7 ms·
No matter how many years pass, downloading something from SourceForge feels like downloading a sketchy patched executable from a eastern european forum or a gam
by HidyBush 4y ago
No matter how many years pass, downloading something from SourceForge feels like downloading a sketchy patched executable from a eastern european forum or a game mod from some community managed website.
- nomemory 4y agoAs an Eastern European I don't understand what's wrong with Eastern European forums.
- HidyBush 4y agowhere have I said that they have something "wrong"?
- dudeman13 4y agoThe words just before it were "a sketchy patched executable". People are bound to infer there is something wrong with it, regardless of whatever your intentions might have been.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- manwe150 4y agoI think they meant it as a compliment, with a heavy dose of not knowing why or how though. Just that it worked.
- avalys 4y agoI just took it to mean it's sketchy downloading and running a binary from a forum where you don't speak the language. You have no idea if the vibe on the forum is friendly or hostile, if the first response to the post you're downloading from is someone saying "Hey, thanks for the great work as always!" - or someone coordinating an identity theft scam - or both! I think because of the abundance of expertise in low-level machine language there, many cracked deDRM'd binaries or patched executables for abandonware games come out of Eastern Europe, hence the association.
- Kye 4y agoThis was also before usable quality automatic translation was built into browsers. Babelfish would lose even more in translation than modern Google Translate.
- bombcar 4y agoCompare the lack of ads on HN with the ads found on (I don't know any offhand, but imagine a site dedicated to a game run on a PHP forum with ads). I remember finding some patches for Heroes III that were only available on some .ru site and there were lots of ads if you turned the adblocker off. I couldn't read Russian but it was pretty clear they were not the highest quality of ad.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y agoAs someone whose internet experience is firmly in the Anglosphere, when you see Cyrillic on a website, you think "I'm downloading malware". Keep in mind, I'm not going to Cyrillic sites for news, recipes or something else, it's usually related to software. And malware at least back in the day was endemic on those sites.
- Claude_Shannon 4y agoHave you perhaps ever visited Elektroda? :D
- archhn 4y agoYou think Eastern European is joke? https://youtu.be/fzLtF_PxbYw https://youtu.be/fzLtF_PxbYw
- p1peridine 4y agoNothing. I believe some Americans underestimate how many forums are actually hosted in Eastern Europe. They're still popular over here. In Norway (~5M population) you'll find atleast 3 huge forums but also several niche ones.
- hackernewds 4y agoA whole 3 forums?
- p1peridine 4y agoGeneral discussion forums, yes, atleast 3. And tens of various niche forums. It's not about "how many" it's about how much activity they generate compared to the population size of the country.
- fmajid 4y agoNorway is hardly Eastern Europe. It’s as Northern as it gets (specially when you consider Svalbard)
- p1peridine 4y agoYou're right, it should say Eastern/Northern Europe (or just Europe). I realize the mistake now, thanks for pointing that out.
- jbirer 4y agoSometimes you used to hit on ads with minors doing questionable things, if you were not getting a ransomware.
- callesgg 4y agoI dont understand why the easterneuropeans keep publishing strange software on strange fourums why don’t they just use GitHub??? When I wanted to change some hidden settings on my car I found many strange software packages on these strange forums. But nothing on GitHub, these forum people live in their own strange walled of garden.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]