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Most addictions will ruin your life - whether it is gambling, drugs or alcohol.

Right, so why advertise gambling or any other of them?

Food addiction kills too. Shall we stop advertising food?

Why should we advertise something that you have to go consume? Do you need advertising to tell you about bread, vegetables, meat?

> Do you need advertising to tell you about bread, vegetables, meat?

Looking around at the world, yes?

Less-heathy takeaway chains do advertise constantly, and concepts like the food pyramid are there to literally "tell you about bread, vegetables, meat" as an advertisement for a better alternative.

People aren't born knowing this - if they don't learn it from parents, they will either learn it from someone else, or not know it and have a poor diet out of ignorance.


> Food addiction kills too. Shall we stop advertising food?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq5y2vzlyldo

> 4 January 2026: Junk food adverts are banned on television and online starting on Monday as part of a drive to tackle childhood obesity.

It seems that the factual answer is "yes", in certain conditions of the most addictive food and most susceptible audience.


Not really commenting on the politics side, but do Americans realise sports betting has been legal in other countries for decades? (Since 1960 in the UK at least).

Yes, there were a few fixes when in-game betting and exchanges first came in in the UK, but by and large most problems are solved now.

Maybe a less parochial view would help them get a sense of proportion?


The power of "Kill a Commie for Mommy".

Hahaha

If it wasn't for 4Chan, we might never have solved the Haruhi problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superpermutation#Lower_bounds,...

I used to go on a curated version of 4Chan via Telegram. Yes there is a lot of racism (although it flies in every direction, between every ethnicity you could imagine) but there is also (due to the anonymous nature) some genuinely interesting discussions. I remember one thread about aircraft carriers being of no use being debated by US and UK submarine officers.

There are also some genuinely funny bits. There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university. His nickname was Dormogenes.


It is the freedom that comes from being anonymous.

To mock and ridicule, yes. to speak your mind, sure, But first and foremost to discuss between true equals, because you can only be judged by what you write, because the value you are bringing to the discussion comes from your words and not from your reputation as the real-world human you are.

Being free to discuss controversial topics without having repercussion to your job or family (which is why doxxing was so frowned upon back then)

Being free to do some stupid childish fun, just for laughs.

Something we still had when it was just forums, even though we did have accounts they did not represent our whole persona, and we could be different people on different platform.

Something that was almost lost for good when normies invaded the internet due to social networks. It's not completely lost yet, and we must fight to keep it.


>There was a guy in Greece who had found out that as long as he never graduated, he could live a basic life for free at university.

I remember him. Sadly he got evicted in the end. F.


Unless it was someone else larping as him, as recent as feb this year he posted that he's still living there (apparently got an extension or something). He was arrested, but he got released within a few days.


More like Φ probably

there is a great clickhole headline that your comment reminds me of

"Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point"

4chan has produced some hilarious/interesting stuff, and they have also driven people to suicide. i suppose it is up to everyone individually to make the value judgement there.


> and they have also driven people to suicide

As has Reddit, Facebook, etc.

Bad things occasionally happening on a platform doesn't make the platform/site inherently bad.


weird combination of "what about" and misinterpreting my comment.

Not really when you were holding up causing suicide as why it's bad when every high traffic social network has done that.

yes, you are repeating the "what about" part. my comment has literally nothing to do with other social networks.

if it helps, feel free to apply the original quote to facebook or whatever when they do something good. but this article and comment chain is about 4chan. so i am talking about 4chan.


"Whataboutism" is just the cry of people upset others disagreed with their stance in a way they disliked.

lol, what are you talking about? i said i was reminded of a quote, that is it. no one disagreed, they just said “other people do it too” and put words in my mouth so they could argue about something.

like, what “stance” do you think i am even trying to take?


Well, much like HN, 4chan is a couple dozen boards of different topics frequented by something like 22 million unique users every month. So of course there's going to be good things there. And of course there's going to be bad things there. You don't get to pick and choose.

Trying to make a "value judgment" and boil the whole thing down to "4chan good" or "4chan bad," seems with even the most generous interpretation... incredibly reductive and foolhardy.


i wasnt trying to make any sort of profound point. i was reminded of an applicable quote i like, so i posted it.

and of course my comment is reductive, it is a total of 3 sentences. i dont really know what nuance you were expecting to get out a 3 sentence comment.

everything is gray, with both good and bad. 4chan included. there we go -- more true, less interesting.


Replace "4chan" with "humanity in general" and your statement still holds true.

I mean that's pretty vacuously true, since (the community of) "4chan" is a subset of (the total population of) "humanity in general," but it's a stronger and more interesting claim to make about the subculture in question.

If anything, the person you were replying to was intentionally describing how 4chan is less dissimilar to humanity in general than its typical portrayal, so responding with a dismissal that that makes them just the same as everyone else is really just affirming their point.


"4chan has done these" and "humanity has done these" are equally vacuous.

sure, yeah, the original quote was about a person instead of a website, so that makes sense.

Societies drive people to suicide in general. Families also do. I don't think the solution is to make the world a padded room.

>I don't think the solution is to make the world a padded room.

..neither do i?


I haven't gone on in many years, almost decades. I feel like it was both a huge waste of time but also useful. I eventually lost interest in keeping up with it all. I am surprised anyone's mind can handle being there for long. Even m00t himself left and I don't think ever came back.

While there's plenty of legit, true racism throughout 4chan I was always struck by how incredibly specific it could get. Like "Congolese Bantus subjugating pygmies" kind of specific.

They did the same when they raided Roger Stone.

Roger Stone had a history of making violent threats and long association with an armed paramilitary group. There was also the tape recording of him appearing to plan violence against two Democratic elected officials.

Afroman, by contrast, smokes a lot of weed.


I wish my bloody commuter train into London had Starlink. Even when the onboard wifi works you are limited to 100mb of traffic.

I get a better 5g signal on the Jubilee line than I do on an overground train.


Just swap mac address if you have to use such a wifi. Or set up Xray[0] with the captive portal as domain if you have a VPS and are so inclined. Can also use this on locked down airplane wifi.

0. https://github.com/XTLS/Xray-core


can always macgyver your own antenna like this guy in Brazil https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/passageiro-causa-polemica-ao-...

Just get a good 5G plan? On the ground in a busy metropolis like London, I can't imagine why or how you would need to consider using satellite communication for connectivity. Then again the last time I was in London the cellular service was by and large pretty bad.

yeah, 5g doesn't work on trains very well once just a little bit out of zone 2/3. Actually to be honest any connectivity at all is patchy.

This is what happens when people argue past each other on "Trust the science".

Science is good, but it's mediated via corruptible humans.


Also, "science" isn't some sort of dogma that you should trust, it's a process you should follow.

"Trust the science" is anathema to the process. If anything, the chant should be "Doubt the science! Give it your best shot, refute it with data, with logic, provide a better explanation!"


Realistically, the vast majority of people will not have a real chance to "refute" or even evaluate scientific claims. Maybe given a lot of time and foundational work to learn the field, some percentage of people can usefully think about them, but the vast majority can't. A lot of people are functional illiterates. They will pick based on trust and gut feelings either way.

For example, when deciding whether to give your kids certain vaccines or not, you really can't expect that new parents will read the primary literature and try to refute or confirm the conclusions based on the numbers and will trace through the citations and so on... Any of those claims will also have some online account on social media refuting it with equally scientifically sounding words. In the end it will come down to heuristics and your model of how the world works, which set of people operate with what kind of intention. Like maybe you know people working in the field who you trust and hear from them that generally this sort of stuff can be trusted. Or maybe you had some bad experiences getting screwed by "the establishment" (maybe even unrelated to medicine) and now you lump all this together and distrust them.


Which is why we need people "doing science" to also focus on getting rid of bad ideas rather than just coming up with more. The present incentive structure is such that we reward people for coming up with shocking new ideas even if they are obviously rubbish and don't do enough to reward the ones who put in the effort to debunking existing bad ideas.

Coming up with ideas is the easy part of science, but most new ideas are wrong. Getting rid of the ones that aren't actually correct is hard, yet we shower praise on people doing the easy part and ignore the ones doing the hard part.


I heard YCombinator definitely want to buy ClackerNews: https://clackernews.com/

We could have an AI Dang.


> The moderator bot *clang* enforces community standards.


>We could have an AI Dang

"We trained the dang-AI on thousands of dang posts, and now it's a Zen master and wants to sit under a tree and contemplate bees."


Why not ClankerNews?


Not mine but I guess they wanted the rhyme.


Damn, they have the same post over there:

https://clackernews.com/item/675


Missed opportunity to call it Clankernews


This is hilarious thank you for sharing


Disappointed to see nothing about Clacks.


In the days before the web, when bandwidth between sites was limited, Lotus Notes was amazing.

It will beats outlook as a mail client in a lot of ways, such as having actual usable full text search.


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