Only in the UK, and only on "private sellers". eBay is losing a lot of marketshare in the UK so they've taken drastic measures to try to get people listing again.
Makes sense. In the UK, their fees plus the encouraged (used to be mandatory as an option) Paypal payment option steals a very significant chunk of the purchase price from sellers.
In the last 5 years I've won multiple auctions for not-really-worth-shipping things like bikes, paid via Paypal, then had the buyers contact me to say the fees are too high, cancel the auction and deal separately in cash.
For anything that you're picking up in person anyway, very little reason to use ebay vs. FB marketplace.
Looks like a majority of it’s all politics and LLMs. I think we’re all as a collective tired of both and want something ‘interesting’ for once to post.
I get that. And if an LLM story disappears from the front page—oh well.
I'll defend the political stories though. For me, all the other places out there that vend politics are truly awful. While a political post lingers briefly on the HN front page, I find I actually learn something from the comments. If there are shit-posts in the discussion, they are quickly "dead". More often though there are (seemingly) reasoned debates about the issues in the comments.
I appreciate (what I am embarrassed to call) a more intellectual discussion on politics than I have been able to find anywhere else. (Embarrassed because I'm walking a fine line trying not to appear to cast the discussions as "elitist". Or maybe I am an elitist, who knows.)
It’s not that the quality of politics posts here are very high (you get plenty of “engineers outside their domain” type stuff). Just, it is hard to find sites with
* Active political discussion communities
* That haven’t swung dramatically to some extreme and eventually worn down the local “opposition” party
I’ve got boards I go to for politics but the ratio is so lopsided, and the one or two remaining posters that disagree with the consensus seem to be more or less sticking around out of contrarianism (which unfortunately decreases the quality of their posts).
I think if HN let too many political threads stick around, that would destroy the whatever quality the discussion has.
I always agree with a good-faith, well-reasoned political argument. And HN generally seems to have a much more educated base than most of the other stuff out there--but agreed with the other person that I think it's probably best to keep that content off of HN, unfortunately.
> That used to be possible with a carefully curated Twitter feed, then a series of bad decisions made that impossible
But you wouldn't know from reading HN that X, the tech company, has become a shitshow, as all discussions about this are "political" and flagged by users.
I feel the same way. I crave high quality political discussion about what's going on in the US and this is one of the few places I can get it. Most places just offer memes and hot takes.
The low quality posts and low quality responses and them being flagged makes the users affected, to use the moderators' terminology, "activated". It's not conducive to maintaining the HN we know and love.
Also the site moderators have plainly said that moderating these controversial political threads is a strain on them. You may be enjoying yourself but someone else is paying a hefty price.
Far less concerned about ThE StReSs Of MoDeRaToRs and more concerned about legal citizens getting drug out of their home at gunpoint in front of their children.
Hand-waving everything as "politics" is not healthy. It's necessary for us to be able to make collective decisions on societal questions which is what "politics" are.
So I, as a software engineer, have to deal with the impacts of this administration both making my employment harder as well as terrorizing the city I live in. Where do you suggest I would go to share these issues other than the site that is specifically for hackers and tech workers?
I get that people want to make the place 'non-political', but a lot of us in the US live in major metropolitan areas and are very directly impacted by all of the shit going on.
No. It means "sick to death of hearing about politics everywhere I go and I am desperate for the occasional respite from that madness". Your interpretation is extremely bad faith.
This is what the biggest names in the VC class want you to think as they continue to enrich themselves, while (in the USA at least) they support a regime that is growing in its authoritarian output.
Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
> Thiel, Musk, et. al., support, for example, Curtis Yarvin, who believes that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced with an all-powerful "CEO"
These guys all benefit when the No-Politics Purity Brigade drives by and flag-kills every article pointing out their wrongdoing as "political." By flagging this stuff, they're actually making HN more political: They are defending billionaires, their agendas, and their status-quo politics.
This is such a weird idea. Everything is political because there are no universally agreed upon values. Humans literally do not always agree on what the purpose of society is, what is good and what is bad, how much power we should have over one another and nature. And, as far as I can tell, neither god nor philosophy seems willing to descend from heaven in order to resolve our differences. Thus, we are stuck discussing things amongst ourselves and deciding how to move forward, a process called politics.
No, just because there are no universally agreed upon values does not make everything political. People can, and frequently do, agree to live and let live when they have differences of opinion rather than wage bitter wars over those differences. We can, and must, have spaces where we can enjoy things in life rather than having division fostered between us 24/7. There is no idea more toxic to the well being of society than the idea of "everything is political".
"Live and let live" is a political philosophy. I don't see what is so hard about this concept: human beings typically don't agree on everything. They have to decide what to do. That process is called politics, whether it happens to result in a live and let live attitude towards many things or the oppressive politics of the Soviet Union. When you tell me that in many contexts people should not feel pressure to adhere to a specific political line you are, in fact, expressing a (non-universal) political ideal, one which you don't need to search much to find counter-ideologies to.
I happen to agree with you: my preference is one in which dogmatic and performative adherence to a specific ideology is discouraged but that doesn't make me non-political, especially if I happen to live in a society where (for example) religious fundamentalism is the main cultural artifact.
At a deeper level, assertions that we should "remain apolitical" are, in the end, simply assertions that the status quo is "sufficient" or even good and that people who have some difference of opinion about how human affairs are managed are "bothersome" for bringing it up. Sometimes this is motivated by a misapprehension or genuine (if incorrect, in my opinion) belief that the status quo reflects some obviously "correct" view of things and thus questioning it is pointless, bothersome, or even dangerous.
I think political differences should (for the most part) be tolerated, resolved through discussion and democratic processes, and that a healthy society is one in which people are (to the extent possible given other goals) allowed to live as they please, but I do not think of this as a non-political goal. I mean, just look around, plenty of people want to take that sort of society away from you.
Its a tired trope, but you are wrong. The haves and the have nots define everything about our society and Not Addressing The Situation is a very active choice, thus politics.
Google makes RCS servers for carriers, host RCS themselves for carriers without RCS servers, and builds the most used RCS client app, so it makes sense that they're in the RCS monetization market as well, but you don't need to use them.
Google's pricing being displayed upfront while most others are listed as "contact us" will make Google much more attractive to small apps, of course.
I’m still on the fence of buying a large cargo van like a Sprinter and outfitting it to be a one-man ‘expeditor’ cargo carrier. Travel the country hauling one-off pallets from point A to B, check the DAT boards for loads and journeys abound.
Im curious about the feasibility of that. Im assuming you would start your own business. I'm just wondering if a solo person can come anywhere close to competitive? In terms of cost and availability. Does Steve lose money offering services at a competitive price? Why call Steve when I know he cant do it if he has any other business?
"Employees who have an iPhone from Radboud University can continue to use it as long as the device is still functioning. However, returned iPhones will no longer be reissued."
I wonder what the take rate will be from people rejecting the Fairphone and requesting their own SIM instead. The inner IT purchasing cynic in me says this is just a simple way to cull out your purchasing costs by only issuing one quasi-unpopular* device.
* I used to issue out phones at a large hospital and we allowed device choice. We saw ~90% iPhones, 10% Android in our fleet.
If Holland is anything like Denmark the cost of employee phones can be budgeted as an operational cost, which means it's basically free. I doubt that is their reasoning. It's far more likely this is a part of the massive anti-US tech dependency wave which is rolling over Europe. Digital sovereignty is a hot topic these days.
As far as what people want... it depends... A lot of people have two phones anyway, since they don't want to pay the additional taxation for using a company phone privately. Also because it's easier to turn it off when you're not working. In education I would imagine a lot of teachers/professors would prefer to not give their private numbers to students.
That sounds unreal to me. Typically rich countries, like the nordics, are majority iPhone. But then again, Dutch people are know across Europe to be cheapskates so maybe that explains it ;)
The reason is how messaging works. In the US (and Canada?), SMS was affordable since before smartphones, and people kept using SMS once smartphones became common. Apple automatically integrated iMessage into that. Americans are used to texting using the default messaging app, and using an iPhone to text another iPhone provided a better experience than plain old SMS/MMS.
In Europe, SMS was extremely expensive in the late 2000s/early 2010s, so people never really used it, and instead started using cross-platform internet messengers. MSN, Skype, then WhatsApp. Android was/is seen as the same or better quality for a lower price, so why buy an iPhone?
I think the choice of Fairphone is about digital sovereignty. It's not only repairable, but it's also available with e/os, an android version which is much more independent from Google
The US hasn't turned out to be a reliable partner in the last few months.
Windows admin in the room -- you'd be amazed what can batch together from DOS batch. I provision APC UPS monitoring cards with a sub-15 line script to bring them into our management.
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