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Comment by HidyBush | Hacker News Reader

No matter how many years pass, downloading something from SourceForge feels like downloading a sketchy patched executable from a eastern european forum or a game mod from some community managed website.

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As an Eastern European I don't understand what's wrong with Eastern European forums.

where have I said that they have something "wrong"?

The words just before it were "a sketchy patched executable". People are bound to infer there is something wrong with it, regardless of whatever your intentions might have been.

I think they meant it as a compliment, with a heavy dose of not knowing why or how though. Just that it worked.

I just took it to mean it's sketchy downloading and running a binary from a forum where you don't speak the language. You have no idea if the vibe on the forum is friendly or hostile, if the first response to the post you're downloading from is someone saying "Hey, thanks for the great work as always!" - or someone coordinating an identity theft scam - or both!

I think because of the abundance of expertise in low-level machine language there, many cracked deDRM'd binaries or patched executables for abandonware games come out of Eastern Europe, hence the association.

This was also before usable quality automatic translation was built into browsers. Babelfish would lose even more in translation than modern Google Translate.

Compare the lack of ads on HN with the ads found on (I don't know any offhand, but imagine a site dedicated to a game run on a PHP forum with ads).

I remember finding some patches for Heroes III that were only available on some .ru site and there were lots of ads if you turned the adblocker off.

I couldn't read Russian but it was pretty clear they were not the highest quality of ad.

As someone whose internet experience is firmly in the Anglosphere, when you see Cyrillic on a website, you think "I'm downloading malware". Keep in mind, I'm not going to Cyrillic sites for news, recipes or something else, it's usually related to software. And malware at least back in the day was endemic on those sites.

Have you perhaps ever visited Elektroda? :D

You think Eastern European is joke? https://youtu.be/fzLtF_PxbYw

Nothing.

I believe some Americans underestimate how many forums are actually hosted in Eastern Europe. They're still popular over here.

In Norway (~5M population) you'll find atleast 3 huge forums but also several niche ones.

A whole 3 forums?

General discussion forums, yes, atleast 3. And tens of various niche forums. It's not about "how many" it's about how much activity they generate compared to the population size of the country.

Norway is hardly Eastern Europe. It’s as Northern as it gets (specially when you consider Svalbard)

You're right, it should say Eastern/Northern Europe (or just Europe). I realize the mistake now, thanks for pointing that out.

Sometimes you used to hit on ads with minors doing questionable things, if you were not getting a ransomware.

I dont understand why the easterneuropeans keep publishing strange software on strange fourums why don’t they just use GitHub???

When I wanted to change some hidden settings on my car I found many strange software packages on these strange forums. But nothing on GitHub, these forum people live in their own strange walled of garden.

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