I hadn't noticed that, but they both look to be helping their members, at the cost of society in general. The American Psychological Association does have a good style guide though, so they have that going for them.
Since we just asked you to stop breaking the site guidelines and you've continued to do it, I've banned this account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Calling a comment "ridiculous" is against the guidelines?
Okay. Hopefully it isn't against the guidelines to say I think that's a silly guideline. Apparently saying "ridiculous" in response to a comment is very selectively enforced, must be my lucky day.
Anyways, this is probably the reminder I needed to stop commenting to HN. Some of the moderator decisions you guys are making lately are just.. way off base to me. Either you've changed or I have. Probably me.
"What an absolutely ridiculous comment. That is extremely obviously not what I said or implied." is obviously a flamewar reaction. This is not a borderline call!
If you had simply posted the last sentence, your comment would have been just fine.
For the purposes of this article, this graph is much more effective at making the point than the log scale one. I think it would have been a better choice to use a graph like this.
For the purposes of what this post is communicating, I don't think the exact sizes of adobe prior to 2000 or the exact size of sumatrapdf matters at all.
The linear graph instantly communicates:
- sumatrapdf has barely changed size in the same time that adobe's size has grown exponentially
- adobe's crazy growth spike started ~6 years ago
Maybe I'm just dumb, but I didn't realize the graph had a log y-axis at first. Then, once I realized that, I had to spend a bit of time parsing the graph to figure out what it was saying (I don't work with log graphs often at all). And once that was done, the only thing I came away with was "wow, adobe grew a hell of a lot when sumatra didnt", which is the same thing the linear graph told me instantly.
Being able to see that sumatras size remains relatively flat while adobes size growth is practically vertical is all the granularity I care about at a glance. If I want to know exact sizes, I'll dive in deeper.
I think this is an argument for the log scale. I'd argue that the things you say it communicates are not actually correct.
Adobe's size has been growing exponentially pretty much this whole time. The rate increased slightly in the mid-2010s. SumatraPDF started out that way too, but managed to level out after about a decade.
Relative size is what matters here. That increase from ~2.5MB to ~5MB in the mid-90s was pretty significant for the time. In terms of the impact on users, it's probably at least as important if not more so than going from 300MB to 600MB 25-30 years later.
I disagree, am with qualeed on this one. I don’t think the size doubling means much at all except raising the question of why did it double? What was added that I care about? My instinct tells me nothing so it’s shouldn’t really be acceptable except this is par for the course these days. Nobody cares about bandwidth it’s just assumed to be fast and unlimited by nearly every publisher of software.
In the 90s that jump cost me in terms of modem time. I couldn’t download anything else for an extra 30-60 minutes that day (if I remember my speeds correctly). Today, extra 300mb costs me less than a minute and I can easily continue multitasking in the process.
Imagine there had been a 50MB jump in 1998. That would be a major WTF moment. Now imagine a 50MB jump in 2025. We'd barely notice.
Saying Adobe's crazy growth spike started six years ago is just pointing to the knee in the exponential curve. It's had pretty much the same curve since version 1.0. And SumatraPDF had the same exponential growth for quite a while.
If absolute numbers are what matters and an extra 300MB is not important, then why not scale the Y axis to 1TB and squash everything to the bottom?
1) "De-googling" doesn't need to be a binary, all-in or all-out situation. Any reduction in reliance of Google (or any single point of failure) is good. Diversifying the big stuff (mail, storage, etc.) is a great start. About last on the list is worrying about the occasional allowance for gstatic.com or whatever.
2) While I occasionally need to allow some scripts from google, it's absolutely nowhere near 1/3rd of sites.
As a non-American, I've always been surprised with how common HOAs are, and how over-bearing they seem.
I know that I only hear about the crazy ones because blogs about normal/good HOAs aren't going viral, but I've seen enough horror stories that if I ever moved to the US I would do my best to avoid one like the plague.
I’ve lived in two. They were fine. They collected reasonable dues, provided some services, and that’s about the extent of it.
I still wouldn’t want to live in another one. Even if they behave well, they’re just annoying. It’s another set of de facto laws I have to keep track of, elections to vote in, proceedings to follow. The HOA’s finances are my finances so if they screw up it’s my wallet on the line. (I see so many people asking, the HOA fucked up, can they make us pay for it? You are the HOA, there’s nobody else to pay for anything.)
And they’re just not necessary in most places. Maintain common areas? We have something for that already, it’s called local government. Prevent eyesores? Fuck off, if you want to control what happens on a property then buy it. It’s unavoidable for a condo, but completely unnecessary for detached houses, and even townhouses don’t really need one.
You hear the bad stories. It all depends on who was elected and who votes. Most HOAs are not the horror stories you hear, just a quiet entity that maintains common property and is a backup solution for problems (when talking to neighbor does not work). Mine is cheap, like $300/year and we have a shared park, community space, and where I live lots of irrigation. They only send out letters for egregious violations and don't police or nit-pick.
If I had to pick one thing I dislike the most about HOAs, it would be this. There is never a guarantee that your quiet HOA will remain that way in the future. Which, to me, seems like a crazy chance to take.
>we have a shared park, community space, and where I live lots of irrigation.
This is where my confusion comes in. My local government handles this sort of stuff. But I understand that we (as countries) have different thoughts on governments and their responsibilities.
> >It all depends on who was elected and who votes.
> If I had to pick one thing I dislike the most about HOAs, it would be this. There is never a guarantee that your quiet HOA will remain that way in the future. Which, to me, seems like a crazy chance to take.
Exactly this. HOA boards have a great tendency to attract the interests of the most busy-body, have to dictate to everyone what they do, Karen's that exist in the area covered by the HOA. Such that, over time, the original HOA that just maintained common areas and only got involved in egregious violations mutates into one that has rules specifying exactly where, by measurement, you are to position your trash container in relation to your garage door when it is not out front for trash pickup day. One of the worst offenders of HOA's near me has exactly that rule (position of trash container in relation to garage door) and the HOA has paid "inspectors" to drive around each trash pickup day after the HOA decreed time that the container should be returned to this location, to look for violations of the position and write folks up.
There was an entire story in the local newspaper about this pettiness on the part of this particular HOA (which is how I learned they had "trash can position relative to garage door" rules and that they had paid "inspectors" to monitor compliance).
And all it takes is for those with "controlling personality disorder" [1] to start running, and getting, elected to the HOA boards for this to happen. And for most HOA areas, the only population group even interested in running for HOA board member are the "controlling personality disorder" types. So no matter who one votes for, the HOA slowly mutates into a "control everyone, everywhere, all the time" one.
[1] I.e., those personality types that want to control everything that someone else is allowed to do.
There are plenty of city owned spaces as well, it's not all HOA run. I suppose I would ask if it's fair for a voter on the other side of town to pay for irrigation on my street?
What's stopping them from charging you $3000 or even $10000 next year, or escalating progressively to these numbers? What's stopping them from adding ten new ridiculous rules? Nothing. It's about giving up your freedom.
The answer to that is always "you". Well, collectively.
An HOA isn't a separate body with no stake in the properties involved—that would be a property management company or something similar. It's a body made up of the people who actually live there. So while they could potentially charge you $3000 or $10,000 in bullshit fines for something they decided you did, they (usually) can't realistically charge you $3000 for dues without charging the same to everyone. Including themselves.
That said, there are definitely circumstances where an HOA is fully captured by a small clique of highly-active, highly-entitled, power-mad people with too much time on their hands and too little common sense or compassion, and they can't be gotten rid of either because of byzantine bylaws or because they actually are a majority of the people in the neighborhood.
Sometimes, this won't matter, because "they" are making millions a year (or are married to someone who is—often, toxic HOA members are stay-at-home spouses with little else to occupy them), so I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but we're not talking about some third-party management company raising prices so that they make more profit. We're talking about a cooperative raising fees for its own members—including the board members—which go into the common coffers.
Unless, y'know, we're talking about active embezzlement. Which does happen, but is obviously a failure mode and not normal operation.
In some places they act as a kind of local governing authority similar to a town or village council. In much of the US the lowest level of governing body us the county, and those can be pretty huge and diverse areas so HOAs are used to fill that gap.
Sure, I guess I can kind of understand that. It's just not something I've experienced. I've never felt that there was a "gap" that needed to be filled. Especially not by a group that can also tell me that my paint has to be a certain color or whatever.
Things like maintaining a community’s cohesiveness (eg via restricting exterior cosmetic changes, requiring lawn maintenance, etc) are in the HOA contract in an effort to maintain/increase the community’s home values over time. And, of course, people can choose not to buy a home in a community like this if they don’t agree to the provisions of the HOA.
Even before the 2021 surge in home values, homes on city streets almost never saw as much growth in value (except for homes in the heart of metro areas where people will pay for location to work. On suburban city blocks, home values are often stagnant even in good markets)
> And, of course, people can choose not to buy a home in a community like this if they don’t agree to the provisions of the HOA.
One of the common problems I've heard of (not firsthand, so this may be apocryphal—but it wasn't just once that I heard it) is that buyers don't get to see the HOA agreement, or even know it exists, until after they've bought the property. (IIRC, the situations where the latter was the case were either buyers not reading their purchase contract closely enough, and thus missing the actual requirement to agree to the HOA, or neighborhoods where the HOA was not legally required, but if you didn't join it they'd gang up and make your life a living hell.)
They're not common everywhere in the US. Here in West Michigan I don't know of anyone that's part of one (other than condo associations, where it's part of the selling point).
America hates government and taxes but occasionally someone thinks wow, it’d be nice if we could split the costs of this road and water pipes we all use! But all the existing standards for how to do this basic function of society are terrible!
And under the question "What happens if I am distributing the runtime for commercial purposes?":
>"Industry Customers requires explicit authorization from Unity and is subject to a fee ("Distribution License') which is generally equivalent to 4.0% of the revenue generated by the software product that incorporates the Unity runtime (discounts may apply)"
Since the title on here is "Unity reintroduces the Runtime Fee [...]" I assumed that there would be more to it the simple outright subscription plan(s), making me scroll down to the FAQ of the linked page where you can find the following bit of drivel which turned me right off:
> "How much does Unity Industry cost?
> For seat-based and floating license pricing, contact Sales."
Also, according to the "order summary" you get when have the default "monthly" option selected and click "Choose Plan", it says:
> "Commitment
> 8/21/2025 - 8/21/2026.
> Your total annual commitment is €4,968.00 excluding VAT /Sales Tax. ¹
> You will be charged for one month today and every month thereafter, and your subscription will > automatically renew at the end of your annual term. You can manage your subscription in your Unity Account."
indicating that even though you selected the "monthly" option it's still going to be an annual subscription and I just can't be bothered to wade through what're probably mountains of Legalese during my private time to find out how they're planning to keep you captive in that subscription for the whole year anyway.
Unity have demonstrated time and time again they're trying to screw their customers, so fuck 'em, use literally any other engine like Godot which has been recommended in this thread already. I don't think the company will reverse their course again now that the original outrage has cooled off but hopefully at least some some bottom-feeding manager types responsible for this get fired for "underperforming" if/when enough devs take their money elsewhere.
¹ in € it's 414€/mo or prepaid 4554€/a, essentially 11 instead 12 months if paid in advance
Edge does, as well. It drops a warning in the middle of the screen, displays the resource-hogging tab, and asks whether you want to force-close the tab or wait.
It's crazy (especially considering anime is more popular now than ever; netflix alone is making billions a year on anime) that people see a completely innocent little anime picture and immediately think "pervent-dwelling imageboard".
> people see a completely innocent little anime picture and immediately think "pervent-dwelling imageboard"
Think you can thank the furries for that.
Every furry I've happened to come across was very pervy in some way, and so that what immediately comes to mind when I see furry-like pictures like the one shown in the article.
Out of interest, how many furries have you met? I've been to several fur meets, and have met approximately three furries who I would not want to know anymore for one reason or another
Admittedly just a handful. But I met them in entirely non-furry settings, for example as a user of a regular open source program I was a contributor to (which wasn't Rust based[1]).
None of them were very pervy at first, only after I got to know them.
Even if the images aren’t the kind of sexualized (or downright pornographic) content this implies… having cutesy anime girls pop up when a user loads your site is, at best, wildly unprofessional. (Dare I say “cringe”?) For something as serious and legit as kernel.org to have this, I do think it’s frankly shocking and unacceptable.
Phillip Zimbardo, and the link you linked to, are the "American Psychological Association".
These are two different associations.
Theresa Miskimen is the president of the American Psychiatric Association, not Zimbardo.