not anymore, my friends from #hackernews , not anymore . @midzer built thumbnails and WEBP-support for #flohmarkt today. and i helped him integrate it. it's amazing to see how fast stuff is loading now :)
in backend news, we made the communication with SMTP-servers more resilient, so your outbound mails just take a beer from the fridge and chill if your mailserver isn't available for a few moments.
Postgrest is of course written in #Haskell. But what I didn't know was that #Supabase is based on Postgrest, and they employ the lead developer of postgrest to work on it fulltime, which means Supabase is also based on Haskell!
Ask Microsoft: Are you using our personal data to train AI?
"We had four lawyers, three privacy experts, and two campaigners look at Microsoft's new Service Agreement, which will go into effect on 30 September, and none of our experts could tell if Microsoft plans on using your personal data – including audio, video, chat, and attachments from 130 products, including Office, Skype, Teams, and Xbox – to train its AI models..."
I've reached out to https://dm.hn and I think we're about to get a huge #OPML list of most of the blogs that were submitted to the original #HN thread!
It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money. A man would be annoyed if he found himself in a mob of millionaires, all holding out their silk hats for a penny; or all shouting with one voice, “Give me money.” Yet advertisement does really assault the eye very much as such a shout would assault the ear. “Budge’s Boots are the Best” simply means “Give me money”; “Use Seraphic Soap” simply means “Give me money.” It is a complete mistake to suppose that common people make our towns commonplace, with unsightly things like advertisements. Most of those whose wares are thus placarded everywhere are very wealthy gentlemen with coronets and country seats, men who are probably very particular about the artistic adornment of their own homes. They disfigure their towns in order to decorate their houses.
Thinking about Hacker News but sprinkled with #activitypub
imagine being able to reply and participate to any #HN post from the #fediverse and with #webmentions have fediverse comments mingled with native HN activity.
First they came for /r/pics ... now Reddit are coming for the individual personal subreddits
Quite some years ago I'd realised that amongst the problems with using Reddit as a personal blogging space (my avatar here is a relic of that, if you'd not put the two together) was that I do not in fact have any permanent claim to that space.
Reddit's previous policies of moderator re-assignment bothered me. The policies apparently instituted September 2022 and being rolled out aggressively in recent days ... have not weakened my concerns.
And, checking in now, I find a day-old modmail to /r/dredmorbius, a subreddit which only ever was my own personal posts with comments from a few friends, and about 1,000 subscribers ... has received a notice to reclaim by /u/Modcodeofconduct, screenshot attached here.
I have not abandoned the sub. I had closed it in protest of Reddit's continued failings and war against its volunteer moderators and general community.
The Reddit story goes deeper, and drags in Ycombinator and its popular news aggregator Hacker News
My submission earlier today about Reddit seeking to seize my personal subreddit of going on ten years drew 405 votes and 299 comments, but ranked 42nd on the archive page https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-06-22&p=2, well below posts with far fewer votes and/or comments.
I note that this conflicts with, and contradicts, a comment from a week ago reiterating HN's policy of moderating less not more on stories concerning YC companies, specifically noting that this was despite the somewhat distant-in-time and tenuous present relationship between YC and Reddit.
And that comment appears to be the first HN's mod team bothered mention the fact, as an HN site search reveals:
And yes, that can be repetitive and annoying and repetitively annoying ... but ... it is often one of the only viable venues for those who are disempowered to be heard.
HN's present Reddit policy both amplifies an existing power discrepancy (that of Reddit members against the company) and puts HN's own credibility at risk.
HN cannot simultaneously claim to:
moderate YC companies less,
impose a penalty for submissions concerning a specific YC company, and ]- fail to disclose the existence of that penalty at all.
The fact that HN have now put their thumb on the scale without notifying either submitters or the general readership concerns me greatly.
How about HN:
De-thumbs that scale
Clearly and prominently disclose the fact of the penalty, and the dates at which it was applied and lifted.
Applies a case-by-case assessment based on new significant information.
Provides a mechanism for aggregating similar classes of stories. E.g., the tens to hundreds of thousands of small and/or personal subreddits which Reddit are now acting to seize control of.
Hacker News's own credibility is very much at risk here and that itself is a serious concern to the site.
(Communicated to HN's mod team via email, toot here adapted slightly.)
My article on long-term perspectives of important information on the web gained additional momentum (and great reading rates) with the self-inflicted demise of #reddit:
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.
Note that some idiosyncrasies affect this, e.g., "New York City" appears rarely, whilst "New York" may refer to the city, state, any of several newspapers, universities, etc. "New York" appears 315 times in titles (mostly as "New York Times").
I've independently verified that, for example, "Ho Chi Minh City" doesn't appear, though "Ho Chi Minh" alone does: