More wildflower goodness on today’s hike: white death camas (don’t eat! ☠️), blue mist and purple penstemon, yellow cinquefoil, yellow arnica, white fleabane, plus many more. 🌼
My hike this morning took me to the top of the 1st Flatiron (the big slab on the right in the first photo). A classic, with beautiful scenery at the top.
Three years ago when the pandemic first shut everything down, I was so despondent and isolated for the summer. So I threw myself into a garden project, turning a weedy area of the lawn into a wildflower patch. That first year was all preparation for the following spring: digging out the grass and weeds, forming the patch using leftover wood from damaged trees, enriching the soil, and sowing all varieties of native wildflower seeds in the fall for spring germination. I am so glad I did this project because it brings me so much happiness today. This is the third year it is blooming — it is beautiful, and it attracts so many wonderful pollinators!
🌼🌿🐝🦋💜
Currently blooming: orange wallflowers, blue flax (they’re done for the day, but will reappear in the morning), yellow prince’s plume, white daisies, and a few pink dianthus just starting. There are so many other flowers in there waiting for their turn to shine as the season goes on.
A question about what states were most-frequently represented on the HN homepage had me do some quick querying via Hacker News's Algolia search ... which is NOT limited to the front page. Those results were ... surprising (Maine and Iowa outstrip the more probable results of California and, say, New York). Results are further confounded by other factors.
HN provides an interface to historical front-page stories (https://news.ycombinator.com/front), and that can be crawled by providing a list of corresponding date specifications, e.g.:
So I'm crawling that and compiling a local archive. Rate-limiting and other factors mean that's only about halfway complete, and a full pull will take another day or so.
But I'll be able to look at story titles, sites, submitters, time-based patterns (day of week, day of month, month of year, yearly variations), and other patterns. There's also looking at mean points and comments by various dimensions.
Among surprises are that as of January 2015, among the highest consistently-voted sites is The Guardian. I'd thought HN leaned consistently less liberal.
The full archive will probably be < 1 GB (raw HTML), currently 123 MB on disk.
Contents are the 30 top-voted stories for each day since 20 February 2007.
If anyone has suggestions for other questions to ask of this, fire away.
NY is highly overrepresented (NY Times, NY Post, NY City), likewise Washington (Post, Times, DC). Adding in "Silicon Valley" and a few other toponyms boosts California's score markedly. I've also got some city-based analytics.
How Much Colorado Love? Or a 16-year Hacker News Front Page analytics
I've pulled 5,939 front pages from Hacker News, dating from 20 February 2007 to 25 May 2023, initially to answer the question "how often is Colorado mentioned on the front page?" (38 times, 5th most frequent US state). This also affords the opportunity to ask and answer other questions.
Fresh finds in the garden today: white columbine and prince’s plume. Afternoon thunderstorms brought more gentle rain — the garden is so green and alive this year! 🌿
Colorado Becomes the First State to Limit Court Use of Family Reunification Camps
A new bill restricts the use of reunification programs and requires domestic violence training for experts in custody cases. Lawmakers credit ProPublica’s reporting for exposing the need for reforms in the family court system.
The City of #Boulder, #Colorado‘s e-bike rebate program begins in July. Residents will be able to get $300 back off the price an e-bike or $500 off an e-cargo bike sold by local retailers. Low-income residents get even more back, $1200/$1400 respectively.