The largest collection of free stuff on the internet!
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By renegat0x0 2026-02-237:221 reply - the site is awesome, but could be better
- I was also a fan of githubs awesome lists (eg. https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted)
- I think separated lists are cool, because they focus on one subject, like self-hosted above... but if all awesome lists were in one big list...
- awesome lists are often data, with a lack of search functionality. fmhy site has a search functionality, but I often prefer searching links by a 'tag'
- what most of awesome lists lack is 'votes', or 'ranking'
My solution is to provide links, with tags, and 'ranking' https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database. Provides search by link, title, description, whatever. I think that is where it all should go.
Also my database captures links from fmhy.
By input_sh 2026-02-239:54 I think an important distinction is that most of the awesome lists required an entry to have some sort of a sentence-long pitch about why something's awesome instead of a giant list of items with no way to distinguish between them without clicking. That's far more important than tags in my opinion.
That said, I am biased as I maintained quite a few of them years ago and am happy to see today's youngling maintain this tradition of low-effort contributions to make a source that's better than a search engine when looking for stuff in a specific niche.
By CobrastanJorji 2026-02-234:444 reply Note for the hacker crowd: they don't mean free as in speech. They mean free as in beer that fell off a truck.
By stackghost 2026-02-234:483 reply When I was coming up, hackers embraced both those definitions. "Information wants to be free" and "fuck corporations" were our guiding principles.
Edit: to the dead comment in reply to this one, of course it's more nuanced than "all information should be public at all times". It's almost like a 5-word axiom necessarily omits nuance in exchange for brevity.
Hackers also used to exhibit critical thinking skills, sheesh.
By dudefeliciano 2026-02-239:17 VC "hackers" still think that information is free and fuck corporations, just as long as it's not "their" information or "their" corporation
That’s long gone, especially around here. YC is YC.
It’s sad the best we could do in terms of community forum is a VC’s website.
By stackghost 2026-02-237:18 >It’s sad the best we could do in terms of community forum is a VC’s website.
It is sad. There are definitely some talented people here but the pervasive corporate bootlicking is pretty hard to take, at times.
Certain usenet newsgroups had a similar vibe, once upon a time, but usenet couldn't solve the spam problem.
By vovavili 2026-02-2321:13 Ycombinator is far from your average venture capital rent-seeking company. I am surprised that a person who thinks this way without added nuance would spent time on this website.
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-235:231 reply [flagged]
By staplers 2026-02-235:31 Meta, openai, google have a bridge to sell you
"Beer that fell off a truck" has a somewhat negative connotation, but FMHY-listed sites are generally not only free, but also high quality, especially the starred ones. Nowadays when I'm looking for a service to do something I just search FMHY instead of a search engine. Much better results.
“Fell off the back of a truck” is a euphemism for stolen goods; it’s not so much about quality (indeed warez releases are often stripped of ads/launchers/annoyances, rendering them very high quality).
By vntok 2026-02-239:03 Copying Is Not Theft
By numbers_guy 2026-02-238:54 They mean free as in a poem that can be recited by anyone who has listened to it previously.
By aardv44rk 2026-02-236:53 Speech isn't a medium in this context.
Piracy is preservation.
Always has been.
Rightsholders must not be allowed to control how works are preserved, else they can very easily steal from the eventual public domain in ways that mere piracy can never be considered stealing.
By franga2000 2026-02-237:101 reply I think it's insane that the concept of a legal deposit [0] is so rarely extended to films or other media. Even more insane is that US courts have found it to be unconstitutional. A primary school's student newspaper needs to send two copies to the national library, while a movie can be played in every cinema in the nation and...nothing?? Let alone video games and other, more complicated media...
Everyone likes to shit on patents, but patents are designed well. You invent a thing and in exchange for publishing it openly, you get time-limited exclusive rights to it. Why the hell is copyright not like that?
By zahlman 2026-02-238:08 > Everyone likes to shit on patents, but patents are designed well.
I think the critique of patents has more to do with the patent officers often being ignorant of blatant, widespread prior art, or having a bizarre idea of how the relevant legal principles should apply in a particular problem domain.
By charcircuit 2026-02-239:011 reply It's sufficient but not necessary. It would be better if there was an entity like the library of congress who would keep it safe, but private until copyright expired after which it would become public. Right now piracy leads to way more of free entertainment than preservation.
By account42 2026-02-239:59 In practice, it's necessary. While escrow should absolutely be a requirement to receive the benefits of copyright protection you'd also need to make sure that the escrowed artifact is actually complete and in a usable form and covers every version of the work. That means a lot more than dumping it onto the library of congress so even with that requirement we would benefit from independent archival.
well maybe but they don't do a very good job at it
popular stuff that you could watch anywhere, you can pirate of course
but anything more obscure is impossible to find, or was there at one point but is now long gone
By circularfoyers 2026-02-2312:171 reply Whose "they"? Private sites do a phenomenal job at preserving a large amount of rare content.
By 1317 2026-02-247:20 what's the point if no one can see it
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-239:002 reply [flagged]
Do you not believe that the eventual purpose of limited copyright terms is to incentivize creation of works and enrich the public domain?
I am absolutely not trolling. Historically, pirated works become more accessible than non-pirated works. Especially in the realm of computer software and video games.
Rightsholders are more often than not horrible stewards of their own legacy. The best way to preserve works is to spread them far and wide. Universal was doing a great job managing their masters, until it all went up in flame.
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-2510:05 Thanks for responding thoughtfully. I think we agree that the point of limited copyright is to encourage creation of works. I would say that creating and selling the works is already a substantial benefit to the public who opt to buy or license them (and in the case of physical copies at least, resell or swap them). I see only a moderate social value in forcing them to eventually become public domain (I have never waited with bated breath for a particular text to be added to Project Gutenberg), but I'm certainly not opposed to such limits.
> The best way to preserve works is to spread them far and wide.
I disagree. We are in an age of cheap and abundant digital storage; preserving works for the public good could be adequately covered by introducing a requirement that copyright holders archive their digital works in a government archive, to be unlocked when copyright expires. (Due to the extreme time limit, there would not even be any incentive to abuse such a service for regular file storage.) I would be happy for a few of my tax dollars to go towards keeping the lights on in a government data centre holding all this. Unlike piracy, this approach has the advantage of not violating the rights of the copyright holder.
In practice, it's undeniable that essentially all piracy is done thoughtlessly, for the immediate gain of the pirate, and because they technically can, so the idea that it is being done to better society seems extremely convenient to say the least. Even in cases where piracy winds up financially benefiting the creator due to the increased public awareness of their creation, it should be the creator's decision how much of this to allow, in the same way that I should have the right to throw a perfectly good apple I just bought in the bin if I want to.
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-2322:39 In the time it took you to write that comment, you could have pirated something. Something that the original creator will doubtless now steal from future generations.
Let that be upon your head.
By dncornholio 2026-02-239:183 reply Piracy = Piracy. Stop doing mental gymnastics to justify stealing. If you rip a movie and put it up on the internet, it's not preservation, it's piracy.
By account42 2026-02-2310:01 Even if you disagree with copyright infringement, it's not the same as stealing.
By skeaker 2026-02-2320:43 Patently false, just look as far as Netflix taking down exclusive shows and movies from their catalog. You would literally not be able to watch them anymore if not for folks putting them up online.
By LocalH 2026-02-246:59 Copyright infringement is not stealing. It falls under no theft laws.
It may be a crime in certain situations (most notably, non-commercial infringement is almost never a crime unless done prior to a work's initial publication, but rather a civil issue).
