I'm glad they dropped the ban on HN readers[1]. That was my very first impression of Asahi Linux that I ever encountered and it's unfortunately what I think of every time I see it show up here.
Honestly, knowing what I know about marcan, the decision was probably the result of an overwhelming/strong emotional reaction.
Not to just shit all over him or anything, but it really sucks to see someone who is genuinely top-ten-on-earth when it comes to "real hacking" struggle so much with socialisation and mental health.
It is weird to blame the victim for reacting to being harassed by a mob. That is a normal thing to have a reaction to. Perhaps rather than blaming people's social skills and mental health, we should instead blame the culture that normalises harassing people on the internet, even to the point of suicide (as happened in byuu's case). You are basically advocating that it is better for individuals to change to accept a shitty society as a given rather than advocating for society to change to be less shitty.
I'm genuinely unfamiliar of the harassment campaign that HN launched against him.
(I am familiar with some comments debating the validity of Byuu/Near's gender identity, and marcan's extremely strong reaction to that, but no actual harassment campaigns)
This marcan person had problem with Go, he had problem with Apple fans, he had problems with linux committers, so much he left internet or something. To say everyone but marcan was wrong is just a kind of fanboyism and it hardly helps marcan.
This person liked to dish out as much as next person but display extreme reaction when served.
No it actually wouldn't. As in 15+ years of Hacker News I have not seen the same so clearly it can be so horrible that it regularly leads to such strong reaction, suggesting that for most people this isn't nearly so impactful. And very few things described could actually be called harassment, mostly it was light criticism or maybe a bit trolling.
The guy appears to have a fragile ego. Any criticism and he goes nuclear, as if he was never told "no" as a child. Sure you can have opinions about the best way to moderate comments, but I can't imagine thinking I was special enough to publicly demand how Hacker News should be run. I've worked with people like this, not fun!
This is not a dichotomy. It's not healthy to take random online comments to heart so much. It's also bad to make such ridiculous comments. Both can be true at the same time.
This diminishes what "random online comments" are. They aren't just text on a screen. They represent words that another human being has said about you. Often, words that will convince other human beings, who may take different actions or view you differently because of what they've been told, which will in turn spread virally and alter how thousands and thousands of humans see you and act towards you.
Humans are a social species. It is easy to say "just don't be social bro". When you are actually the victim of this behaviour, it is much less easy to shrug off. Having a bunch of people hate you and say horrible things about you hurts. That's not abnormal. That is perfectly normal. Is it good for your health? No, in the same way that somebody smoking next to me is not good for my health, but it's not my fault the person next to me is smoking. The blame rests with them. To some extent, yes, stepping away from the smoker is a short-term fix, although often an unpleasant one that impacts your quality of life in other ways (what if the restaraunt you like is full of smokers, what if the airport is full of smokers, etc). In the same way society eventually changed to discourage smoking around other people, we really, really need to change the culture around the internet, to recognise that the internet is actually a social environment, that there are real people on both sides of the screen. "Go touch grass" implies that the internet is not the real world, but it very much is, with real consequences, even if you can't see the other person.
I agree it would be much better if online culture improved, and I don’t think anyone would argue against that. The difficulty is that change at that scale tends to be slow and unpredictable, on the order of decades, so you can't rely on it in the short term.
Because of that I think there’s value in focusing on what individuals can control, like setting boundaries, disengaging when things get overwhelming, or stepping away from spaces that become unhealthy.
That doesn’t mean the behavior is acceptable, or that people should just tolerate it. It’s more about acknowledging that, while broader change is important, taking steps to protect yourself is the only immediate and reliable option.
> The belief that this will happen is also a malicious fairy tale to tell to people.
Cultural change is possible. It is not something that will happen, no. But it is something that can happen, if enough people choose to make it happen. Making it happen starts by pointing this out and not blaming the people on the wrong end of this behaviour.
This kind of thinking reminds me of my truly most loathed thought-terminating cliche of all time, "life's not fair", as a justification for supporting some horribly unfair status quo. True, life isn't fair, but humanity has collectively spent an unbelievable amount of effort doing all kinds of things to make it slightly more fair, one step at a time. We can make it more fair. That's what we do as humans. We bend the world to our collective will.
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seems the comment I was responding to was completely rewritten while I was writing this. oh well.
You are derailing this discussion by keep moving it to: "This is what the world should be like", and no one is disagreeing with that here. This is not what anything I said is about.
The very first comment I replied to was insulting the victim's social skills and mental stability. This is the exact opposite of what is needed to reach "what the world should be like". Positive progress is not inevitable. It does not happen by some fate of the universe, where if we just wait things will naturally improve and life will get better. When positive progress does happen, it happens by humans consciously choosing to act in ways that make the world a better place rather than in ways that do not.
>The very first comment I replied to was insulting the victim's social skills and mental stability.
Dude, the very first comment you responded to was itself a response to someone who suggested that the frankly unhinged HN "ban" was a decision that was "not taken lightly".
They literally stuck a comment into the site banner suggesting that HN comments critical of Asahi or their devs was part of a Kiwi Farms targeted harassment campaign trying to take advantage of HN's SEO.
I don't know why you're continually upholding this fantasy, referring to marcan as a "victim", or pretending that somehow the problems of the world would all magically be solved if everyone only said positive things about other people all the time (communities like this 100% dysfunctional), but it's fucking strange and naive.
It was not a ban or anything that could even possibly be misconstrued as one. People are talking about an overreaction, but the real overreaction is here on HN. This had literally nothing to do with the topic of Asahi Linux's progress report, but somebody intentionally dredged up a year-old subject with an outright deceptive and extremely hyperbolic framing for the sole purpose of shitstirring.
> pretending that somehow the problems of the world would all magically be solved if everyone only said positive things about other people all the time (communities like this 100% dysfunctional)
This is not even remotely what I said. The issue at hand is people mobbing to personally attack and harass individuals. Earnest criticism is one thing, but there is absolutely nothing constructive or productive being accomplished by the way people are behaving on this subject.
> It was not a ban or anything that could even possibly be misconstrued as one.
That is correct. It was just a rant, really, and even then not even a long one.
> This is not even remotely what I said.
Can you clarify what you're trying to say, then? AFAIK nobody on HN is harassing marcan, Byuu, the Asahi devs or anyone else in that sort of vauge circle. We're making comments about how they might behave or present themselves publicly, and some of the comments are definitely negative - but there is no coordination or intent to belittle or anything of that sort. Just internet bitching.
(and I am open to counterexamples if you're happy to share - have people been emailing marcan personally to say "I'm from HN and you're a piece of shit"? I wouldn't be surprised if people on Kiwi Farms were doing some of that.)
I am not sure how what happened can be considered "being outed", the vtuber's puppeteer was obvious from day one to anyone who was paying any attention at all, it is just that a lot of people decided to uphold the kayfabe. (And I don't blame them, at least before the lkml crashout it was a pretty fun character.)
While there is overlap between vtuber communities and HN, the culture is quite different. When one does come up, it is eternally September on HN. In vtuber communities/culture, the persona of the vtuber is treated as entirely separate from the person behind it, even in cases where it's exceedingly obvious (e.g. someone leaves an agency to work independently).
At the very least, it is rude to disseminate, draw attention to, or even speculate aloud about the identity of the person behind the avatar. Typically it's considered harassment/doxxing (I believe this is because vtubing culture is largely derived from Japanese idol culture, which appears to be structured around dealing with stalkers). That is to say, "upholding the kayfabe" is a bare-minimum of respect.
I could see why people on the Asahi team considered HN to be a host of harassment, considering even a cursory search of HN turns up comments "compiling evidence" about Asahi Lina's identity (including one still-up comment that straight-up links to Kiwi Farms, which is almost certainly done for purpose of harassment). I'm not sure if Hacker News ought to be moderating comments that deconstructs pseudonyms where clear effort has been made to separate it from the person behind them, but I also empathize with not wanting to be linked to accordingly.
I do not understand why people would rather play into the delusions of a clearly mentally unwell individual for months and year on end — when they well know it's bullshit — under the guise of this somehow being in the interests of said individual and/or being fun. This, to me, is the height of selfishness clocked in disingenuous empathy.
The widespread normalisation of this behaviour, and the subsequent ~~thought~~ now real policing around the issue, is a clear mark of a deep societal ill.
I've been a pro member for many years, with about 35k photos uploaded. I am grateful that they have never chased the engagement bait. Some people like to complain about the Pro features but I found them to be absolutely fair and I wanna do everything I can to support this platform.
All of my photos are automatically synced to Flickr via the Auto uploader, and getting things from my camera to Flickr is as simple as transferring the data from the dslr to my phone, and the auto uploader takes care of the rest.
From there I can go through the photos, decide which ones I wanna make public, and organize them into my albums to share with others.
My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
They have bbcode and html embed, with dynamic width and automatic linking back to the page with alt text, but nothing for markdown.
I can use HTML for my blog but my blog is written and marked down and I would rather just stick to markdown, plus many forums have switched to markdown and won't accept an HTML embed.
My current solution is to convert the following by hand from something like
> My single complaint with Flickr is simply that they won't provide a markdown embed code that works exactly like HTML embed, but that's pretty low of a complaint.
fwiw, a lot of markdown parsers allow some amount of HTML also.
Pasting a html img tag into your markdown documents might work, depending on which parser is used.
I used to receive a catalog every quarter for an audiophile magazine. They sold some very very expensive gold plated toslink cables. The gold planting was supposed to be for superior conductivity.
Toslink is an optical audio format, and a pair of fishing line would've even worked identical quality.
> That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
They also haven't come out with another iPhone with a headphone jack, yet no one kept using those.
I get what you're saying, but what I think is that the average mini buyer is inherently someone (on average!) who changes their phone a lot less often. They're less likely to be glued to their phones. Bigger phones = more infinite scroll addiction, and so on. Apple doesn't want to cater to the mini buyers.
> That's because they haven't came out with another small iPhone in more than four years.
I kind of agree with the previous comment. I think if you spend a lot of time on the phone, have a lot of apps then it makes sense to upgrade your phone more frequently and also makes sense to have a larger screen and better battery life. So conversely, there is a correlation between people who have smaller phones and upgrade less frequently.
I have my iPhone 12mini for 5-6 years now, and I'd upgrade it now if there was a new small iPhone. But I would upgrade it 3 years ago.
> Fifteen years ago, we started work on the Dark Sky weather app.
I will never forgive them for selling out to Apple.
Dark sky was the greatest weather app I've ever used, it had features such as considering the pressure of the atmosphere when predicting rain using crowd sourced phones, and it was the only app I've ever used that was as accurate as it was during a time when my job relied on quickly leaving the office and running across town multiple times a day.
it was sad watching the API get killed off but even worse was that a lot of the features that dark sky had never really made it into Apple weather, and the rain predictions at Apple Weather had were never as accurate as dark sky. There were several times where it was actively raining and Apple weather never even knew. Dark sky always knew.
Nope nope nope fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me, I'm not touching this with 39 1/2 foot pole.
The Telegram drop off for doing something really bad recently? I have not seen a single person mention it as an alternative. I don't really use discord that much except for the few friends I have that are not on telegram. Actually all of my family and friends are on telegram, even my grandmother is on telegram. When playing games with friends we just do a group call in telegram. I don't even see it on this list though.
Isn’t Telegram at least plausibly a tool of Russian surveillance? My understanding was that its attempts to distance itself from the regime were laughable and only made the relationship more obvious.
I mean, discord is a tool of US surveillance and I’m a Lot more worried about that government doing something to me given Russia is ten thousand miles away
[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/AsahiLinux.github.io/commit/e0...
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