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Oracle Suspended My Account

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Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#281

Post by dang »

kevinh wrote: post #162
vintermann wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least Hacker News isn't randomly suspending accounts without notice...I think.

Shadowbanning definitely happens on HN.

In a couple pretty well-defined cases, where it makes sense. Otherwise we tell people we're banning them, and why.

This is all discussed at length in past comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... If you or anyone has a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to answer it - but please familiarize yourself with the past answers first, because as far as I know it's all pretty thoroughly explained. Certainly that's the intention.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#282

Post by dang »

pseudalopex wrote: post #241
Bayart wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really shouldn't. People don't get randomly shadowbanned. Turning it on just shows a whole lot of vile, aggressive, hysterical rubbish.

Most dead comments are rubbish. Some are only unpopular. 1 dead comment is enough to shadow ban a new account apparently.

> 1 dead comment is enough to shadow ban a new account apparently.

That's definitely not so.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#283

Post by helpfulmandrill »

kube-system wrote: post #202
helpfulmandrill wrote: post #78

Got the same thing with Ebay. I created an account. I attempted to sell a Linguistics textbook. I was immediately banned. They wouldn't tell me why. My account will still let me BUY from ebay. But I'm not going to.

eBay is really aggressive with fraud prevention for sellers because there's a bunch of scammers making fake listings trying to make a quick buck and eBay will always reimburse the end customer. I know that if you share any address/payment method/IP address/etc with someone who previously flaked out as a seller, they'll ban your account. It sucks but I don't really know what they could do to improve it.

Maybe they could let me prove that I'm not the guy who used to live at my address. I could prove that really easily, they just don't care.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#284

Post by _huayra_ »

striking wrote: post #276
_huayra_ wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually my approach: move things to "self hosted in the cloud", then move to on-prem (hopefully timed to when I finally get a house after the housing slump gets worse in a year or so fingers crossed ). Although the costs aren't monumental, it does add up more than using basic hardware at home (I live in an area with fairly cheap electricity). I also work for one of the major cloud providers, so it kinda pain…

Yeah, but a lot of that margin is from scale, no? The numbers aren't quite the same when it's just you working on your homelab. Definitely agree with self-hosting when it makes sense, but cost alone might not be a good reason.

Yes, scale is a huge factor creating the margin. I'm actually on a team that is responsible for guiding the cloud part of the company in what hardware to buy (among other things), and I've seen the purchase orders; it is indeed incredible the deals one can cut when one buys hundreds of thousands of things.

However, whatever deal one may be able to cut there must be accounted for in terms of the rest of COGS, including salaries, taxes, and everything else. The company charges well above COGS in order to turn a sizable profit, and to give some room to compress the profit margin should another cloud provider decide to pressure them on prices.

Basically, the cost would be comparable if you invoiced yourself for your time setting up your homelab, and had to pay your spouse a fee for taking up a perfectly fine closet with noisy blinking lights.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#285

Post by Rackedup »

dang wrote: post #282
pseudalopex wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most dead comments are rubbish. Some are only unpopular. 1 dead comment is enough to shadow ban a new account apparently.

> 1 dead comment is enough to shadow ban a new account apparently. That's definitely not so.

I think I am shadow banned, any idea why?

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#286

Post by dang »

Rackedup wrote: post #285
dang wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1 dead comment is enough to shadow ban a new account apparently. That's definitely not so.

I think I am shadow banned, any idea why?

Please email hn@ycombinator.com with this kind of question. That's in the site guidelines btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#287

Post by vkou »

sesm wrote: post #251
Shorel wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Your free instance used more than 12345* CPU credits under 24 hours, therefore you exceeded the threshold for automatic termination." This number is published, and someone creates a script to launch hundreds or thousands of free instances that all run exactly 12344 credits every 24 hours and are used as spam boxes, or cryptocurrency mining, or something similar that degrades the platform for all other users. * meani…

Dedicated abuser can find this limit experimentally via binary search.

If you don't tell them which one of many rate-limiters they've tripped, it's going to take them a lot more effort than a simple binary search.

The only secure system is one that doesn't work, perfect security isn't the goal. Good enough security is.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#288

Post by vkou »

jjav wrote: post #280
vkou wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if the real world operated that way. The real world does operate in exactly that way, with a scant few exceptions. It's often even less scrutable than what I described. > The police arrest you and throw you in jail for unspecified reasons and you're not allowed to know why or defend yourself. Since you're saying this, it doesn't sound like you've had a lot of confrontations with police. (And if you ever do,…

> The police can and absolutely do arrest, intimidate, harass, and violently assault people for unspecified, fabricated or utterly bullshit reasons I was going to include a sentence on police corruption in the original response but decided to leave it out. Yes, that happens, far more often than it ever should. But an important point is that it is corruption. It is not how the system is supposed to work. It's not much…

> But an important point is that it is corruption.

It's only corruption if they are doing it for the benefit of someone in particular (Say, a politician that uses them for a personal vendetta).

Most of the time, they aren't, they are just doing it because their mentality is to treat the citizenry as the enemy. It's not corruption, nobody benefits from it, it's just plain banal evil.

> It is not how the system is supposed to work.

According to who? You and me? Sure, but we're a minority opinion on this question. The public is overwhelmingly opposed to us on this.

> In today's world, it does.

> Just this week there was a discussion here on how the unjustified account blocks impact the poor with the least resources.

Strong disagreement. All of these problems are nothing compared to what one bad cop (Or landlord, or employer, or boss, etc, etc, etc) on a power trip can do to you, especially if you are poor. And, as I said, they are one of the more 'accountable' institutions you get to interact with. You have (in theory) legal and constitutional protections against abuse by them.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#289

Post by Rackedup »

dang wrote: post #286
Rackedup wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I am shadow banned, any idea why?

Please email hn@ycombinator.com with this kind of question. That's in the site guidelines btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html .

It would be nice if I could privately message you on this board since my email account is not associated with my HN account... feels like a violation of privacy.

Re: Oracle Suspended My Account

#290

Post by jjav »

vkou wrote: post #288
jjav wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The police can and absolutely do arrest, intimidate, harass, and violently assault people for unspecified, fabricated or utterly bullshit reasons I was going to include a sentence on police corruption in the original response but decided to leave it out. Yes, that happens, far more often than it ever should. But an important point is that it is corruption. It is not how the system is supposed to work. It's not much…

> But an important point is that it is corruption. It's only corruption if they are doing it for the benefit of someone in particular (Say, a politician that uses them for a personal vendetta). Most of the time, they aren't, they are just doing it because their mentality is to treat the citizenry as the enemy. It's not corruption, nobody benefits from it, it's just plain banal evil. > It is not how the system is supp…

> > It is not how the system is supposed to work.

> According to who? You and me?

No, not you and me; the law as written.

Sure the police often ignore the laws and too often get away with it, but because there are laws written down there is at least an opportunity to challenge the injustices in court.

In contrast with the cloud companies who don't reveal any of their rules and just ban people left and right for no discernible reason and there is no possibility to challenge these arbitrary rulings anywhere.

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