7 ms·

I presume the only people you're hurting by downloading gigabytes of docs are the people on the plain that paid for the service. Maybe the company providing the

• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• yard2010 2y ago
  Me and my wife merged our facebook accounts to not take up space in facebook
  • Scoundreller 2y ago
    idid2
    • qingcharles 2y ago
      I'm literally just posting this to add another row to a database.
      • Scoundreller 2y ago
        unethical!
      • sgc 2y ago
        Let me clean that up for you. '; DROP TABLE comments; --
        • Cyphase 2y ago
          Stop that, Bobby!
      • Cyphase 2y ago
        For anyone else who wants to add a row to a database, but can't be bothered to post a comment, you can upvote this comment; each (voter, comment, vote) tuple is likely a row, or at least some amount of data. You're welcome.
      • Zak 2y ago
        Good thing HN doesn't use one! Though I suppose once it's storage mechanism performs enough of the functions of a database, it's an ad-hoc database.
• justusthane 2y ago
  Agreed. I applaud the initiative of figuring out they could access reddit via the CDN that Stripe uses - but downloading gigabytes of images for the sole purpose of "wasting their bandwidth"? Why??
  • annexrichmond 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • everforward 2y ago
      > Honestly this person probably felt they were truly sticking it to the big guy because how dare they charge for internet. I get the vibe, though I agree this was an unproductive way to pursue it. I strongly suspect the fee for access is not at all related to the cost to provide service; they’re leveraging the temporary monopoly on connectivity they have to get consumers to pay absurd prices. Cruise ships are similar; I think it was double digits per day for internet. I don’t think it’s productive to metaphorically “take the ball and go home”, but that instinct would probably be much lower if the fees for access were something reasonable.
      • vel0city 2y ago
        Marine satellite internet can get pricey especially pre-Starlink. Like, potentially thousands of dollars for a few gigs even today.
        • everforward 2y ago
          I went looking because I got curious; I found a reseller for Inmarsat’s Fleet Xpress plans, which are unmetered: https://www.pulsarbeyond.com/media/contentmanager/content/Fleet_Xpress_Premium_Rate_Plans_USD_-_A4_01212020-2.pdf https://www.pulsarbeyond.com/media/contentmanager/content/Fl... The highest tier with a price on it is burstable 8x4Mbps with guaranteed 1x0.5Mbps for $9k a month, which feels about right for a ferry (especially with some aggressive caching). They would break even with 30 customers paying $10 for access, though really I would be surprised if a ferry went far enough out to sea to need specialized internet (I am out of my depth, though, so maybe they do). All in all, interesting. The markups still feel high, but not nearly as outlandish as I would have thought. I wonder if at huge economies of scale you can get cheaper marine satellite internet if you don’t need full-ocean coverage. Eg cruise ships seem to sail the same routes on repeat, they don’t really need coverage of the entire ocean. I wonder if Royal Caribbean et al get cheaper service because they have pretty static and pre-defined routes, making it easier for the satellite provider to ensure there are satellites overhead when the ships are there.
• mmastrac 2y ago
  > And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me. This is a noble activity and I salute you for it, but I'm pretty sure that towers have traffic shaping that manage QoS and fairness for you.
  • kstrauser 2y ago
    I think it’s misguided. If the cell carrier can’t deliver its service to normal people doing normal things without inconveniencing other customers, it’s the carrier’s fault, not the users’. No way am I going to treat the service I paid for with kid gloves to make Verizon’s job easier. (Not talking about edge cases like BitTorrent or such. But if a carrier advertises watching streaming video on my phone, I don’t feel guilty downloading an app update. If their tower couldn’t handle that, it’s on them, not me.)
    • olyjohn 2y ago
      Why is BitTorrent an edge case? I paid for the bandwidth, if I want to host a... Linux ISO, why shouldn't I? What if I pay for, and download 30 movies for offline use onto my phone because I know I'm going somewhere that there is no service? Why is that wrong? What if I backup my entire phone to two separate backup services in the cloud? ISPs have done a great job shaming people who use their service for what it is supposed to be. It's 2024, and we should all have fiber to the home by now. But no, they're only working on deploying more shitty wireless connections to everybody and letting all the land-based services rot. Fuck them.
      • canes123456 2y ago
        I think you are overreacting. They didn’t say either of those things are immoral. They said it was an edge case. It is an edge case. The vast majority of people don’t know what a torrent is much and much less are downloading torrents on to their phones.
      • kstrauser 2y ago
        What canes123456 said. Also, I was talking in the context of cell connections. I have a vastly different expectation for wired connections: use that sucker up to whatever level you want and can afford. You paid for it, you use it. It's on the ISP to keep their network capacity upgraded to meet demand. (But even then, don't be a freaking sociopath. I have 10Gb fiber with no cap and I use it without a second thought, but don't like have a daemon that deliberately saturates it 24/7 or something. I run backups when it's convenient for me. I stream movies whenever. I download software updates as I please. I don't leave a copy of `iperf3` running just because I could, because that would be using up resources just for the hell of it, and that's never a good look.) Wireless is a bit different in that there's inherently limited bandwidth. You and I share the same RF fields. If I'm monopolizing them, you can't, and vice versa. Now, if you have a home 5G hotspot, do what thou wilt. Those are advertised to support a household. If they can't, they shouldn't advertise it. However, if I were at a baseball game with 40,000 other people, and I couldn't text my wife because I saw you having 300 torrent connections open on a laptop just because you could, I'd still kinda wanna throw a beer at you. It's like listening to music out loud on the bus. You can; you shouldn't.
• arsome 2y ago
  > And here I am, avoiding downloading things on cell service because it might negatively impact other people around me. You paid for that service, they should be able to provide it to you. If it negatively impacts other users, that's the provider's fault.
  • DidYaWipe 2y ago
    He DIDN'T pay.
    • lencastre 2y ago
      But did you give? You gotta give? See, it’s completely user funded!
  • londons_explore 2y ago
    I think the same whenever I turn on my gardening watering system at 7am and the whole 250 person street group chat starts complaining about lower water pressure and the fact nobody can have a shower. But, I'm not selfish so I just water the garden at 4am now.
    • FireBeyond 2y ago
      As a firefighter... If your neighborhood's water pressure is affected by you running a garden watering system that most likely maxes out at 15 gallons/minute, then you have a serious problem, god help you if there's a structure fire in the neighborhood. Seriously though, if you're not just exaggerating to make an example, contact your town/city/whatever Department of Works, something is seriously wrong.
      • londons_explore 2y ago
        London (UK) has deliberately low water pressures because the pipe network has a lot of leaks, and the lower the pressure the less water leaks out. It's low enough that some appliances like dishwashers and washing machines give 'water supply' errors unless you run them overnight. Some houses use pressure boosting pumps to get water to the top floor. Apparently fixing the leaks is expensive and it's free to just lower the pressure and pass the problem onto householders.
• lnxg33k1 2y ago
  Never lose the opportunity to fuck corporations, also it's not your duty to preserve others experience, it's not like that corporations don't give a phuck about having enough bandwidth or don't oversell and then we have to be scared of downloading something
  • sickofparadox 2y ago
    How communally-minded of you. That certainly is one way to solve the tragedy of the commons.
    • lnxg33k1 2y ago
      I am of the idea that the main issue are those at the top, but volounteers are also contributing to hide or make issues less pushy, what is the level of pain you're going to be able to support in order to let the community feel better, while execs pocket money?
    • rexpop 2y ago
      There is no such thing as "communally-minded" under private ownership. What we have is "rugged individualism" and free competition, ie "might makes right." I don't like it, but I can't escape it. It's ironic that you mention "tragedy of the commons." Literally, what we don't have is a commons. What we have is enclosure. So it's truly not a "tragedy of the commons" but a tragedy of private ownership or, specifically, a tragedy of the commons' absence. Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited.
      • Gormo 2y ago
        Everyone is a specific person, i.e. a "private" entity, and ownership represents the exclusivity of possession and use that is inherent in all economically rival goods. In order for anything to be owned and used by anyone, it must be owned and used by someone specific at the exclusion of others. In other words, "private ownership" is the only kind of ownership that actually exists. "The public" is an abstraction that resolves to lots of separate "private" people in aggregate -- it's not a specific entity capable of acting as an owner of anything. When people talk about "publkic ownership", what they're really describing is one specific organization acting as the de facto owner, but nominally acting on behalf of "the public" by being bound up in fiduciary responsibilities to others. That sounds nice in theory, but the incentive structures applicable to those institutons are often not aligned with the interests of "the public" (presuming that any singular interest can even be attributed to it), and the mechanisms of fiduciary accountability often do not work properly. What "public ownership" usually amounts to is private ownership by political institutions, which have their own interests and agendas. > Again, there is no use in being "communally-minded" within the confines of an entity that has no community spirit, eg a ruthless, cynical, bottom-lining private corporation. In this context, "communally-minded" action cannot and will not be rewarded. It will only be exploited. The corporation is an organizational model employed by people. It has no consciousness or will of its own, so attributing any of the above qualities, positive or negative, to it, is meaningless. Corporations cannot be ruthless or cynical, or be communally-minded or have any sort of "spirit". They are just processes. The people who are using the corporation as an organizational structure, on the other hand, can be any of those things. If you have a society full of greedy avaricious people, then commercial corporations will likely behave in ways that reflect greed and avarice. But then so again will every other expression of that society -- including political institutions and interpersonal interactions -- because it's not the abstract organizational model that possesses those qualities, it's the people. The reality here is that doing destructive things out of some antipathy toward the abstract "corporation" has concrete negative consequences for its employees, its customers, and its investors (who aren't cartoon characters wearing top hats and monocles, but include ordinary people trying to fund their retirements).