skeaker

The easy counters to this article are:

1. I think their spending is a good thing. Charitable scholarships for kids and initiatives to have a more educated populous in general are things that I am happy to donate to.

2. As stated in the article, hosting is still a relatively simple expenditure compared to the rest of their operation. If Wikipedia really eats a huge loss, falling back to just hosting wouldn't be unrealistic, especially since the actual operations of Wikipedia are mostly volunteer run anyways. In the absolute worst case, their free data exports would lead to someone making a successor that can be moved to more or less seamlessly.

The only real argument in my eyes is that their donation campaigns can seem manipulative. I still think it's fine at the end of the day given that Wikipedia is a free service and donating at all is entirely optional.

Not to sound harsh but this is a personal flaw. It's hard to find a better way to phrase it than "you need to get a life outside of work." Many, many people would kill to have not needed to work for the last 25 years because they have better things to use their time on outside of it.

This is more or less my concern too. Imagine if every road accident was now it's own miniature 9/11. No thanks

Alternate clients and APIs aside, HN has a simple enough layout that you can really easily write up some JS as a browser extension to modify the page a whole lot to your own preferences. Comments have exact timestamps baked into the hovertext of their age, so you could have your script grab all of the comments from the page, sort them by their timestamps, then set all the indent widths to 0. Replies could really easily be tracked and added to the page by reading the parent URL on each comment. Might look into doing this myself later.

"Redditor" in this context is just an internet-savvy way of saying "sheeple."

It's a crying shame that there isn't a Graphene compatible phone that also has a micro SD slot and headphone jack. The perfect phone just doesn't exist in our timeline

I think you've missed that it was a rhetorical question, likely referring to how he believed ideas such as "the civil rights act was a mistake."

It diverts the attention of the public from other notable topics.

If it didn't, then what exactly is the problem?

That's a fun term for [2]. Our team always called it bikeshedding.

iirc this bug existed from release but didn't impact the game until years later after a sizable number of DLCs were added to the online mode, since the function only got slower with each one added. Not that it's fine that the bug stayed in that long, but you can see how it would be missed given that when they had actual programmers running profilers at development time it wouldn't have raised any red flags after completing in ten seconds or whatever.

I don't think it's helpful to assume that rate is an unshakable baseline. There's value in investigating the causes of these tragedies so that we might be able to find ways to prevent them in the future.

I can't really agree. If you mean specifically the tac FPS industry, similar games have since broken through and do plenty well, such as Valorant. If you mean the games industry in general, CS isn't really relevant to its current state in the grand scheme.

If your inventory is set to public you can calculate its value with a third party tool like backpack.tf.

I can promise you that the site isn't the reason your book flopped financially. That is just what the vast majority of books do, especially ones on such niche topics.

> The default is to not buy something.

But if this is already true by default, then we're back to square one where the important financial decision was already made. Again, if it was already decided by default that there is no sale to be made, then whatever the end user does after that is irrelevant.

But beside that, in my last response I gave you three very common reasons that people do buy things against their own financial interests, and you've ignored that part. How do you fit that into your argument?

Yep. And not that you asked, but my own opinion (not theirs) is that even writers who get income from sales will be fine either way. Reading a book for free and then buying it to support the author if you want to has been a practice for longer than the internet has existed. It's exactly how libraries have always worked!

Link it.

That makes the very silly assumption that the default is to boycott everything, which is really not the case. People at large definitely still default to purchasing things first, for all sorts of reasons from just feeling that it is moral to the service being convenient to just enjoying and wanting to support the work itself. This is self evident in the fact that boycotts essentially never actually kill anything because the majority still favors paying.

You've just made this person that you're arguing against up.

Depends. I've seen some in favor and some against. Academics who have their papers paywalled by publishing entities against their own wills are generally for it.

Your other points aside...

> I'm not against consumer boycotts, but it should generally come with a sacrifice on both sides--for consumers, that means missing out on the product or service.

I'm curious as to why you feel this way, genuinely. The decision to boycott means that there is no sale, full stop, so no money is being handed over. Why does anything after that matter? The important part, the money, is already decided from the start.

To be fair, the theory with the whole coin thing is solid, and I'd say it should count as something to be proud of even if in reality it gets tainted by speculative investments.

As they should. Never once have I seen any good outcome of ads on the web.

On the user end:

- People click scam download buttons or fake links and are blasted with scams or malware.

- Nobody I know has ever, not once, purchased something from an ad and been happy with it. The one person I know who did purchase something from a Facebook ad got scammed.

- The actual content people want to watch is delayed or interrupted by constant nonsense that they will never engage with.

So already there is absolutely no incentive as an end user to want ads. Then over on the content creator end:

- Because they work through clicks, ads generate a ton of bad incentives to make divisive content or just otherwise harmful content. See Elsagate for one way this manifests.

- For honest creators who make genuinely good and creative works, ads harm them by consistently underpaying them. Only the very absolute peak of content creators make a livable wage from ads alone. See the rise of Patreon and other such subscription methods that they have had to rely on to get away from ad revenue dependency.

- Ads also harm honest creators by incentivizing bad actors to steal their work, either by direct reuploads on various platforms or by simple plagiarism. See any Facebook page for stolen content or the whole James Somerton expose that happened a couple years ago for the plagiarism bit.

>Idk who still does this

Not my fault you're out of the loop.

Nobody said you couldn't do this too.

People can and do download games for free all the time and Steam is still there. People pay for Spotify when music has been openly free since Napster was the zeitgeist.

Citation needed, but also buying homes (that you don't intend to live in or actually use) is still hoarding, and is arguably even worse than hoarding wealth.

Did you keep a list of how each solution ranked? I'd be curious to see it (genuinely).

I would still call this practice malicious. There's no justifiable reason for that much of a jump in price in the first place.