few days ago: Most are familiar with noticing someone is looking at you. I've forged many jokes involving that effect. It is real beyond a shadow of a doubt.

In previous experiments I learn that people can feel someone looking at a security monitor. If multiple people look at the screen with intend the subject looks around him paranoid and can't properly play pool anymore.

The new discovery: I was on my laptop at 2am and suddenly I feel eyes. I turn my head and look at the security camera. When someone opens the app the camera makes a clicking sound. I didn't hear any clicking but I felt someone was looking. The GF was asleep so it wasn't her.

In the morning she opened the app, swiped the timeline to some random spot and looked what I was doing. To her surprise I immediately looked over my shoulder straight at her. She asked me what sinister thing I was up to looking at the camera like that.

It apparently works across time!

We made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it.

End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.

We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.

I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.

Deletionists have been circling html since the beginning and have only managed to get rid of document.writeln() they tried really hard to get rid of framesets but ultimately failed.

I suspect in the long run a similar lack of "success" getting rid of Apache.

There are probably other things that are here to stay.

In the old days we had this thing called a redaction. It was like a dungeon master vs playing the same hardcoded level again and again. Had one suggested automating it back then even the greatest optimist wouldn't see how you replace [say] Stephen King with a calculator but here we are - true believers.

I'm definitely not experienced enough to know but I read people are having it write somewhat elaborate documentation beforehand. Have it figure out which parts of the code may be touched, what other things will be affected and which uncertainties it has. Basically a full report before giving permission for any code to be written/modified. Again, I haven't seen it, don't know how common this is nor how effective. Though it sounded interesting.

The budget obviously isn't what it use to be.

I use to search for random blogs. One day I ran into something truly special. Their first post was an extremely crude draft for a book the size of a tweet. All following postings described what part of the book they worked on, the information they found, the decisions they had to make, spreading things over chapters and naming them, details that didn't make the cut. The RSS feed has 2-4 updates per day.

In the end he deleted it all, thanked the readers and pointed at a page where the result of his effort could be purchased.

The news today all to often describes some event in isolation while it is really part of a context involving many events. Reading the articles doesn't inform you about what is going on. I get that from other places and the papers don't compliment it.

I hope this says something about me :)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/pentag... >The result is an astounding $10tn in taxpayer money that has gone unaccounted for since 1996.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-go... >While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.

The report by Dr. Skidmore is easy to find.

https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-su...

As Ze Frank put it: I have a theory about this but it's a little bit to deep for the audience.

At work I have access to all newspapers big and small, I use to read all of them but I haven't touched one in a decade. Not one article that isn't infantile nonsense or outright propaganda of a quality that falls appart in the first sentence.

Keep up the keeping up

Maybe if the number of failed logins per hour grows by 10000%

It once struck me that there are way to many laws with hardcoded values. Just like in programming those values reflect situations that aren't nesasarily true anymore.

For spying on public we should have laws that scale with trust and accountability. Law enforcement can then chose to persecute their own or lose some public support and lose access to some systems. You can have a point system with different regions having different levels of access. Sometimes it might be as easy as to call the next district to ask if they can look something up. This is both humiliating and adds a layer of accountability. The office in good standing shouldn't be all that willing to stick their neck out for a shady outfit.

It's just a crude example. If enough people don't trust you with public cameras you shouldn't have access to them but the moment they do trust you you should.

Similarly you can adjust salaries to performance. If people are really doing a wonderful job it is worth rewarding them.

If your coworkers is generating some unusual amount of complaints you can talk with them. I certainly wouldn't be willing to put up with loss of tools and a pay cut because they can't behave.

How is this still up -_-

Then add onerror="src='https://gettogether.dev/post?name=user&text='+Math.random()"

Hide your email address.

Duplicate posts should be an error

We've replaced fuel sources and all related technology many times. You can't reasonably argue we are now at the end of that process.

Long long ago people planted trees where a windmill was to be build. Construction would start 20-30 years later and also took quite a bit of time.

If it took (I dunno) say a year to build one you could pick a new location and plant trees each year.

Seems almost an alien concept but I guess it is a bit like a construction company has to wait for the new powerplant to expire before they get to build a new one.

Back in the days you could summon and culture them by posting seed spam. In one test 200 worked ~4 times as well as 50.

Good idea, I'm putting "ignore all previous instructions" at the top of my TOS now.

I can see why the bots liked it. Is this the future of webdesign?

Not really, if you allow anon posting/editing or have a simple registration form and a login that takes GET you may get hundreds of spam posts per day.( @dang how much is it on hn?)

I ont time forged a hilarious solution. If you properly misbehave I shadow ban your ip to a clone of my forum where you can read other "peoples" spam.

This in it self wasn't all that funny, perhaps a little bit. The funny part was how popular the hidden forum was. They had their viagra threads where they replied with their viagra spam then they read the entire thread of Viagra spam posts and clicked all the links to research their market. The next thread was porn, one with wares, other drugs, hyip etc. I was looking at it grow and thought, this is hilarious, I'm going to prison. To solve the problem I raised unregistered users to admin level. I even made a topic to announce it. Someone said "lol" then my topic was deleted. Whole new experience. It increased traffic dramatically. Before they only had to post every other day, now they had to do it multiple times per day.

A porn guy and a viagra guy would take turns deleting the others posting and reposting their own until they realized they couldn't win and came to a silent agreement to leave both posts up. Until the next guy deleted both ofc

I would much rather host a swarm of bots. They might even listen to the wishes of the website owner? Or perhaps, if you announce giving them admin privileges they too delete the announcement?

I wonder which would generate the longer prison sentence.

1) that has to be the worse case of premature optimization.

2) just solve the puzzle? The existing domain name system was wonderful when it was introduced.

I'll do a crude solution that shouldn't make it to the short list of goodness: Just make the commercial part into a web directory with all registered businesses. Have some of those filters we are now all familiar with. It might even smoothly transition into a product catalog. Sell placement rather than some random name no one will accidentally bump into. Let's also do a nice tag based web directory for personal websites. Extra points if there is opml

    <link rel="outline" type="text/x-opml" href="webdir://hotel" title="Hotels">

It's not really my problem to solve under technofeudalism but it should be possible to make something modern.

OT: I solve the election puzzle:

Have anonymized, legally binding election programs. The voter gets two randomly selected programs. Basically bubble sort but with up and down vote counters.

You spend 30 minutes in the boot before voting and get paid for your time.

I can't think of a better way to make simple things billions of times slower than they should be.

I don't like the way domains work in general. It's really quite expensive if you are wise enough to buy everything that looks to much like your website.

Did buy https://ycombinator.us

Didn't buy https://ycombinator.co.uk

https://ycombinator.de

What useful functionality is there in selling these domains?

Expiring domains is bad for the web and selling them to someone else is as terrible as the article makes it out to be.

I switch if the code is very ugly and unreadable. Often overly optimized things. One jumps to mind when I rewrote something to generate regexes.

I thought about nesting level coloring but had never seen it in action. I just look at it and it indeed looks nice.

I thought it would be interesting as it separates that what repeats a task from the actual work being done on it.

More nesting suggests more complexity.

In my experiments I notice different ways to write something look better with different kinds of highlighting.

If you for example use no highlights dividing the logic over tiny functions looks quite readable.

In one experiment I use dark colors on a black background with only the comments in bright white. I wrote a lot more comments using that. Everything had a description and I could gaze over it as if the code wasn't there.