Basho produce a lot of good documentation for Riak which I've found invaluable when creating my own distributed database.
7,416 karma · joined October 23, 2009
Email: charles@codemix.com
I totally agree with you, this is an awkward topic because advertising itself raises moral questions.
The problem is exactly what you said, we're all destroying the web by being terrible consumers. We're used to an internet where we do not generally have to pay for content, and that has led to a culture where paying for online content is almost unthinkable. This is a problem of our own making, but here we are.
People pretty much universally hate ads, but almost no one hates them enough to actually hand over money instead. We know this because of the failure of things like flattr and the experiences of developers on app stores - if you offer a free ad-supported version of an app, and a paid version which removes the ads, only a tiny, tiny percentage of users are going to choose the paid version. And this is in an ecosystem where products usually cost less than a cup of tea and you can pay with almost no effort - it's literally easier than finding the equivalent cash amount in your pocket. People just don't do it.
I don't have an answer to this. What I do know is that quality content costs money to produce and therefore we need a way for content producers to be rewarded for their work. Right now just about the only way that works on a large scale is with ads, and even that works poorly for most cases.
Some people reading this will say to themselves "well, I'd pay for content". Congratulations on being an outlier, most people are not like you.
Some people reading this will say to themselves "well, the free market will solve this problem", and that might be the case in the long term, but it will have terrible consequences for content producers in the short term and will fundamentally change the web. You might hate ads, but do we really want the series of walled gardens that an ad-less internet would necessarily devolve into?
If everyone blocked ads, things like Google would have to become paid services. What kind of social inequality would that lead to in the long term?
Obviously this is related to game theory. Blocking ads makes sense on an individual level, but if everyone does it we're all screwed. It's not a solution to the problem, it's going to cause more problems, and that's why I don't do it.
This is totally nonsensical. If they have no prospect of recouping the expense they incurred from your visit then you are not helping them, you are worse than worthless to them, you simply cost them money.
> Are you saying it is moral for publishers to track my usage behavior, and to force me to watch any ad they want me to?
You aren't being forced to watch anything. You have the option of leaving their site and living without their content.
Your attitude is the definition of entitlement.
It's quite simple. If there is no way to get paid for producing quality content, no one is going to produce quality content. I don't like the ad-riddled web any more than you, but it allows billions of people access to content they would not otherwise have access to. If the online ad business goes away, what fills that gap?
Please don't suggest micropayments, people don't want to pay anything to read a website.
No, they are offering their content in the expectation that they will be rewarded for producing it, via ads. It isn't free.
Are you saying it's moral for you to read their content but circumvent their business model?
Please don't do this, you will starve. Very few people are able to make enough money from open source in this way and I don't think this is the kind of thing that's suited to it.
Commercialize this technology, market it, sell it.
But it isn't a way to specify graph queries, e.g. you can't express concepts like "find the shortest path from vertex A to vertex B using edges with the given label". It's just not designed for that kind of thing.
It's interesting that self promotion is so frowned upon in our community when failure to adequately promote ones self holds back so many careers. Why do we applaud those who promote their startups as "hustlers" but not those who advertise themselves?
Coincidentally available for contract work right now...
I suppose some people will be happy to pay a premium for a quick turn around, but personally I care about the quality much more than the delivery time.
This is probably one of those heuristics that works well enough on enough real world code, even though everyone knows it's suboptimal. I've heard that the turbofan compiler will remove this limitation but that's still very much work in progress.
Well, in theory yes. When determining whether a specific function can be inlined into its call site, V8 looks at the length of the function source code to try and guess whether it's worth it. Functions longer than 600 characters (including comments) cannot be inlined and therefore they will typically be slower.
Whether that makes any meaningful difference to your application performance really depends on the application. In most cases it won't.