The interplay between X11 and Wayland is still bad in my experience- if you don't have all of the XDG-portal stuff setup or force all of the constituent drivers and applications to render on Wayland there will be issues.
How on earth did we never see some early 90s hacker-culture movie do some Blue-box phreaking using this watch, similar to the (fictional) Atari Portfolio ATM hack in Terminator 2.
Because some people think that Browsers should be the ultimate app platform, so hijacking your inputs or preventing proper zoom makes sense to them even though it's utterly user hostile.
Which has led us to regress in terms of building GUI desktop apps. Remember the 2000s and 90s how you could make a somewhat native UI in Visual Basic 6 and Delphi, now you got to use an entire browser to get there.
Java didn't only run on one OS but for whatever reason Oracle seems to find no value in making its UI stack nicer and modern. It seems only Microsoft's C# stack is working on this. There's also Qt, which is not a single-OS solution, but its C++.
Well, there is JavaFX, which is really nice for modern java desktop UI's. However, Swing can be taken really really far - just look at IntelliJ and friends (most people don't even realize they're Swing UI's).
With that said - most modern applications are webapps for good reasons. Making native apps sucks for a lot of reasons - including all the random OS-specific behavior you have to work around, specific versions of native OS libraries, etc.
Building for the web browser means, without any extra effort, you app works on all operating systems, and it works exactly the same. That's a pretty good sell to anyone trying to make a modern application that's mostly just a front-end UI for an API...
I think it's got a certain "cool" factor. For some types of content in some cases it might also make sense, almost like a slideshow or paginated document, allowing each jump have its own self-contained focus.
For example this page has action buttons and community links with a video on the first page, a written blurb about system configuration on the second page, screenshots/visual showcase on the third page, etc.
Personally I'm on the fence. I think it probably more often than not tends to be annoying, like most overrides of default conventions, and feels more like you're being force-fed marketing instead of reading information. This specific page would probably work just as well if they kept the sections, dividers, and even the animations, but just let you scroll naturally.
But then, maybe it gets them more downloads or something.
Because you can make all sorts of games and apps with the browser now, which is very cool. In my game the scrolling is just a fast way to zoom in and out and there it is no text to scroll, so it is very appropriate.
But yes, the downside is that some people think that websites, that really just should be pages, get gamified and abused like this.
It is slightly annoying to click the link, get stuck behind the paywall, then have to return to HN, go into the comments thread, and find the archive.is if it exists, and then make it yourself if it doesn't. It'd be nice if the OP could submit a non-paywalled link alongside the original one. I assume HN feels like that would be crossing a legal or ethical line though.
If it makes you feel any better your click -> see paywall -> leave likely counts as a bounce. But I agree, archive links should be default. My strategy is to just immediately pass any major news outlet article through an archive service because they legitimately do not deserve my money or my eyes.
FWIW, I've been making a point of submitting paywall/archive links along with my own submissions for a few years now. I'd encourage that practice as well.
The problem with paying is that there are an unreasonable number of publications out there to subscribe to. It would cost an absolute fortune to support every journalist for every article out there. Given HN is a link aggregator you have to assume that most publishers are going to be represented here.
If there were a quick and easy way to pay a reasonably small fee per article (similar to what we used to do with newspapers) then your unnecessarily condescending comment may have some merit.
How do you know that the parent comment here doesn’t ever pay for journalism? For all you know they pay for literally every publisher out there except for this particular one.
I pay for some journalism, but I reader mode others. Things rarely exist at the polar extremes. Usually my willingness to pay depends on the value proposition, if they’re asking me to pay for a lot of content I have no interest in I’m not likely to subscribe.
Perhaps it’s less a moral question for the consumer and more a logistical question for publishers to make it viable to pay for only the content we actually consume.
This is as bad of an argument as "You wouldn't steal a car" regarding piracy of media. Stealing a physical thing is never the same as obtaining a digital copy of something.
The problem with subscriptions is that you don’t have unlimited means, which means you can only afford a certain number of subscriptions. A subscription is always more than the cost of a single purchase, so by forcing you to subscribe the company is coercing you into also choosing them for the next purchase as well.
Yeah, you can go to another pizza place to get the pepperoni that you want, but you have already subscribed to the first place and it is a nontrivial decision to not utilize the subscription you already have. Plus the new place will require you to subscribe and now you’re paying far more than the two slices would have actually cost you if you were allowed to buy by the slice.
If you want to talk ethics, pursuing exclusively a business model that is anticompetitive via a reduction in consumer choice per transaction is on the wrong side of that line. I don’t fault people for opportunistically avoiding the paywall.
I don’t like anti-competitive, anti-consumer sales tactics. When that is all that is offered, I don’t blame people for finding ways around it.
What if instead every pizza place said “you must pay for five slices up front”? If you want a single slice, you have to pay for five. You get the next four without paying, but you have to buy them all up front.
Now you have purchased your five slices, but the next time you want pizza you want something that isn’t offered where you bought from last time. You can go across the street to where they have what you want, but you have to pay for five slices.
Now you have purchased ten slices and consumed two. Is that fair? What happens when you decide that the next slice you want isn’t offered at either of the two places you bought from before? Now you’ve bought fifteen slices and eaten three.
At what point do you decide to eat what you don’t really want simply because you’ve already paid for it? At some point this choice is taken away from you entirely because you can’t reasonably afford another five slices.
Subscription exclusivity in pricing is anti-consumer. They’re pushing you to consume only from them because they know you have to decide based on your means rather than purely what they offer.
I think I fully get what you're saying. I just don't think you have a human right or entitlement to buy pizza or news articles on the terms that you prefer.
You are right that if everyone does it you don't have a choice that allows you to get what you want for the price in terms that you want.
I don't think not being able to get your way means you get to take what you want. I don't think pizza companies individually or in aggregate have a moral obligation to satisfy you or have you as a customer.
It's like Mutual consent is only required as long as you get what you want , and if you can't get what you want, it doesn't matter. Do you apply this logic to the rest of your life?
There are laws against anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices, I’m not sure why you think we don’t have a right to purchase what we want without the market attempting to coerce us into buying from them exclusively.
I don’t need to apply this to the rest of my life because it isn’t tolerated anywhere but a few select places. I can buy my bread from a Vons and my milk from a Kroger and my meat from a butcher and we don’t allow any of those three to make it difficult to do so. I can buy a Honda motorcycle and a Ford truck and they aren’t allowed to subscription me into their brand.
Not that long ago, I could walk to a news stand and buy the journalism that I wanted case-by-case. You were allowed to “subscribe” to delivery of one but it was the delivery you were purchasing on cadence not the publication. I got to make that decision of which to buy daily, and I got to choose not to buy at all on days where I didn’t want to.
Current journalism has robbed us of these choices, and if they’re allowed to do that then I don’t see why we should be held to an ethical standard that they aren’t.
I think you have it all backwards, but I also don't think I'll be able to convince you of anything. There's no law preventing any of these grocery stores you talk about from selling only in bulk. They choose to sell lower volumes of their own free will.
This was an interesting, relevent article in the leading newspaper in the U.S. Many peope subscribe, and if it's important enough, you can go to the Library to read it.
Are you saying that relevent articles in major newspapers, like the WSJ, NYTimes, or WaPo shouldn't be discussed here, and only things on "free" sites like BuzzFeed, and PerezHilton are good?
As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites (as defined by HN) which have made just the front page (30 items/day). That's roughly 3% of all submitted posts, which would be a rather larger site tally.
How many of those 52,642 sites do you suggest HN members subscribe to?
If we restrict that to only the sites with 100+ front-page submissions, that number falls to 149.
Of the sites I've identified as "general news" (all sites w/ >= 17 appearances, plus a few others), that list is 146.
Those constitute 8.47% of all HN front-page posts.
I would suggest that expecting the 600k+ active HN participants, let alone the 5 million or so total monthly users, to individually subscribe to more than a very small handful of such sites is entirely unrealistic.
I always wonder: how does that work? Is it a subscriber legally sharing paywall content with their share privileges, which i have done, but not aware of archive.is, or is it like copyright violation?
