Can't you already just get an HDMI monitor, speakers & a raspberry pi?
2,076 karma · joined February 9, 2008
> These and other types of "unskippable ads" violate my personal freedoms and should rejected by society.
It's funny you keep bring up unskippable ads. I remember when YouTube invented the skippable ad format about ~15 years ago. How quickly it became a right & a guaranteed personal freedom.
This doesn't make any sense to me.
> Given that people currently are not able to choose to be free from advertisements in any practical way, even if abstaining from luxuries
Sure you can.
You can get a more expensive Netflix tier.
You can pay for YouTube Premium.
You can choose not engage with businesses that have a monetization model you dislike.
This is a terrible idea. Users should have choice & control.
I'll say something that on the surface level seems controversial, at least to HN: Some users prefer ads. And those users should be allowed that choice.
Ads are part of a value exchange. It's disingenuous, imho, to frame the question as "Do you want 'X' with or without ads?" Absent any other criteria most people would naturally say without ads. But I feel it's disingenuous because it overlooks the value exchange.
A better example: Would you prefer Netflix with ads for $7.99/month with ads, or $17.99/month without ads?
A lot of people are choosing the ads tiers. It's the fastest growing tier. Personally, I have the ads-free tier, but I can make that choice for myself. The people wanting the ads tier should be able to make that choice too. I don't see the value in taking it away from them.
I don't deny there are bad experiences. I do think Samsung is making a mistake & damaging customer trust with the refrigerator thing. I likely won't be buying one in the future.
Like anything, advertising can be done well or it can be done badly. I don't use Instagram myself, but I have a lot of friends who love fashion who do & say they're on their to follow brands & find deals. They find the ads a good way to discover some new fashion product & snag a good discount.
Likewise Amazon sent a catalog to my house. My kids are using it to think of what they want to ask Santa. A catalog is basically a book of ads.
The Atlantic recently wrote on how hotel policies have changed, with many no longer allowing free cancellations.
Why Hotel-Room Cancellations Disappeared
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/11/hotel-room-ca...
TL;DR: Hotel aggregators (e.g. Booking.com, Expedia) adopted a "cancel-rebook" strategy, where the aggregators would monitor hotel prices & rebook if the price dropped.
"TP-Link is a Chinese company that manufactures network equipment and smart home products. The company was established in 1996 in Shenzhen. TP-Link's main headquarters is located in Nanshan, Shenzhen; there is a smaller headquarters in Irvine, California"
This flies in the face of what we all lived through during the Biden administration.
All the major tech outlets[1, 2, 3] have come forward to say that Biden administration pressured them to remove content, including things like the negative impact on children of school closing during COVID.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/zuckerberg-says-biden-adm... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files [3] https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/google-says-biden-admin-...
Donald Trump would like a word.
The U of C is affiliated 101 Nobel Laureates (amongst the highest in the world) -- not to mention 10 Fields Medalists, 4 Turing Award winners, 58 MacArthur Fellows, 30 Marshall Scholars, & 55 Rhodes Scholars.
Friedman explained numerous time how he went from a New Deal left (having grown up in the Great Depression) to an fervent free market capitalist because he believed capitalism was more effective in helping people.
Now you may disagree, perhaps vigorously, but you should still be honest over their motivations.
U of C notably does not have an engineering program. When I attended (in the 90s), the rumor was that, over the years, several alumni had offered to make significant donations to start one, but it was always rejected for being "too applied."
We didn't even has a CS major for a long time, instead having "Mathmatics with a emphasis on computer science." When CS was introduced as a major, it was still very heavy in theory. I would estimate I didn't touch a computer for half of my classes?
They said it was a fact that COVID is NOT airborne. (It is.)
Not they believed it wasn't airborne.
Not that data was early but indicated it wasn't airborne.
That it was fact.
In fact, they published fact checks on social media asserting that position. Here is one example on the official WHO Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/WHO/posts/3019704278074935/?locale=...
Whenever this happened with me, Amazon was pretty quick to offer a refund/replacement.
For reference, the median hourly wage is $27/hour.
Did it ever have it?
Things such as this remind me of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect, when you notice the media is wrong about something you know, but still trust it on everything else.
> myNoise is now running on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosted at One, with audio assets served via a CDN through Cloudflare ...
One of the few movies to have a mathematical consultant in the credits!
Not to be disrespectful, but this is naive.
In a perfect world only "real" crimes would be prosecuted.
But almost every despot prosecuted their opponents by claiming they were criminals. Remember Nelson Mandela spent decades in prison as a criminal. The leaders of the KPD & SPD parties were both arrested as criminals during Nazi Germany. Putin has arrested many of his opponents, citing criminal behavior.
Saying "don't commit crimes" overlooks that the "crimes" themselves may not be real.
I don't mean ads for Apple products. I mean the ads that Apple sells in News, the App Store, where they track your behavior to personalize the ads you see and to see if you ever buy what the ad is selling.
It was nice of them to exclude Hawaii.
As someone not familiar with the case, I personally did find it pertinent information.
[citation needed]
If anything recent elections in the US have shown money is not the most important factor.
We have space in our basement. And with our kids getting into pre-teen/teen years, I think it'd be fun to have a place for lan parties.
I don't understand this. Between Iran and the Russia/Ukraine conflict, they seem to be very top of mind for many.