News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

alex1138

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @01:06PM (#50340921)
Sorry. I just meant, Debian's free as in beer. Ubuntu can be too but I thought there was more of a visible avenue to pay for it. And I just get annoyed with the 'you are the product' as a slogan because you get used plenty, exploitatively, even if you do pay for something. And many ethical things are in fact free

The fact Debian apparently does things properly just hammers it home

It was a lazy reply and I apologize

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Monday November 02, 2026 @10:49AM (#50338495)
Meanwhile, Debian lol

"If you're not paying, you're the product-" hey jerks, the analogy doesn't always work

Re:HackerTube: YouTube built from videos recommended by HN on Sunday November 01, 2026 @10:18PM (#50332759)
> notifications are useless

Not exactly what you talked about but comment notifications are useless. There's no way to have only x-replied-to-you-in-thread. You either get notified about everything, ever - or you get no notifications

Product designers: fuck off. You are doing an absolutely shit job

I don't know whether to reply to you or slowin's reply but this is correct. And I tend not to think it was Dorsey's fault. And apparently Musk has indeed made a mess of Twitter but it's also wrong to assume there weren't massive problems with old Twitter too
A bunch of people working in the industry with a vested interest in shaping narrative being able to flag any comment or post whenever. What could POSSIBLY go wrong
I have to agree. The man has always been accused of stealing from others going back to the Winklevosses. He'll take any side is expedient regardless of what you (general 'you') think politically
Re:Alphabet Announces Third Quarter 2026 Results [pdf] on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @04:52PM (#50280741)
Youtube has sucked for many years. I just don't know how much Google is responsible for it. Back in 2006, they were dealing with copyright battles (despite the fact they won their lawsuit against Viacom) so Google bought them to help them out with their resources. The site itself has tons of censorship and bad targeting on the recommended videos and I think Neal Mohan has made it even worse the last few years with more and more ads and Shorts and everything
The replies to you and giancarlostoro are of course disgusting, typical for "hacker" news (please the man, serve the man)
The fact this was [dead] says everything you need to know about hacker news
Upvoted, fwiw. Reddit is utterly insane
I tried selling a VPN service once called TurtleSpeed

I have no idea why no one bought it

Re:Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month on Thursday October 22, 2026 @08:42PM (#50203102)
More than Facebook itself already does...?

Try logging out for a few days and watch the extremely vague (and sometimes OUTRIGHT FAKE) email notifications roll in

It's a deposition
The comments on Zuck's are funny

Typical "lawyer is so stupid, she's asking dumb questions, repetitive questions"

Yeah, people - it's a deposition. Getting Zuck to blab is what they're looking for

Yes, I remember an article in the Guardian about this, around 2015-6

Facebook does this. People think 'privacy' as a complaint and perhaps think about advertising on FB but straight up, settings get reset (including posts suddenly becoming Public. or graph search.)

Why? Because Mark Zuckerberg does not believe in it. In 2010 he said privacy was no longer a social norm. Not only does he himself not believe in it, but he can't keep it to himself. He knows 'better than you'. So, he outright changes it himself or instructs his engineers to do it

It's like with Free Basics in India. You could, theoretically, support it. Many didn't, it was a form of digital colonialism. But let's say you happened to think it was a good idea. It didn't matter either way: Facebook sent emails on users' behalf to TRAI

That's who Zuckerberg is. A sociopath, a criminal, someone who knows nothing but how to steal

So apropos of nothing remember when Zuck bought a castle rather than spend that money on any sort of Facebook account support?
This place included. You can get flagged and downvoted pretty quick.
The Taliban can tweet (pre-Musk) but Donald can't

(I dislike Musk for many reasons but you cannot tell me there were 'no problems' with old Twitter or that every criticism was a 'nothingburger')

It doesn't change my point
Network effects matter and no you can't just 'email/call them'. Not everyone automatically has those. You can get it, but something like FB, loose connections, regaining contact (you literally don't have their email/phone numbers and don't tell me 'oh but you lost touch for a reason'), is a nice thing if its CEO wasn't who he is
To be "fair", Zuckerberg is a mendacious little prick with a history

Did the Google guys ever get caught saying that? Or using their power over the company to unsend messages, oh I guess you can't do that with email, but with Messenger you can...

Re:Meta's GB{2,3}00 Cluster on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @07:38PM (#50174200)
(Rhetorical question) Who would you trust scraping your website? Google, for who among all their issues I haven't seen complaints of "Google is ddosing the web", both pre and post LLM

Or Meta, run by someone of Zuckerberg's character that wants to dominate everything and it shows by how many requests per minute? He's one of the reasons sites now have to implement bot blocking technologies

Re:Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @05:44PM (#50173109)
> That goes against Facebook policies and the account would get banned.

lol. the "lol" isn't directed at you. I'm not laughing at you. But FB is infamous for "we will ban you due to some stupid innocuous or mostly innocuous thing but you can report the worst things imaginable and that 'doesn't violate community standards'

Re:Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:50PM (#50169206)
You can't see it because Zuckerberg in his fucking benevolence has decreed you need an account for PUBLIC LINKS AND POSTS

Never mind the fact his platform has routinely chipped away at privacy in the past, posts suspiciously going from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public. Like you can set it and it will straight up come unset

But it's totally cool to just lock things down for accounts only if you're Facebook, and never mind people get banned all the time for bullshit, horrible things that people report are never taken down, and it's apparently increasingly impossible to even make a new account

Re:Facebook now charging to post more than 2 links a month on Tuesday October 20, 2026 @12:29PM (#50168872)
So... what

We have the internet and that's not good enough

You already throttle posts - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719

You already act as a piss-poor communications medium https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4151433, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712

Is "Metaverse" open web/open protocol? Or just yet another way for Zuckerberg to fuck people over?

Yes I mean anecdotally, not India, but an acquaintance of mine (North American) got JD Vance in her feed and she doesn't like him

Myanmar - Facebook took responsibility from the moment they decided to "service" the country using shady tactics such as https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/facebook-misleading-indians-i... where they had what, one translator, two? Some of this is in Careless People

It shouldn't matter what specific political side - Facebook are bad actors (or Meta or whatever) across the aisle

I still refuse to sign up for it so long as they have their "Fuck you, logged-out user" popup

It's not because of 'scraping'. They literally just want user count

People loved IG pre-FB acq. Then Zuck had his "IG can hurt us" emails, other private messages with one of the IG co-founders ("Zuck will go into destroy mode") and now we have photography being gatekept

How much did they spend on Metaverse? I hope I'm not just throwing out figures irresponsibly, feel free to fact check me, but I heard one figure of 80 billion? I mean, it was enough to rebrand their entire 'business' (bullshit pivot; extortion) around

Zuck recently bought a castle. I bet none of his vast wealth goes to improving his platforms

No matter what side you're on in a given issue there's a clear problem with certain platforms having things taken down but god help you if you report something horrible, it will never be removed

This is especially bad with Facebook (properties). Everyone else is really bad about various aspects, but only Zuck has as much contempt for people as he does

There was an episode where Google was asked to remove Pirate Bay from search results and they declined to do so. Facebook blocked it - even in private messages

Zuckerberg is an absolute sociopath, a cancer on the internet, he should've been shut down years ago

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