dredmorbius

dredmorbius, 1 year ago to random

Hacker News front-page analytics

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.

Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36076870

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.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-05-25<br></br>

Easy enough.

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.

And, as of early 2015, top state mentions are:

 1. new york:         150<br></br> 2. california:       101<br></br> 3. texas:             39<br></br> 4. washington:        38<br></br> 5. colorado:          15<br></br> 6. florida:           10<br></br> 7. georgia:           10<br></br> 8. kansas:            10<br></br> 9. north carolina:     9<br></br>10. oregon:             9<br></br>

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.

#hn #hackernews #data #DataAnalysis #WebCrawling

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to eink

So, Pocket, the article-archival tool that keeps getting worse the more you use it, has just become immeasurably worse.

I've reverted from version 8.6.x to no, not 8.5, not 8.4, not 8.2, but 8.1.1.0 from freaking February of this year to revert these completely fucking brain-dead changes.

The TL;DR: link is https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/mozilla-corporation/pocket/pocket-8-1-0-0-release/

That's what you want to install and freeze on until Pocket catches a motherfucking clue.

I've had a long an unhappy relationship with this feature and app. Its sole claims to my continued use are that it holds nearly 5 GB of content hostage, and that it, unbelievably, seems to be the best of what is an immensely shitty application space. See my now-six-year-old rant virtually all of which remains valid: https://web.archive.org/web/20190512092903/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_it_gets_worse_the_more_you_use_it/#

Most recently, Pocket has lost two features:

• A "page flip" mode, which though itself hugely flawed, is better than scrolling through articles, especially on e-ink devices.
• The ability to view all articles either in the (hugely preferable, very useful) #ReadabilityJS view, or in-app in a "web view". The latter now revert to your device's default Web Browser app on mobile devices.

The problem with that latter is that the task of annotating and tagging articles (my principle remaining justification for Pocket) is made vastly more tedious --- and it's already more than adequately tedious in previous Pocket versions. To the point it's not even worthwhile.

Fortunately, I was able to hunt down a prior version of the app (using the APKMirror app), and I will not be upgrading Pocket beyond the most recent version I can find which still supports both Page Flip and Web View modes, as noted above 8.1.1. from 17 February 2023. (Few if any of Pocket's "improvements" over the past five years have had any value to me whatsoever, so this is little loss.)

There is of course a Relevant xkcd: "Software Updates":

https://xkcd.com/2224/

I would so like to see a useful document-management solution for tablets and e-ink devices with the ability to managed both offline and online (Web-based) content.

Boosts and re-sharing this on other platforms is strongly encouraged.

Edits: I'm updating this toot as I'm finding out more. In particular, what version(s) of Pocket are NOT affected by these changes is not yet clear.

#Pocket #GetPocket #MozillaPocket #Mozilla #ApkMirror #EInk #DocumentManagement #xkcd #xkcd2224 #kfc #webfs #docfs

dredmorbius, 10 months ago to random

There are old planks, there are bold planks, and there are cold planks.

But there are no old, bold, cold planks.

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to reddit

So ... I've just logged in to Reddit for what appears to be the first time in five months, to set my small stable of subreddits dark.

(Few of those are in fact active, but hey...)

#Reddit #RedditBlackout

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to reddit

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.

And I will not go quietly.

#Reddit #FuckReddit #ModCodeOfConduct #RedditStrike #RedditBlackout

dredmorbius, 3 years ago to random

An administrative announcement.
Motherfuckers.

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to reddit

Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts

With Google’s generally poor search results nowadays, appending “reddit” has long been the default way I search for almost anything (and no, I’m not ready to get my info from an AI chatbot, either). But given the sheer volume of subreddits that are currently unavailable — including some of the most-subscribed subreddits — clicking through many Reddit links in search results takes me to a message saying the subreddit is private. ...

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759942/google-reddit-subreddit-blackout-protests

Seems Google (and Bing ... by extension DDG) might want to consider whether they want to be working on Maggie's farm no more.

#Reddit #RedditStrike #Google #WebSearch #InternetOfShit #KillingTheGooseThatLaysGoldenEggs #GoldenGoose #UnintendedConsequences #Sharecropping #Sharecroppers #Dylan

rustoleumlove, 11 months ago to climate

new article on lab tests of the impact of hot & humid environments on ppl.

their conclusion? a #WetBulb of only 88C is actually really dangerous. ( = ~100F at 50% humidity)

'A combo of temp. & humidity causing a person’s core temp to rise is called the “critical environmental limit." Below limit, a body can maintain a stable core temp over time. Above limit, core temp rises continuously & risk of heat illness w prolonged exposure increases'

#Climate #wx #ClimateChange

https://theconversation.com/how-hot-is-too-hot-for-the-human-body-our-lab-found-heat-humidity-gets-dangerous-faster-than-many-people-realize-185593

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to random

#DearHivemind / #DearMastomind: I'm trying to find an essay on the evolution of a "scene", possibly from the aughts.

It's on the evolution of groups and cliques. Possibly band scenes or artists. First you've got the artists / creators, then you get the afficionadoes who recognise great work on their own, then the groupies and fans, then the people who follow the crowd (and often: "social opportunities" to put that spin on it), then the opportunists who seek to benefit from the crowd itself: advertisers, pickpockets, scammers, swag sellers, etc.

If this rings bells, please respond.

Boosts appreciated.

#SceneEvolution #Groupies #Creators

dredmorbius, 1 year ago to random

A: They're members of the aluminati.

#DadJokes #CursesFoiledAgain #ThereIsNoTinfoilCabal

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to random

The #TeamHuman podcast now has ads.

dredmorbius, 1 year ago to random

Does anyone know what the mid-century (1940s -- 1970s or so) scrolling ticker signage based on light bulbs and electric relays was called? NOT neon lighting.

There's a current equivalent of LED signage, but I'm talking of the old-style ones based on incandescent lights which you could hear relays clicking as the image / message advanced. Often found in big-city downtowns, e.g., NYC. Particularly theatres and such.

I'm pretty sure this is one such display: https://media.gettyimages.com/videos/electric-news-bulletin-scrolling-korean-communists-conflict-walgreens-video-id510557321?s=640x640

Also here on "The Light Restaurant", reading "RESENTED BY WCBS - TV": https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-LE4ssUh4hKw/WCwquKoDISI/AAAAAAAAmv0/vO_mwFNY4MsrQtct42LRxqauETn03l3qACLcB/s1600/Times%2BSquare%252C%2B1959.jpg

And lots of video examples in this clip: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=yZSq52Jq1os (NYC, 1950s)

And London (also 1950s): https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ZtoXNfIV-JY

I'm curious what trade names / products were associated with these.

Boosts appreciated.

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to random

Have you ever considered the Hard Problem of Conscientiousness?

dredmorbius, 1 year ago to random

I've almost completely forgotten about Ello, though occasionally I'll pull up some of my own posts at the site. Something I'd specifically anticipated by creating an index page of significant posts: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/dlz9c2z6x-tvkd7rxtxwpw

For a site which could have been so good ... the experience is so utterly frustrating.

Two elements contribute most to that:

• Lack of any effective on-site search (compounded by near-total Web search opacity). It's simply impossible to find anything.
• Interstitial overlay nags. After a few seconds, every page is overwritten by a nag demanding signing up to the network. (Memo to whomever runs Ello these days: I've got an account, I just don't have the spoons to log in.) I'm pretty good at fixing such annoyances with CSS and local stylesheets, but Ello manages to defeat me here. (Second memo to whomever runs Ello these days: If you're going to fight your audience and/or authors, You Will Lose.)

I'd stopped contributing to the site years ago. Along with very nearly everyone I know who'd posted there. It's now painful even to try to link or reference my back-catalogue there, and I really don't want to invoke the site's abuse on others.

Enshittification indeed.

I'm aware that online economics suck. Don't make the problems worse.

#Enshitification #Ello #ElloHasBeenEnshittified

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to random

Mastodon badly wants for some longer Mute options.

I'd like to see 1 month, 6 months, and a year, f'rex.

#mastodev

dredmorbius, 2 years ago to books

The Modern World Can't Exist Without These Four Ingredients. They All Require Fossil Fuels

Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.

https://time.com/6175734/reliance-on-fossil-fuels/

Paywall / broken JS: https://archive.ph/7FFlL

HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31395036

Edit: tyop: s/Payall/Paywall/

#VaclavSmil #Postcarbon #FossilFuels #Materials #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange #Limits #LimitsToGrowth #resources #Books

dredmorbius, 11 months ago to random

Is it just me, or does #Threadreader now need a Twitter login to create / view a thread?

#DearMastomind #DearHivemind

dredmorbius, 1 year ago to fediverse

How do you keep small independent communities both small and interesting?

-- pixl97 @ HN

One inspiration I've had comes from thinking about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).

There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).

These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.

As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:

• Many of these schools were either formed or saw a sharp growth following the Sputnik scare and emphasis on higher education in the 1950s. See particularly California's Master Plan for Higher Education: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Master_Plan_for_Higher_Education, or the UK's "Green Book": https://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/greenbook1941/greenbook.html
• There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
• The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
• The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
• Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities.

Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard ($50 billion), Yale ($40 billion), Stanford ($38 billion), Princeton ($35 billion), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.

So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions.

I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.

The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:

• A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
• A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
• Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
• Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
• Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
• On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
• Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.

And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.

There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.

(Adapted from an HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36249791.)

Notes:

1. "How the $5500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.

#OnlineCommunities #Community #IntentionalCommunity #KeepItFresh #KeepItSmall #Universities #CollegeTowns #Mastodon #TheFediverse #StScholasticaDayRiot #RedBrickUniversities #PlateGlassUniversities #CaliforniaMasterPlan #LandGrantUniversities #ResearchUniversities #Usenet #HackerNews #LongForm

dredmorbius, 1 year ago to random

Whitespace in filenames is a major category error IMO.

OTOH, filenames themselves (and filesystems as presently incarnated) are also grossly insufficient for many needs. It's interesting to note, for example, that on Android (and possibly iOS), databases (usually sqlite) have emerged as the de-facto default persistent data storage mechanism, even for content which would normally be held on a filesystem.

I've long been looking at questions such as what a document-oriented filesysem (#docFS) or the World Wide Web as fileystem accessible (#webFS) might look like.

For documents, I've generally arrived at a naming standard which uses underbars (_) to separate elements, hyphens (-) for standard whitespace, and double dashes (--) to indicate punctuated / multiple element (e.g., multiple authors, or a subtitle following a colon or dash). Permitted characters are otherwise 7-bit ASCII alphanumeric ([A-Za-z0-9], with dot as a file extension only, and possibly parentheses.

So:

Author-One--Author-Two_Title--Subtitle_YYYY.filetype<br></br>

That might have a publisher or journal title added (additional underbar-delimited element after the title(s). Additional contributors (e.g., editors, translator) might be mentioned. And it's possible some identifier (ISBN, OCLC, DOI, LoC call number) might be added, though those are supplemental.

The idea isn't to fully and completely or precisely represent all aspects of a document or work, but to usefully do so. So yes, that means that foreign charactersets aren't presented, that full author lists aren't included (for scientific paper these can number in the tens to hundreds), etc. But enough to find the work reasonably within a corpus through a directory listing.

Yeah, I'm familiar with Calibre, Zotero etc., and should really get more familiar with them. But they're clunky enough and not sufficiently universally available (e.g., on Android, where most of my documents live these days, via an e-book reader) that I'm not optimistic they're really a solution.

(Hoisted from a limited share.)

#DocumentManagement #Whitespace #OnTheNamingOfCats #OnTheNamingOfFiles #Whatever #SameThing #RockyHorror #MacavitysNotHere #Bombalurina #Effanineffable #OldPossum #TSEliot #DOS #PaulOtlet #Mundaneum