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I'm curious as to what their agenda is? I don't read it very often but I've not noticed anything overt. Could you give me any examples? I'd love to know more.

"Agenda" has become code for "ideas I don't agree with", used by people who mistakenly believe it (politics) can be compartmentalized from other everyday topics and only trotted out at election time.

I disagree. Agendas are real things. Just because they have one, doesn't mean it is inherently bad or even a disagreeable position... but some people just don't like to be "sold to", regardless of the topic.

I'm afraid both are true. And they often go hand in hand. Often, someone calling out an agenda is doing so to sell theirs. (See also "ideology", which is often treated as a synonym.)

For some people perhaps. For me personally, I find some sites purposefully interject their 'agenda', either left or right into their journalism to the detriment of the piece. You're not going to a get a truely subjective view on things anywhere but some places are skewed to the point that you can't tell if vital information is being witheld or under reported.

I got tired of reading about Trump and Elon.

I'm also trying to understand. The agenda is to publish about Trump and Elon? Is that correct?

The agenda is to highlight when Trump and Elon blunder but ignore neutral or positive stories. Go to the front page right now and look at the articles, I see four mentioning Trump that are negatively charged. That isn't to say any one article is untrue, but hard to miss the curated pattern

Honest question: has he done anything you think warrants good press?

I too quickly grew tired of the constant doomerism in his first term, but this one seems to be unmitigatedly terrible.


https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/08/trump-admin-says...

This is the only thing that comes to mind, and Ars covered it.


Apart from articles by the two space reporters, any news about Musk tend to be biased towards being extremely negative.

Aside from SpaceX, has there been any positive news about Musk lately?

Would that excuse being extremely negative about anything that is much less than extremely negative?

That is an incredibly tortured sentence. I'm not really interested in parsing tone in an article, that's very subjective. I would be interested if you could demonstrate that Ars was choosing not to write articles about factual things that would portray Musk in a positive light, but you instead basically said "If you ignore all of their positive factual coverage, they don't publish anything positive about Musk at all!"

I have said that they have a strong negative bias. Whether the underlying news is positive or negative is completely irrelevant. Relevant is that they make things much more negative (= less positive) than they are.

But how does that bias manifest? The only thing you said was that they "ignore neutral or positive stories", and that doesn't seem to be true.

No, I didn't say that at all. I said they are biased, that "they make things much more negative (= less positive) than they are", which is a very different thing. Basically, I'm saying they report x-10 rather than x (that's bias), and you are replying with "so the value of x they report is always negative or 0." No. Wrong.

Oh that was the person earlier in the conversation, okay.

So you haven't really been specific at all. I don't know how I could even try to check if a vague claim like that is right or wrong. But since they apparently have positive spacex reporting and only say other things are negative then I'm skeptical of significant bias.


Again, their SpaceX reporting might be "positive", but that doesn't mean it has positive bias. Apart from that, I previously said the non-SpaceX reporters are strongly biased. Anything about the SpaceX reporting isn't relevant for that.

Gitlin, at least, also slants the negative news. The story on sales about Tesla losing market share to VW, but other outlets reported it as VW gaining the top spot.

They've always had more coverage of Tesla than other automakers, or at least I've always noticed it more. When Tesla was leading EV sales they dutifully reported that, when they're dropping they report it just as well. If anything slanted coverage would be reporting less on Tesla because they are doing badly, which seems to be what you want.

Nothing Trump or his administration has done warrants good press.

And is that supposed to be bad in any way?

_Daily_ hit pieces on Elon Musk (or Musk companies), going for something like a decade. These have petered out somewhat since he left DOGE. But they started way back before he should have had that much notoriety.

They were rightfully been calling out the grift at Tesla. On the SpaceX front they've been his biggest cheerleader (even dismissing other stories like the sexual harrassment)

Slightly confused as to why - surely homebrew adds itself to the PATH ahead of the system utilities?

Also - surely vim auto-reads your vimrc?


I learned to deliberately declare paths pretty early on in my adventures at the CLI. I don't leave room for accidental alternative execution. It might be overkill, but it gives me a sense of security and that's why it's there. Don't worry, I probably made a terrible mistake somewhere else that completely negates my attempts at a correct shell environment.


I wonder. Would it be possible for any/all submissions to automatically generate (and provide) and archive.is/archive.org link? @dang

I can't think of any large downsides, it would mean every submission would have an available snapshot for the given time, and we would no longer need a user comment to provide this.


I'm confident that you didn't realize what you were saying, but I really chuckled at "I can't think of any large downsides [in institutionalizing a clearly very legally questionable practice]".


Yes, I didn't realize this was a very legally questionable practice, let alone clearly. Can you explain why?


There's a thing called "copyright" and it's kind of like a union, but for people who write or create art. It gives them the right to decide who gets to make a copy. Many of the best sources of news put up a paywall because it's what allows them to pay their reporters. When you make an illicit copy without their permission, you undermine their ability to make a living. In other words, eat.


I asked pgwhalen specifically, so chiming in with a smug/condescending reply isn't welcome.

It's also IMHO a misplaced or false criticism, per my other comments in this thread.


GP’s explanation is better than I would have given and didn’t seem smug or condescending to me - from my perspective it was welcome.


Your own original had the same problem, so let me play it straight; I don't think there is a legal issue, let alone a clear one.

You don't think phrasing like "There's a thing called 'copyright'", as if I'm not aware of what copyright is, isn't condescending?

Now, either of you relate that concept to a suggestion that HN link to archive.org


> You don't think phrasing like "There's a thing called 'copyright'", as if I'm not aware of what copyright is, isn't condescending?

No, not really. You just seem to be trying to pick a fight.


Yes, really. Not the first time you've hopped on a thread to make a bad call coupled with a personal insinuation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43966385


I'm not interested in having a debate on the legality of it which is why I said "legally questionable." It doesn't strike me as implausible that you wouldn't know what copyright is, if you don't accept the premise that linking to the internet archive for any and all paywalled contemporary content is at least legally questionable.


> if you don't accept the premise that ... is at least legally questionable.

The premise was that this is so obvious that my naivety is funny. But no, you don't want to debate that point - Why would you care to consider otherwise, it's not you losing face if correct.

Here's an uninvited counterpoint anyway:

https://blog.archive.org/2024/03/01/fair-use-in-action-at-th...

You'll also notice that the link in this post (https://archive.is/TajtJ) shows a 'log in' button, implying that log-in credentials where not used (or abused) to get/share this snapshot.


I don’t follow the first paragraph of this comment at all, it just seems vaguely antagonistic. You also seem to be suggesting I’m taking a view on a debate that I am not.

That such a blog post exists at least suggests the legal “question” exists, which again is the only thing I said in the first place.


The practise in this case is not starting a competing service to archive.org, but linking to it, so the downsides are what?


Presumably if hosting and sharing copyrighted content is legally questionable, then linking to it (especially systematically) might be as well. IANAL.


Perhaps, but for different reasons (not liability for hosting). And if there is liability in intend - I already raised those questions here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46669775

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46669774


Large downsides? How about the news sources going bankrupt? Someone has to pay for reporters.


The sooner some "news sources" go bankrupt the better, especially The Economist.


There’s a big difference between accepting people will post links that just happen to, sometimes get people past paywalls - and operationalising that so it’s the default behaviour


Actually I'd say the opposite: If it only happens with paywalled sites it's clear that its purpose it to circumvent paywalls. If you always do it, It's so there is a record of the original site at time of posting.


It would also help with sites that can't handle the hacker News traffic load. Happens all the time


One large downside is that publishers whose paywalls are being circumvented by the act of submitting to HN, would consider legal action against HN.


Why isn't that already an issue then? archive.is links remain, despite being easy to otherwise detect?

IANAL, but it would seem to me HN couldn't be liable, since it is a third party (archive.is/org) caching the site. In fact, I always assumed that's why the links aren't removed.


I am also not a lawyer, but I would guess that a court might differentiate between choosing not to actively scour user generated content for archive links, versus choosing to proactively provide those links.


I'd guess otherwise.


To expand on this; I don't think other forms of active moderation get this pass, you don't get to harbour copyrighted IP, CPP or other illegal material posted on a forum by just not moderating.

further, if intent would be a possible defence, I already mentioned that archiving everything looks better than only having links when there are paywalls, active or otherwise.

from a moral position, I don't think HN moves the needle wrt enabling bypassing - most if not all HN users are likely fully capable of using archiving sites themselves, if not automating the process themselves.


I don't think morality has anything to do with HN's action/lack of action here. They are likely just balancing risk & reward.

How much work to enable auto paywall busting? >$0

How much reward? $0

How much extra risk that a publisher will make your life difficult, regardless of morality or the letter of the law? >0%

I can't imagine why they would bother when HN users seem happy enough to do the work for free.


didn't google try this with AMP or whatever? It wasn't very popular


> Why do I have to complete a CAPTCHA?

> Completing the CAPTCHA proves you are a human and gives you temporary access to the web property.

> What can I do to prevent this in the future?

> If you are on a personal connection, like at home, you can run an anti-virus scan on your device to make sure it is not infected with malware.

Love how actual captcha spyware has turned to victim-blaming to justify its existence.


The vast majority of website-gate captchas are served by cloudflare these days. You can use the privacy pass [0] browser extension to skip them. Privacy passes are an open standard [1], so you can re-implement it yourself if you don’t trust that extension.

[0]: https://developers.cloudflare.com/waf/tools/privacy-pass/ [1]: RFC 9576 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9576.html, RFC 9577 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9577.html, RFC 9578 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9578.html


95% of the time I click the tick box and wiggle my mouse and it lets me through without doing a captcha.

I believe they check your mouse for human-like movement as an additional factor. Could be wrong but I haven't been bothered by many captchas in the last couple years.


I'm not pulling my pants down (enable javascript to have my browser identified) and wiggling anything, virtually or otherwise.


If malicious or scraping traffic is coming from your IP, it's not victim blaming.

AI has ruined everything good and free for everyone except a few oligarchs.


> If malicious or scraping traffic is coming from your IP, it's not victim blaming

But it is not; my IP is a residential address paid for with a credit card associated to a human who visits like 6 websites.


The message is stating that you're seeing a Captcha because suspicious traffic has come from your network. If you're not doing suspicious things, "check that you're not infected with malware" is valid feedback.


No, it’s because Cloudflare and archive.ph have some pissing content going. I forget the details, but it has nothing to do with malware on anyone’s machine. Somewhere on HN someone has given a better explanation, but I’m not spelunking for it.


No, the message is stating that because I don't allow Javascript to fingerprint and commodify my browser. The euphemized nonsense about malware is just an insult to reason at this point.


Privacy is suspicious nowadays.


Worse still, the loop-de-loops can make your packets dizzy which is an unpleasant experience for anyone doing a video call with you and makes games such as VR chat completely untenable.


It does highly improve the QoS if you stream Sonic gameplay.


Yes! Although looping dizziness happens in copper, too.

If you ever experience this, but can't uncoil the transmission cables, a workaround is to spin your desk chair in the opposite direction of data flow, at about the speed of light (for the respective cable medium). This temporary cancels out the effects of ethernet frame looping induced dizziness. Alternatively, you can treat any sickness symptomatically by chewing on a piece of ginger. The latter also helps with aforementioned data-abrasion in fiber optic cables through means not fully understood, yet.


It's less than two hundred words long, I promise you it's not going to take very long to read


This sounds like my kind of hell. I actively enjoy going to work in a busy office and the primary reason to do so is to chat to my coworkers.

I literally cannot work in silence. The best place I ever worked was at one CCC congress where someone had set up a bunch of desks in the corner of one of the raves.

What even is the point of going in to the office if you're going to sit in silent ranks trying to increase shareholder value as much as possible without any breaks or distractions? Eugh.

Bonus: by the way "Trait 2" is written I know for sure that the author has never experienced real hyperfocus. True hyperfocus is something to be avoided at all costs. Writing code for 6 hours straight is a terrible experience and leaves you drained, physically uncomfortable and sometimes mildly injured if you were in a bad posture during that time.


> I literally cannot work in silence.

That is different for many neurodivergent people, but not all. I know some who need silence. I myself need some noise floor, but something that is not distracting, like chatter than I cannot understand or make out, and without loudness spikes or recognizable names/topics/voices. For me, some kinds of music or soundscapes like waves on a beach or forest work best.

And generally, everyone who needs their personal noise in a quiet room can always use headphones. The opposite doesn't work, and the only available soundscape is "office noise" anyways.


Your last point tells me that you haven't experienced hyperfocus. The fact that you ascribe consequences to the act of prolonged focus means you don't experience the ADHD type of hyperfocus.

Because man, consequences do not connect that way. When I hyperfocus for hours, the primary emotion is satisfaction. We fixate due to a malfunction in reward centers, which happens to override negative consequences for long enough that your stiff back is no longer correlated at all to the fact that you've sat motionless over a keyboard for hours.

Even raising the question of avoiding hyperfocus excludes you. Hyperfocus is generally not something that can be avoided or controlled. The chemical gradients hit a tipping point and you're committed whether you want to or not-- and without your awareness or consent.

You appear to be suffering from bad work ethic/balance, not ADHD. Because this is not in any way how an ADHD person experiences hyperfocus. It's not a choice or a consideration, it is an event that happens without your input or control.


> Your last point tells me that you haven't experienced hyperfocus. The fact that you ascribe consequences to the act of prolonged focus means you don't experience the ADHD type of hyperfocus.

What a strange thing to say

> When I hyperfocus for hours, the primary emotion is satisfaction

Lucky you. Are you in your 20s? I thought it was great when I was in my 20s.

> which happens to override negative consequences for long enough that your stiff back is no longer correlated at all to the fact that you've sat motionless over a keyboard for hours.

And your stiff back magically fixes itself the moment you stop concentrating?

> Even raising the question of avoiding hyperfocus excludes you. Hyperfocus is generally not something that can be avoided or controlled. The chemical gradients hit a tipping point and you're committed whether you want to or not-- and without your awareness or consent.

Avoiding it is easy, you simply prevent yourself ever having enough focus for it to hit, or have external stimuli that can cut through it. I have a bunch of alarms and reminders set up throughout the day that are generally enough to jerk me out of it and remind me that I need to breathe properly, sit up straight, drink water and attend to bodily functions.

> You appear to be suffering from bad work ethic/balance, not ADHD.

Thanks for the armchair diagnosis, maybe I should stop taking these pills the doctor gave me


I tried my best to keep the question neutral but you can probably guess I'm not a huge fan of this trend

Sure, it's cute to see a Studio Ghibli re-enactment of your blog post but then I'm always left wondering if I'm going to spend more time reading the article than the author took to write it. It kind of ruins my enjoyment of the indieweb if I end up looking suspiciously at dashes. Could this have been a twitter thread with a few photos and the raw prompts instead?

All that being said, I've been trying to work out if this is another thing I should let go. With how outrage-fuelled social media is these days I've been working on being less judgemental of others if it doesn't directly affect me.

20 years ago you could have perfectly civil conversations on forums with people with usernames xXx_ShadowFox69_xXx and typically the contents of their messages was more important than how cringy their signature was. Maybe this is just an unfortunate part of the modern web I should look past, even if I don't like it?


You would think it's common sense but I've received PRs that the author didn't understand and when questioned told me that the AI knows more about X than they do so they trust its judgement.

A terrifying number of people seem to think that the damn thing is magic and infallible.


I suspect most of it is going to utilities for power, water and racking.

That being said, if I was Sam Altman I'd also be stocking up on yachts, mansions and gold plated toilets while the books are still private. If there's $10bn a year in outgoings no one's going to notice a million here and there.


How many gold toilets do you need? I mean, I don't even own one.


Tragically I don't make CEO money so I also don't have one but I presume you'd want to have at least one per mansion and another one in the office. Maybe a separate one for special occasions.


Lovely to see someone building something that doesn't require Kubernetes over 4 AWS AZs, DynamoDB, S3, Lambda etc etc.


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