skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A decentralized database is feasible but initial sync to find nodes will take many minutes. Typically those get accelerated by keeping a short centralized list of known potent nodes.

The problem really is not that, Freenet nodes store much more data than socials have in total, the problem is that multitude of services means multitude of filtering and means of discoverability without overloading users. That is an extremely hard problem, not everyone wants to be a moderator, distributed reputation systems are hard to set up and defend against attacks while still keeping any degree of privacy.
You cannot depend on user supplied tags without reputation, you cannot know if it's posted to the right space, you cannot get reputation without someone sitting around and giving it out. (confirming it)

Nasty people will give negative or positive reputation for wrong reason, a single number is insufficient to express why you believe something is good or bad, a multitude of numbers dilutes it.

You see it on twitter and reddit with people liking something only because of the poster. Or posting controversial garbage just to get eyes on their other things.
And politics gets everywhere.

Plus you really cannot monetize it, so greedy people and companies will skip it besides spamming. (Spam is a solved problem in a decentralized way, we do have three nines bayesian spam filters.)

I recommend reading the history of the original federated newsgroups. They even still are around and slightly active. There have been board splits over moderation, issues with spam and terrible content etc.
I've tried to register a Lemmy account but I can't. Many instances require you to write an essay about why you want to join, why you picked your username, etc, and then wait for approval. The Lemmy instances I found that don't do this appear to be overloaded.

Kbin.social seems to be more stable, even if it's alpha software. And it integrates with Lemmy.
I don't understand... Why does it have to be one app?

Can't they make a TikTok-like app with a subreddit as a backend? So ppl get same content but with a different front-end?
They don’t speak for, they give an estimation of their opinion.
Twitter is a troll’s playground – and Musk wants to make their life even easier
Realistically, I would say Reddit users are playing with fire.

Reddit is owned and controlled by VCS who have been finding out playground in the hopes of future profits. We all know and understand the game. They hoped they built a website where the users were assets. The Reddit users think they are assets. However, it Reddit can’t make a profit off of them. They aren’t assets they are liabilities.

Any site wanting to replace Reddit would need either someone with a sizeable amount of cash to fund it or VC money. Realistically, this is the week where we find out if Reddit users are assets or liabilities. If they’re liabilities who wants to fund a replacement?

What happens is they can’t make money off the API? I would presume cancel the IPO and make mass layoffs, cut everything to the barebones and make money that way. VCS will make their money while the site burns.

However, what will Redditors do? Go to a bunch of small communities where the group knowledge is smaller and not as good.
I paid for fark for a while back then, even organised a couple of London fark get togethers in the mid 00s.

It was great fun at the time, but I guess I got bored with the format and the snark and at some point life moved on. I don't remember site design being part of it...
By which standards? Every country is different, even within Europe there are much more conservative countries than the US.
>AOC and the likes.

Who are the likes? How many of them are there? AOC is a house representative; is there a progressive senator?
No. I'm self-taught, so I may be biased, but in my subjective experience all the best programmers I have worked with either had no formal education, or a non-technical education.
Pentium 2 cartridge, double-sided in 3, 2 ... 1...
Well your question was apparently so uniquely bad that they recognized it and correctly identified the duplicate by your coworker. So maybe you're just salty because they were right.
The red line is this year
Is jumping from one corporate ship to another a good idea? At some point they peak and become greedy. I don't know what's the solution. Can we have better open source alternative and people fund it? Recently I learned DPRreviews went down because Amazon didn't profit enough from it. There are way too many stories like this.
> spez / reddit ceo is a mod on r/programming

How is it possible that these companies are still run like an immature dorm room shitshow? Are there no separation of duties? The CEO should not have admin access to anything (the very least for security purposes).
Expectation vs. Reality: The Hard Hand Dealt Young People in 2023
Unless the threat seemed imminent, wouldn't the FBI be better at addressing this concern?
>The problem is you don't have the mindset of Joe Average. It's something most of us lose as we become nerds, enthusiasts, professionals, etc. We become disconnected with the commons.

Oh please, becoming a principled free rider is not some sort of enlightened stance. This is just a dressed-up version of the person who pirates whatever media they feel like because, like, capitalism sucks man.
> A more apt comparison would be AF447, which took a few days before the wreckage was found.

Days? I thought it was found after two years.
I don't really like this style of writing. It's easy enough to skip over though, so I wouldn't say I'm "very upset" about it. I don't find it humorous like you do. It seems like a way for the author to pat themselves on the back. Like having imaginary arguments with yourself or a caricature of your own design.

It's actually a bit like what you did in your second paragraph where you preempt those who disagree with you and portray them being "very upset" and "taking themselves too seriously". This is totally unnecessary.

I'm glad you enjoy their writing, genuinely. But you don't have to speak poorly of those who don't. Doing that makes you come across as insecure about your own opinions; that you only appreciate their quirky style because otherwise you might be seen as "very upset" or taking yourself too seriously. You can do better.
> That's russophobic fiction.

It's reality, I know that Russia and its supporters need their safe space from reality but unfortunately reality says they blew up the dam.

Theres multiple videos of Russians admitting to blowing up the dam, and theres also evidence they blew up another dam.

Committing war crimes with impunity to stop the enemies advance has been a Russian tactic for a long tine.

>> https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/16660615320803614...

>> "We mined everything on Kakhovka HPP. So, they'll f*king blow it up and will wash away Ukrainian Armed Forces on the other side" - a Russian says. The video was published on 10 December, 2022.

>> https://twitter.com/den_kazansky/status/1666003021925347328

>> Russian soldier Yegor Guzenko, who is fighting in the Kherson region, admitted that Russia blew up the dam in Nova Kakhovka to stop Ukrainian army
He also said that the Russian army should also blow up other dams on the Dnieper

> "Kovalchuk considered flooding the river. The Ukrainians, he said, even conducted a test strike with a HIMARS launcher on one of the floodgates at the Nova Kakhovka dam, making three holes in the metal to see if the Dnieper’s water could be raised enough to stymie Russian crossings but not flood nearby villages.

> There were many more attacks on that dam by the Ukraine [1] but I won't bother to try to find non-Russian sources, the WP article is enough.

This is a typical Russian tactic of misinformation, Russia has themselves aid they hit the dam and has Russian propagandists where on TV saying they will blow up Kyiv dam if they want to.
Insurance industry, traditionally seen as resistant to change, is now awakening to FinTech revolution. Insurers are beginning to recognize importance of embracing innovative technologies.

In an industry built on trust and risk management, the infusion of FinTech solutions brings about a fundamental shift in how insurance products and services are designed, delivered, and experienced.
The discoverability is chiefly achieved by external means, and it's only decent because everyone (owner of every space) has their own moderation.

Spaces with lax or insufficient moderation tend to become cesspools.
It also has a tendency to lose information over time as pins are insufficient and search quite sucks.
So, as someone who has had to briefly dabble in Unicode muck some years ago: how would I properly iterate through Unicode? How do I know how many bytes to iterate before I get a proper glyph instead of part of a glyph, or worse: a glyph and some extra codepoints?

Is the concept so esoteric that it's best to just find a blackbox library and not worry about the finer details?
Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome (2021)
No, seriously, there’s not generally much point in supporting more than the latest fairly widely-supported format, and a universal fallback format. The advantages of the intermediate format are typically too slight and too transient.

If, for example, you deal with photos and currently serve AVIF, WebP and JPEG, around 80% of viewers will take AVIF despite the implementations all being under three years old (less than one in Apple-land), and that number will continue to climb, so that the WebP in this chain will be helping practically no one within two years. Moreover, adding WebP is already imposing a tiny cost for every viewer and a likely-noticeable cost for storage and maintenance, while frankly only slightly reducing the cost over JPEG for WebP-but-not-AVIF viewers.
The Guardian - are you serious?
I’ve been browsing Reddit’s mobile app in Popular mode just to see how the experience is for average redditors.

Unfortunately there’s enough interesting content that I’m not sure average people will even notice or care. And it’s painful to say that.

By “interesting” I mean interesting to the masses. /r/AITAH, /r/iamatotalpieceofshit, /r/therewasanattempt, /r/news… the list goes on.

Part of Reddit’s strength is that even with only a handful of subs, it still surfaces the most interesting content from those subs. The net effect is that people who aren’t a member of a community gone dark won’t really be affected.

At least they’ll see it, though. I had to scroll past many posts about the blackout, which isn’t nothing.
I will definitely not use it on mobile anymore. I was already using it very casually, because even the alternative apps are very clunky. If I had to use an even worse app, or god-forbid a mobile browser I would just stop.
Why is it that companies go towards bad UX when they start ramping up profits? Download size is one thing, but ignoring that, how is it that they thought the new (Reddit) website was a good idea? Sure it's mobile friendly, but it's barely useable on mobile and desktop? For example: why do I have to constantly click read more?

This seems to be a common thing with all kinds of companies, Digg, Facebook, many others. It's not like you can't build ads into the current site, right? Tracking can be easily built-in these days. Sure it'll decrease initial download speeds, but the UX won't be as terrible as what they keep coming up with.
I wouldn't be surprised if reddit was profitable/at least broke even 8 years ago.

Reddit needs 300 people max to run, and they got like 1500.
There is no excuse to not support eGPUs though
Sure, I mostly understand. I meant amazed more like the context of the OP of Reddit draining people away from other forums. Amazed that all it takes is saving them 15 seconds of creating a new account, often on a forum that has better features than Reddit, for them to prefer Reddit. It doesn't take much for people to opt in to a centralized internet.
Warhammer is on a postage stamp in the UK!
What’s with all the hyperbole? Reddit Fail?
You might want to look into what disinformation you were personally subjected to that brought you to your own perspective. People who aired their own personal vaccine adverse event experiences were maligned, shamed and cancelled. What makes you think you have the correct information on vaccine adverse events?

I personally know 3 people who have had life altering negative effects due to the vaccine, including myself. You no doubt think that is a lie or a statistical anomaly. What you've missed is that it is ridiculously hard to register an adverse event, due to procedural process, and the negative bias of medical practitioners such as yourself who are unwilling to attribute an event to a recent vaccine, or blame it on the virus itself (without any symptoms of course).

The 'Trusted News Initiative' is one mans life-saving purveyor of truth, and another mans very obvious propaganda network.

I would encourage you to look at an Israeli study "Survey of reported symptoms after a third vaccination Of Pfizer against 19-COVID".

4% of men experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16)
7% of women experienced chest pain after vaccination (page 16)

A survey based approach is more likely to get better statical results IMO because it removes the laborious reporting procedure as well as medical practitioner bias.

I'm fed up of self-righteous do-gooders who think they have an exclusive view of 'the truth'. I wouldn't care so much about it were it not for the negative effect those do-gooder's actions can have on other people's health, as it did in my own case.
I agree. Fark is still chugging along. How many sites has it outlived now?
"I'm not depressed by the graphs. I'm depressed by the indifference for the best of us, and outright denial by many that will just keep their heads down."

https://twitter.com/LeonardLanglois/status/16679668377310167...
Ad ad ad ad ad AD ad AD ad Ad....

And some content in between
> It's interesting everything trying to be TikTok. As a user, if I wanted TikTok i'd use TikTok. I don't want TikTok, so I don't use TikTok.

> ...

> It's sad when every tech company tries to replicate another companies features ditching the very thing which their users originally joined them for.

I wonder if we might give this a name like "tradegy of the social networks".

It's easy to see how a company, like Meta/Instagram can choose between keeping their own smaller market, or taking half the tiktok market by transforming their app to reels. They can't do both, as nobody would install a new app.

For the users this suck, as the total market is now smaller, meaning less choice and diversity.
Meh, I wouldn't be so quick to judge. I'm a mod of a several-million-subscriber subreddit (one that's likely highly popular among HN subscribers). When we asked our community if they wanted to join the protest, the answer was a very resounding "yes, but 2 days aren't going to cut it"...

So we're still debating when/IF we're going to return after going dark. To add, all the mods are tired and don't have enough time to dedicate to the subreddit as it is (with mod-tools working, which won't be the case after the API changes). Only time will tell, but we're most likely only reactivating our subreddit once reddit signals clear willingness to ease on their squeeze. By which time a lot of damage (in terms of subscribers moving on) will be done. Also, some of the mods have said they won't come back after this, as this was the final drop in the bucket and they'll delete their account today.

So all in all, there is some hope that this does serious damage to reddit (at this point, they're clearly seen as the enemy by a lot of us). Talking to mods at other very large subreddits, we're not the only ones thinking along these lines.
Not that I know of. I thought tildes was supposed to be a Reddit alternative, but I guess they never caught on.
And before/In parallel to Fark was SomethingAwful, which to my knowledge never did any meaningful redesigns and quasi died out because.. well i'm not even sure why, just a lot of us ended up leaving.

Though I guess there's still some skeleton userbase left. Apologies to any goons if i'm misrepresenting things.
Being released under Apache 2.0 license actually means that it's fully OSS. The fact that other fully OSS models aren't receiving the same suffix is worrisome, I agree.
Even if we see effects, it could be very short term. People also walked out during the Facebook and IG timeline redesigns, and yet they moved on and user engagement even increased. They will move on from this one, and I’m sure Reddit will find a way to increase engagement despite this.
While I agree that docu is important I've seen my share of garbage poured into wikis and presented as the single source of truth. It takes a lot of time and effort to make docu meaningful and useful with the outlook that it's ignored and overlooked anyways. Quality documentation is expensive, and, if one invests heavily into it there must be a clear workflow path that makes following and reviewing docu mandatory. Documenting for the sole reason of existence of docu is counterproductive.
As a longtime Reddit user, I immediately disliked the redesign but since I've been on the other side I decided it give it a month. I now deliberately dislike the redesign. I get most of my value out of reddit in the text subreddits and the conversation view in the redesign is awful. Things are highly collapsed and following a conversation requires repeated expansions. The comment count without loading more is extremely limited and when you scroll down there's an interstitial callout about the subreddit's all time popular posts. The redesign is fine for top level content in the picture/video/meme subreddits. Content emphasis aside, it feels incredibly slow. Waterfall loading and 2-300ms response times. I've spent quite a bit of time reflecting on design decisions and I think the design brief/product vision is simply opposed to my interests. I feel bad about complaining about another team's work but my complaints aren't the knee-jerk reaction you're complaining about.
I've stayed in over fifty Airbnb in the last three years. Only three haven't worked out (misleading apartment, mouse-poop kitchen, unresponsive host). Each time Airbnb has sorted me out with a refund, called me to discuss the problem, helped finding an alternative place, and providing a voucher to cover any price gap.
Chartwell, a font that turns data into graphs
People use Reddit in different ways. I suspect for many, those examples are perfectly good substitutes.
Interestingly when I long pressed the codes marked as “No” (in Safari mobile), a lot of them were still decoded.
That was the whole point.
On a related note, I tried to find an alternative to /r/nfl a few months ago, signed up for a good looking community, and am still waiting for manual admin approval apparently. It makes me wonder how many of these medium size forums are being killed by bots?
It depends. Are you working on web apps or iOS apps? Then most likely no.

Are you working on drivers, kernel, and software that is close to the hardware? Then maybe.

I've met some extremely incompetent devs with a CS degree. At the same time, I've met some super strong, tech lead level, devs who are self-taught.

I think it has more to do with interest. Someone self-taught who is very interested in tech will easily surpass a CS grad who only does it for money. Everything you need to get a CS degree is easily accessible online anyways.
There's no reason to buy's spez's words, nor any other executives in any company for that matter, their job is to spread a narrative.

In fact, if profitability was the goal, then he should have been ousted at this point, because he's been back for 8 years now without succeeding to make the company profitable.

I don't think he is that inapt, and that his board is stupid to let him in charge despite such a failure, profitability was just never the goal. Getting the biggest possible IPO is the goal, but the timing is actually very bad for them for the reason you mention and now they're trying as hard as they can, including by creating fake subreddits with translated old content for non-English speakers (at least French and German speakers).
Then you're not trying very hard.

https://twitter.com/JJansaSDS/status/1498596035664429056
> Do you know how sometimes there are articles that have a 2000-word introduction to that one sentence that you need to solve your problem? That’s what over-documenting can feel like.

Good reminder.
Taleb thoughts are irrelevant to Bitcoin’s failure or success. Bitcoin has a tremendous potential for many reasons (methane emissions reduction, renewable energy load management, the lightning network for immediate value exchange) and it’s not riskless for sure (regulations, possible hack, UX difficulties).
Personally, I don't even think the two are in conflict. Many of the comments on this article vastly underestimate self-driving's impact. Self-driving creates motives to use transit because it allows the economics of automobile fleets to consolidate around shared use instead of ownership - the pull of "the robotaxi service is cheap", which can be pulled off with a regular, modest YoY cost reduction, will ultimately make people give up the car, and if they give up the car, they will then save a few more pennies by using the bus on occasion - the bus will be more frequent if it goes self-driving too, because it's the labor cost of drivers that determines a lot of the operational economics of transit fleets. Take out that cost and you can run a lot of tiny vehicles as well as huge trains, meaning transit, deliveries and taxis will blur together as modalities, no longer needing to provision for what pencils out with a human driver or to adopt an ownership model where the user has to buy for their largest use-case and eat the associated cost. They can go smaller without much issue and rent larger as needed. It's a different vocabulary of "what transit is" once you add that dynamic.

The political element follows directly from that: if you aren't a car owner, but you are a bus and taxi user, you stop caring about parking and the specifics of your commute route. The robocar service will lobby the city for their own efficiency in your place - and what benefits their efficiency also benefits the users. So in one stroke you end up with an urban population that is aligned to empty out huge swathes of road space and garages for other uses such as bus lanes, bike parking, etc. People will feel safer on a bike because the cars will drive safely, and this is found in studies to be the main bottleneck to bicycle usage, so investment in dedicated bike infra could flatline in a self-driving environment, and bike usage will still rise!

It's hard to find an angle where there is truly a downside - the doomer response is kneejerk.
So how do you test that the method, the path and the body parser are correct? I have had bugs in all of these three.
Here is how the comparison looks to me: Assume you are a HN user and you heard about this interesting lobsters community.

Case 1: Different website, create an account there.

Case 2: ActivityPub vision, search for !lobsters, click join

Case 3: ActivityPub now, go to website, copy URL into your own instance, search returns nothing, try again minutes later, join.

I fully agree that Lemmy is currently not easier (case 3). Users understand multiple accounts (case 1) but managing accounts, they do not. I belief eventually the Fediverse will be easiest (case 2).
interesting. As a data engineer I have been indoctrinated to think about things as various transformations and so the functional approach to things is very nice. I've also been wanting to learn/play with Elixir.

In the Python space, though not the same, the ergonomics of which kinda get you there, there's this: pipe https://pypi.org/project/pipe/
I like the message is You have been banned "for breaking reddit." Not the reddit terms and conditions, just reddit itself :D
Some mods make money by allowing certain sites to be posted while barring others. Some mods promote their own products.

So yes, some subreddits are profitable for mods.

But for Reddit? Maybe.