I’m not willing to pay anything. The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent.

Now that it’s a mechanism of commerce it’s attracted the worst of the worst who have no ethics. Ethics courses will be taught in response to bad actors, not in anticipation of.

I’m aware the cats out of the bag and all of the high paid engineers need to make a living somehow. I just don’t think it’s about the consumer anymore, if it ever was. It will get worse before it gets better and I’m checking out.

I’m an older engineer and going to school for HVAC/R. I plan to do it on the side and eventually start a business. I’m pulling the rip cord.

One thing I will say about the blue collar world: they’re better about ego management. Many young engineers I meet are highly paid and treated well, sometimes rarely disagreed with. I can’t help but think that fosters some bad habits.

I’m so sorry to hear you have such a dark outlook. I totally agree, those companies are not about the consumer anymore, but that’s fine. That’s their problem.

I see computers and the internet as an extension of ourselves, and so they still allow us to communicate with whoever and whatever we want. I’m so glad this community exists and we can express that.

The worst part should already be over, you just joined hn. I’m also all about good will, fun, and generally good intent. And if you do something cool but it’s costing you something, let me know how I can chip in.

This brand of techno-optimism is so tired. Who today still believes the old facebook line about connecting more people? It didn't work and it enabled automated surveillance on unprecedented scale.

I agree, but a reminder to not allow evil companies like Facebook to take away our optimism. Just because they didn’t make the world a better place does not mean a better world cannot be made. What it does mean is their funding and business model probably isn’t the right way to go if you’re still an optimist.

There are still many wonderful niches on the web, and by going there - while avoiding the bad stuff - we strengthen them so they don't disappear as well. As techies we have an opportunity here to bring them more to the front, by the technology choices we make and the projects we contribute to, the awareness we raise.

You're missing the factory for the dandelions growing in the parking lot. Weird niche personal pages and projects are just distractions from the massive power struggle that is being fought by corporations and governments for the minds and personal data of every human on earth.

There’s a massive power struggle indeed, but if you look who’s really behind those organizations, you’ll see people just like you and me, imperfect minds in funky bodies that came from the same place we all once did.

World leaders and CEOs go to bed every night just like us, they speak, poop, and reproduce at the same rate as everyone else. Corporations and governments are nothing more than contracts to benefit those very same people, us. Even though there’s not an equal benefit to everyone involved.

If those contracts fail, and our freedom and liberty is at risk like you say, we ought to renegotiate. It seems, if you listen carefully, that’s what the world is currently choosing to do.

I love how you phrased that! I’m also tired of what’s going on. These corporations allow groups of people to compete for our attention just like individuals. Some giants we created are now getting in our way so much that people are starting to notice, and we are far from passive creatures.

It’s still possible to disconnect. It’s still possible to choose what you see or say, and it’s still possible to focus your energy on something you believe in. As long as you’re not tired of that, I‘m optimistic.

If there was a checkbox that was ticked by default that meant people's data would stay private, then most people would not be unticking that box.

It's our job as techies to add that option, and make it easy.

>The internet was built on good will, fun, and generally good intent.

The main catalyst for the internet was the fear of nuclear war, as exemplified in this influential RAND paper from 1960 [0], which led to the investment in ARPANET. I'm not disputing good will and good intent, but I don't think fun had much to do with it.

[0] http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1995....

By the time you get to the opening up of the internet to mere non-defence mortals, there was plenty of fun.

There was a beautiful sweet spot between the earliest ISPs around 1990, and the end of fun once the effects of the mid 90s ending of NSF's ban on commercial activity fully kicked in. Probably late 90s/millennium as the first dot com boom turned into full on idiotic bubble.

I would definitely pay, but not through a middleman like google. We need to return to a decentralized, peer to peer internet where media companies are not beholden to advertisers (a very old problem). Technology presents the first real chance to implement this. A non-trivial part of the media’s (eg newspapers, news sites, cable news) is due to advertising, including “cancel culture” itself (the name dates back to pressuring advertisers to pressure media to cancel tv production, although the word has gained life of its own).

I listen to a podcast called the No Agenda Show that has sustained itself for about 10 years on a value for value model. Listeners donate what they want and there are never any ads. I think the model is applicable elsewhere. Granted it won’t make someone rich but someone can make a living.

I am not sure that a pay what you want model would work, but I want options dammit, and I would hazard a guess that content creators do too—just look at the wonderful, nearly complete lack of ads on patreon content.

I didn't go to HVAC school, but I have been moonlighting w/ a friend's HVAC business since 2002 for the exercise & appreciation of hard labor. That was well & good, and in time I was making decent, seasonal money working for someone else when not servicing IT needs of SB clients. Around 2008, as many of my clients were closing shop, I crossed paths with a "controls" guy and he showed me how to meld the technical & the labor to make as good money, if not better, as sitting behind a keyboard and playing whack-a-mole security full-time. Between pulling runs, provisioning controllers, solving failures and putting it all into comms I get all my mental, physical & financial needs met. I couldn't recommend it enough for anyone tired of the sedentary life at the keyboard. The only downside is I am still reliant on corporate managers & NOC engineers who have no clue how their products work in the field. YMMV.

TLDR: Get the HVAC skills, then go into PLC work.

Edited: 3rd sentence for context.

Awesome advice, thanks. I’m happy to buy some stuff on eBay and play around.

Any suggestions? How about programming software? Readily available?

I recently picked up a Asco 300 w/comms module for my standby gen, DSE800 to control the engine, and a Siemens 9610 for consumption analysis.

I’m working on controls for load shedding now. I put shunt trip breakers on my water heater and it’ll kick off when on standby since I don’t have enough power, as per NEC.

I’m also working on a modulating valve controlled by the temp delta of my tankless water heater. Sometimes it can’t keep up and I’d rather slow down flow for a shower instead of letting it throw an error, resetting, and annoying people in the shower.

Most of the equipment & software I work with is owned/licensed by Honeywell and is proprietary, aka pricey. Older equipment can be found on reseller sites, but the developer software is expensive to license & hard to come by outside of the HON ecosystem.

If you go down the rabbit hole, check out Tridium, aka Niagara AX. Most(all?) of the big controls platforms are built on the Niagara framework.

Also, maybe contact contractors of Johnson Controls, Carrier Controls, Novar Controls, etc for more pertinent info.

As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one. That may be fine with you. But a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use every day would have to go away. Subscriptions can't replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to spend as companies have in their advertising budgets. We've already given them that money when we bought our groceries, and gas, and paid our bills for rent, internet, TV, phones, insurance, etc. It's not our bank accounts any more to reallocate to Google Maps or our favorite websites instead.

The web is far too large, and far too commercial -- adtech have forced commerce into fucking everything, and fucking ruined it. Without ads, a lot of things hundreds of millions of people use wouldn't go away, they'd reduce to a more sustainable number of companies and products. The remaining products and services would have to work harder to be better to compete and attract custom. Your new startup might have to offer a genuine improvement or innovation to get traction...

As an example every single Amazon or web product or service search results in dozens to thousands of irrelevant, shoddy and worthless products and services that are far closer to an outright scam than something to use. That's without considering the vast array of true scams and fakes.

A web without ads would have a chance of being useful once again, rather than every single click being an opportunity to part me from more money. Perhaps with suitable heavy regulation we could have the best of both worlds, more like newspaper advertising of old. Just "enough" non-invasive, non-tracking, non-JS ads to provide information on new services and products, but with enough demands of honesty, escrow good behaviour deposits, or whatever constraints you can conceive to keep all advertisers well behaved.

> As long as you realize the web without ads is a much smaller and less commercial one.

This is fine. People should make web pages because they have something to say, not because they want to make money. Since the advertisers can stop supporting a site, they effectively become the arbiters of right and wrong on the internet. Anything paid for by ads is inherently worse and less trustworthy than independent creations and platforms because they must necessarily be advertiser-friendly.

I fully agree, and furthermore, I think that if ad-supported sites were wiped out, the people who genuinely cared about the content would come out and make a replacement with just the useful content. People who have a need find a way.

Right now I can't think of any ad-supported site that I critically need. It could all go away and my web experience would probably be better for it.

You realize the entire purpose of HN is to advertise jobs for YC companies?

I don't need HN critically, and there are alternatives.

Even if I did, let me clarify something. When I go to amazon.com and start looking for pens, I don't really consider the product listings to be ads at that point, even though each is obviously advertising a product. The listing is the content I am there for. If I go to a company's website to learn about their products, they are clearly advertising their own (first party) products. I'm fine with that.

Note that there is a difference between "an ad" and advertising. Characteristic of ads is that they are not the content you're there for. The real content is independent of "an ad", and you could block or remove ads and the real content would not suffer. Characteristic of ads is that they are not the topic of the site/content/video you're reading/watching (they might relate to the same subject matter, but they are not the topic). Also characteristic of ads is that they're advertising third party products/services, which again have little to do with the actual content.

If you removed a company's products from their own website, or the products from amazon's listing, then you'd be removing the content I'm specifically after. Does not fill my criteria for "an ad."

Now as to how this pertains to HN: HN was specifically created for startup-related links. So if they're advertising startup jobs here, they are very much posting the kind of content users would come here for. That would be actual content, not ads. Also, like a company advertising their own products on their own website, I think it is quite appropriate for YC to advertise companies they've funded here.

How would you categorize Computer Shopper back in the day? Most people bought them for the advertising not the content.

The problem with this argument is that big tech companies make ridiculous margins that are not necessary for their businesses to be sustainable.

People can afford to fund good online services at the level of google search (for example), but they can’t afford to make google wildly profitable.

That’s fine with me, it’s just VC culture and SV that has a problem with it.

I don’t want Facebook and Google brokering my ads, I want licensed companies who have to tell me exactly what information about me they have and are selling, and let me edit that. Regulation can achieve this.

99% of all web pages are noise, solely created to extract as much as possible out of ads and trackers. The internet would be a smaller but far far better place without them.

> We've already given them that money when we bought our groceries, and gas, and paid our bills for rent, internet, TV, phones, insurance, etc.

I expect the goal of people advocating for less advertising is to stop giving them that money on a going-forward basis.

That's not something we have any control over, is it? Whether it's allocated to internet or some other channel, these companies are going to advertise to acquire and retain customers, and that advertising cost is baked into their prices. If a new federal law was passed banning all advertising on the internet, I doubt Ford will drop the MSRP of the F-150, or that the price of a bar of Proctor & Gamble soap will change.

>Subscriptions can't replace ads, as individuals don't have nearly as much discretionary money to spend as companies have in their advertising budgets

Search ought to be a replacement. Imagine a site that makes a snapshot of other sites and then anyone can type a search request in it and follow the relevant link. That would replace ads since you get your clients for free. Just build the best electronic marketplace and everyone will visit it by themselves.

This worked to some extent and then stopped because people have what they think themselves they need, and the “commercial” part means someone pushing unnecessary crap down their throats. Losing that part is fine for everyone except these wandering commivoyagers.

Subscriptions do not work for most content makers because the content they make is consumed out of boredom instead of need.

I believe you are conflating two things. AdWords and keyword-based contextual advertising was not problematic by itself. (And I say this as a person who absolutely hates ads.)

The problem is all the associated crapware, bloat, intrusion, bandwidth hogging, end-user hostility to point of abuse, dark patterns, intentional misdirection, A/B-test-optimised serendipitous confusion, SEO game-theory shenanigans, and ABOVE ALL the industrial scale stalking.

I've linked this piece a couple of times in the past three months: https://bostik.iki.fi/aivoituksia/random/no-stalking.html

Hell, I remember back in 2005 when I held a university course on basics of information security. The class laughed when I noted that observing everything a person does is called stalking when done by an individual, but as soon as its done by a large corporation indiscriminately and at scale, it's data-mining.

In the eyes of the law, only one of them is criminal.

I don’t think there is any conflation. AdWords is the incentive structure that creates all of the hazards you listed - it is the cause.

In the same way we could say the cholera virus is not by itself a problem - it is the associated symptoms that are the problem.

Well, I don't think AdWords - in their original form - were a problem. But I definitely agree with you that it and its ilk are powering the perverse incentives, and what has resulted of them: the entire adtech ecosystem.[ß]

I can still recall the bad vibes when Google announced their acquisition of DoubleClick. In the early days their search advertising had been non-intrusive, text-only, rendered server side, and visually out of the way. Banner ads were introduced only some time later. (That was already a step in the wrong direction, IMO.) DC, on the other hand, was known as an invasive bad actor who shoveled unwanted crapware to browsers and had already earned the reputation of an online stalker. In fact, ad blockers had existed long before Google got into serving them. Privoxy, anyone?

All the hazards I listed are direct causes of adtech's surveillance business model, and the neverending quest to remember every possible piece of information available on the end-users. I'm not sure comparison with cholera is the most accurate one. (It's a bacteria, after all.) Malaria, a parasite, might be a better fit for this purpose. The symptoms are what makes either one dangerous, but instead of trying to eradicate just one type of a problem, we would do better to purge the environment from what makes the organisms' existence and breeding possible in the first place.

ß: Honest question. What do you call an ecosystem comprised entirely of parasites?

I'd very much like that mythical universal micropayment platform to show up. Probably won't happen, or it will be too expensive because every site will think "We're only charging as much as a Starbucks coffee!" [Note: I don't drink Starbucks coffee, just have a faint idea that it's overpriced.]

Although, shockingly enough, one of the sites I regularly visit (ars technica) saw the light and greatly reduced their subscription price like 2 years ago. And earned my subscription as a result.

I'd pay for a couple more sites if they dropped the coffee fallacy.

> People search for the truth

People search for whatever confirms their worldview.[1]

> while you can sell anybody anything, the truth will prevail.

Those ideas are at odds. If you “can sell anybody anything”, you can also sell them a lie. That keeps happening, so I see no basis for the argument that “the truth will prevail”.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

> I’d much rather pay a monthly fee to get the services I want.

How is that possible if you never visit the same sites? That idea appears to favor the big players.

Great point!

I think ISPs are fine services, they can host and serve websites like they’ve always done. I pay for my service, you pay for yours, we can connect, it balances out.

If you decide to do something that adds value for the both of us, I can chip in to help you cover your costs.

One thing very valuable to me is a search engine. You promise to index all sites you can find on the internet, but you need funds to buy disks and servers. I think you’d do a great job, and I’ll pay you a monthly fee to keep giving me access to your wealth of information.

It so works out that the more people you can serve, the more income you’ll have to become a bigger player. Nothing wrong with that, just as there used to be nothing wrong with Google’s search.

It’s when they asked not the searchers but the advertisers to pay them that things went awry.

Another great service would be one to advertise my products on or disseminate ideas with. To like minded, or just interested people. I’d pay you a monthly service and will keep up my inventory. Customers would build up a profile of things they are interested in being subjected to.

You could help them get to know themselves better, or find what they like by asking for information that they’re comfortable divulging.

Just please don’t combine those two products in one, for the love of god!

> their business model seems unsustainable

I do agree, but if you're unscrupulous enough you can still get rich before such a business model eventually folds.

Unsustainable businesses can be profitable for generations. Particularly if the law doesn't force them to deal with the externalities. Coal mining seems like an appropriate example. It's doubly unsustainable; coal is finite and burning fossil fuels is fucking up the climate, but coal mining remains profitable.