skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It isn't even close to being so important that it's an essential service, because it is 100% replaceable. It has no technical moat. The only moat it has is the network effect and that can turn on them, as it may very well be in the process of doing.

In my own personal opinionated mental wargaming, with which you are all welcome to disagree, Reddit is literally just a few dozen hours from making that outcome very likely, and the clock is steadily ticking. Wargame out their options if their communities don't budge and the stalemate extends past this week. If Reddit will not back down, they have basically only one other option, which is to lever away the moderator positions for all the private reddits and replace them. If they do, that may superficially work for a while (though IMHO even that is not guaranteed) but the end result would still be the fastest and hardest case of social media evaporative cooling history has ever seen: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2015/10/14/the-evaporativ...

Moreover, while the technical task of levering away the subreddit moderators is a single SQL query away (more or less), the job of resuscitating those communities is not. Even if we assume that all the non-moderators on reddit just shrug and get back to redditing, Reddit can't possibly find enough moderators of any kind to moderate that amount of content. At this point the wargame branches out into several options Reddit can take to try to solve this with their current personpower, but none of the ones I can come up with will actually, you know, work. (Closest is to try to query the DB for most active users and make them the new moderators, but merely "most active" is actually not a great criterion, and it will correlate closely with "people who got angry and left" so there is a LOOOOOOOT of manual labor in that process. You can just run the SQL query and surprise announce the new moderators but that really won't work either.) As many have pointed out, moderators are providing an awful lot of free labor. Reddit can easily throw that free labor away but they can not just trivially reconstruct it if they do.

As a moderator myself, I have my reasons for doing what I do, in the amount that I do, for free, and I am satisfied with the arrangement. However, if they do lever me off, I will not be lifting a finger for them. I actually won't be all that perturbed about it either... "oh, no, I can't provide free services to your company anymore gosh geewillikers whatever will I do", I know exactly what I will do, which is move on. I've been on the internet for over 25 years. Moving on is part of the deal. Someday I'm sure I'll move on from HN.
Yes, I've no doubt they know this and have opted for the "more control" route. They seem to fully expect to weather the storm and be able to do whatever they want with the API and anything else.

I guess it remains to be seen if that is true, but unlike Twitter and Mastodon, where I didn't think Mastodon was a good alternative, I actually could see https://kbin.social being a good alternative for reddit.

The longer this protest goes on the more the alternatives will grow and be viable. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Google SEO. The first thing people often do is search for something on Google. The first result(s) are often Reddit
It's the Jack Welch dance.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Man-Who-Broke-Cap...
Show HN: Energy and Protein Bar Ranking
Not sure if this entirely fits here, but I made BarsPro for my own benefit and wanted to share in case it's valuable to others.

Energy and protein bars have been a huge part of my diet for years (for better or worse). As much as I love food, sometimes it's just easier, faster, and healthier to eat an energy bar.

Unfortunately many brands make bars full of sugar/fat/sodium/questionable ingredients, or don't provide enough protein/fiber/nutrition. One of the most frustrating experiences is staring at a wall of hundreds of bars and having to read through the nutrition facts one-by-one to find something edible.

I manually compiled a list of 700+ bars, their nutrition facts, and ingredients - all to make it easy to quickly find good bars.

Let me know what you think! Hopefully this will be valuable for some.

P.S. None of the content is sponsored (and never will be). This is purely a passion project.
Defamation for starters. See Neibich v. Reddit and Berger v. Reddit. So far section 230 has shielded them from much of these but the law has been targeted over the last couple years. So far the Supreme Court hasn’t addressed questions on the scope of section 230. I’m guessing the thinking goes if section 230 scope is narrowed and moderators are on the company payroll that could move them from a content provider (not liable) to more of a newspaper publishing articles (liable).
I've never been recommended those kind of videos, but the only political things I watch on YouTube are live streams of the debates, inaugurations, and the state of the union.
Oops, it's a bit of a spoiler for sure, but it's probably expected from the beginning. The cast described the screenplay as bizarre. I think the movie could have been better handled, but it has some great writing. It's what you would expect from a novelist like McCarthy writing a screenplay. And it's not a feel-good movie for sure though. The violence is both bleak and full.
I hope I’m wrong, but I do not believe the blackout will be effective. Mainly because there is not a clear alternative to Reddit.
It doesn't matter how much it costs because there is no such thing in America as informed consumer consent. If you're unconscious, they will treat you, bill you, and you become liable for an arbitrary debt. The Founding Fathers revolted for this type of arbitrary taxation but too many modern Americans are too docile and accepting of mistreatment and exploitation.

I met a woman in a coffee shop in Redding CA who was about to defend her home, clothing, and means of transportation from creditors who forced her into bankruptcy while she was dying of stage IV cancer. This is the state of healthcare as a business first in America.
Well, I tried building pixelfed and ran into problems. I tried to follow reported, docker related issues on their github but without much luck. There was a momentum and even PR to create an image but it somewhat got stuck.

tl,dr; not skilled enough in this particular toolstack to get it working.
I always thought reddit was smarter than this. They were really born out of the ashes of digg and for a long time they remembered that. At this point they're in decline I don't think the bleeding will stop. Lots of young people already had a negative view of reddit and now redditors have a negative view of reddit too. I hope we can make a home in the fediverse I'm tired of giving my data to large corps with no recourse.
Fair enough. Mind sharing your fountain pen wishlist?
there's a few semi-shady things that 4chan does better than anywhere else though.
like finding pdfs for rpgs. not to say it's not a pit, cess or otherwise, but there's a good few nuggets swimming around in there.
It seems that the end game of corporate controlled social media is for corporate interests to control what you read or watch.

Happened with the feed of Facebook. originally was a true social network where you scrolled through what your family and friends posted. Now it is a algorithm designed to maximize attention and sell influence,

Happened with YouTube. Used to be really pro independent user … now the search functionality is barebones giving you maybe one or two results… the rest promoted content.

TikTok just straight up controls what you consume from the get go

Reddit wants to join in the same model. Heavily corporate moderated content masquerading as “use content.

Sadly I am not too hopeful for a new platform. Any true open forum upvote downvote platform will be torpedoed before it can get going …
15 years of leaving money on the table. Not quite at the level of Uber in terms of setting money on fire, but respectable nonetheless.
There's:

- Objective, general knowledge: Wikipedia

- Objective, general news: AP & Reuters

- "How do I XXX?": Stack Exchange (they have similar issues to Reddit but not as bad, and the actual site is 100x better)

There's also a lot of sites with good, reliable info but only in specific areas:

- Technical documentation or specifications: MDN Docs, Rust Docs, pipi (Python) docs, Apple docs, ...

- Quality tech tips: refactoring.guru, CSS Tricks, ...

- Quality tech articles: fasterthanli.me, faultlore.com, xeiaso.net, lwn.net, ... (many more examples which post much less frequently)

- Figure out which libraries to use: "XXX github", "awesome XXX". or "awesome XXX github"

- Biased tech anecdotes, product reviews, opinions; and tech news: Hacker News

- High quality articles on random subjects: ciechanow.ski, ...

I'm sure there are good sites for other knowledge (cooking, cycling, etc.), but I don't know them. Which is the big problem Google or Reddit is supposed to solve. But I bet some people could make a shared list. Then, if you filter to these sites you get information with even better quality than Google or Reddit.
Nice! Congrats on shipping and thanks for sharing. What did you use to build this?
This is such a case of lawyer brain.

The OP wrote this as a learning exercise. With the goal of learning in mind, I would suggest that it's probably best for the OP to go and read as much code as they possibly can, no matter the license!
I'd argue the religious are actually causing cultural destruction and are a net loss in every way except raw childbearing output. Having been born into one and 'defected', I found the community insular, stuck on platitudes, little to no critical thinking, full of unspoken rules and expectations, and with a ever shrinking dating pool.

They produce poorly educated children, heartache, cognitive dissonance, and perpetuate destructive traditions in the name of long dead / imaginary people.
If you don’t like it, you’re free to go somewhere else as you rightly point out.
My personal (cynical) bet is that Huffman actually understands what Reddit is better than us, and Reddit will be just fine after this.

To be completely honest, if a two-day blackout is proven to be the most serious "protest" the community can do, I'll buy Reddit stock when it IPO.
If this is the same emulator ejected by GB Studio when it exports to web, that makes sense. All GB Studio projects on Itch.io likely use your emu too!

https://itch.io/games/made-with-gb-studio

725 listed so far (lots of asset packs and tech demos I'm sure, but still.)
How was this labor measured? What about the non-labor portions of life like financial planning and purchasing decisions which take time as well?
Thanks, that makes sense re PLT. One thing I have heard is that PLT can be viewed as a "programming languages" approach to math foundations, or at least the foundations of computation, and largely doesn't have to do with programming language implementation, but not everyone seems to share that view. And I recently saw a comment from someone who said they worked on compilers list abstract interpretation as something for budding (industrial) compiler workers to learn[1].

I have a math background so of course I'm drawn to this stuff, but I have trouble imagining it being immediately useful for implementers. Could it be that this stuff is more useful for language design than implementation?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20915485
I've noticed this place seems to have a really high churn rate. I often find myself replying to comments that are only 5 minutes old. :P
If you enjoyed this, you might enjoy my work porting FreeBSD to Firecracker. I gave a talk at BSDCan which will be on YouTube sometime soon, and also wrote it up for the upcoming edition of the FreeBSD Journal.
Really? Maybe I'm in an A/B test but on mobile for me every page load pops up a dialog that says "this looks better in the app" and they only load a limited number of comments and gate the rest behind the app.

Apollo was by far the best reddit browsing experience on mobile and it seems like the API price was a direct action to shut these third party experiences down knowing their experience was sub par.

Are you using old.reddit.com by chance? If so I have a sneaking suspicious that's going to go away in due time.
Was WIRED ever not just the johnny-come-lately of tech hype-cycle?
Snoo is the name of the reddit alien. I believe it was going to be the original name of the site (what's new - what'S NOO).

Since "redditor" is a community name, it makes sense there would be a different internal/employee demonym and Snoo fits the site as good as any other name might.
Morally, maybe. Legally, no.
it keep Reddit usable by deleting the spam you will likely to see.

But not only mods are going to be affected. If you are going to build a bot on Reddit you have now to think twice with the increase pricing cost
I don’t think Google has any incentive to buy Reddit. Financially, Reddit is nearing IPO, which means it’s being sold at a short term peak valuation during a time where they need to raise capital.

From an operational standpoint, Reddit sparked the outrage over measures they’re taking to (theoretically) start turning g a profit. Google profits will be very unlikely to have noticeable decline from a temporary protest over Reddit increasing API fees. So I don’t think there’s much business sense in Google investing in Reddit compared to other avenues that would more directly affect their bottom line.
Energy usage is synonymous with level of civilization. I like civilization.
Forums still rule for discourse content for some subjects. Some of them are basically grand-fathered in because Google will surface them and their communities started before Reddit. Guitar gear is one of those. There are still half a dozen forums that provide way better discourse than Reddit. I imagine a big part of that is because the users are an older age group.
Are young people these days mentally so weak and fragile, and everyone has to be politically correct all the time so that we don’t break their fragile hearts? If you intent to finish and released the product and you fail to do so, is there a need to sugar coat it so that you feel better . You shouldn’t feel better by lying to yourself. This is how you learn and improve as a person . Accept pain .
This is about the transition from a site mostly about engaged focused discussion by enthusiasts to a more mass market generic social site.

I bet most views at this point are just the generic popular view, not driven by a subscription to a sub.
Also magnitudes off in accuracy sadly. I’ve known a few groups who’ve tried to reconcile it against actual charges and you might as well just use a random number generator.
Inciteful posts rank lower. Incitefulness being ranked as some function where upvotes increase the score and number of comments decreases it.
If people are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to use third-party clients, doesn't that suggest that the first-party experience is awful?

Let's not forget that Reddit's content is generated by its users. Perhaps a significant number of these users wouldn't be on Reddit in the first place if not for apps like Apollo.
That led directly to where we are today. But IMO the situation isn’t comparable: if Reddit is Digg then who is Reddit? There isn’t really a viable alternative.
I actually think I would have been pretty bummed by this week’s events if my long-time Reddit account hadn’t been banned last year for literally no reason. (I know everyone always says that - and then it turns out that they’re inevitably extremely enthusiastic posters about, like, early/mid 20th century German highway engineering or something similarly Hitler adjacent. The only not-nice thing I ever wrote on there was in an AMA by a westerner who ran a North Korean travel agency to ask him how it felt to literally be one of Communism’s “useful idiots.” He never answered. But that was also years ago, so presuming that probably wasn’t the cause of my ban.)

I thought, ah, surely this error will be cleared up upon appeal. I submitted my appeal, and nope, ban remains. It was actually kind of upsetting (I guess due to the seeming arbitrariness? certainly no content of any value was lost), but it was good to have that nice, clean break.

Anyway, I mention any of this not because I care about getting that account back, but because it occurred to me that I’d really like to get back on that account and delete all my messages, but with the way their ban seems to work, I don’t think I can do that.

And while I’m sure their 2023 TOS makes it purely my problem if I got myself banned and thus lost any ability to control the content I contributed, I do wonder if their TOS was as robust (it was a pretty, pretty informal place when I started posting, and rights to contributed content can be pretty nuanced based on how the license/TOS is worded), or how their stance interacts with any of the privacy laws passed in the last 10-12 years.

Oh well. This is why my default rule is “never post” (as I elect to override that default at this very moment).
You missed the point here entirely.

The work those few do help people like you in ways you might not completely fathom. Reddit doesn't auto-regulate itself as much as we think. It's hard work but a small percentage of people who are paid nothing, and use 3rd-party tools to work best.
You want to fix inflation? Break up all the cartels, duopolies and monopolies that are everywhere in America. Actual market competition is the only thing that really drives down prices.
It will be overrun by nazis pretty fast. A lot as changed in 10 years.
I’m the CEO of Phind. What have you grown to dislike and how can we make it better?
One of these days I am going to make a shirt with the text “Font Nerd” in comic sans, just to see how many heads explode…
Same here, hadn't heard of them. Thanks. :)

Just went in the UBlock Origin settings... and yep, there are 14 potential "annoyance" filters. Just turned them on an applied them. Lets see how it goes...
Feels like projection. I don’t know anyone that blames Reddit employees for what’s happening, just the CEO.
OK, sure, I agree that at some level the wire format has been stable, but that's like saying "http and http/2 both use TCP, so they are the same protocol".
Even if subreddits don't go dark, the impact will be rapidly observable in August as moderation becomes extremely difficult and subreddit support bots that eliminate spam and maintain post quality stop working.
If you’ve read his final two books it’s incredible clear how fascinated he is by math, physics, and their interaction at philosophy. Stella Maris is basically just a long exploration of the philosophical implications of math, in dialogue form.
Interesting, I was unaware of these standards. It seems that different agencies want different things, since the existing identity verification by Login.gov was good enough for one federal agency but not good enough for the IRS. The federal government is not monolithic.
Lab is essentially for power users who need tabs of notebooks and multiple .py files open at a time in a single window. If you ever only work on a _single_ notebook at a time then it is overkill.
"My executive decisions were perfect, and do not need to be questioned, because I am a vic--I mean, we are all victims of unfair treatment by our regular users who have collectively gone insane and dislike all of us for no reason, a problem we must overcome as a team, right?" /s
We have entire fields that have been trying to solve the alignment problem for autonomous + intelligent agents for centuries: economic and political science.
You could try Child of God? It's shorter than Blood Meridian and feels a bit less serious and rollicking, even though it's about a necrophiliac.

Suttree and Blood Meridian are the elite tier, IMO.
An influx of capital would be easier by making everyone pay $10/mo to access the API via third-party clients. Would still be unpopular but would mean people could still have the experience they want to see from reddit.

but that's the issue - Reddit's been focusing on other forms of content only in the native Reddit app, like TikTok-esque live streams and promoted posts from subs you aren't subscribed to.
Now imagine if this was Neuralink. We're quite eager to install potentially literally killswitches in our bodies, apparently. Insert witticism about Darwin Awards here.
Previous trademarks never stopped Apple from using the name they like best.

Remember iPhone?

Remember iOS?
The notebook environment is excellent for data analysis and exploration. It matches my workflow of manhandling data as I reach for understanding.

Once I figure things out of course, either I'm done with the notebook and can copy a few plots out for inclusion in a powerpoint, or I'm done with the notebook and extract a pile of functions into a utility script or package.

Either way, it has served its purpose for rapid prototyping and one-off analysis.
I didn't realize that dang was Dan. I just assumed it was something like "dang, I'm in trouble for useless comments again". (But, yes, his moderation is worth a lot!)
The post by the Apollo dev made it sound like they had gone back and forth for a while before the final pricing was laid out. I wonder why reddit didn't come up with a price that worked for all parties. Isn't some money better than none + ill will from the community?
We’ve added GPT-4 back to Phind.

Disclosure: I’m the CEO
Because its us vs them, don’t you get it? Us noisy, violent users getting in the way of the Snoos tribe big shiny IPO.
How to Use a Google Script to Create a Slide Deck When a Form Is Submitted
A Man Who Turned the World on to the Genius of Fungi
Archived version: https://archive.is/pybTG
This is a common position and it's really a choice each person has to make on their own because it really does vary person to person. Let me give you an example, when I was younger I was a pretty good programmer and I rose through the ranks very quickly and got a little bit of notoriety. I was self trained but I had some mentors that were real heavy hitters and they taught me a lot. Anyway I was given the option to go work for a very well know SV god father where I'd be a mid-level guy. The other option was to go work for a no name startup where I could sail the ship. At the time I had just gotten done working for another start up and I was looking for something better so I went with being an underling at a really big company. It was really cool to do some bleeding edge work and to work with people that were absolute geniuses, but I am not a geniuses despite what my mother thinks. It was like going from playing sports in uni vs playing sports as a professional, everyone was really, really good so instead of standing out I was just another brink in the wall. For me this caused me to really step up my game just to keep up with the crowd, something I wouldn't have to have done at the startup. It was a doubled edged sword, there was a lot of growth on my end but no rewards, I was just average for the company, if I had went the other direction I wouldn't have had to step up my game but I would have been the top dog. It's big fish/small pond syndrome you have to pick what you want to be, neither is wrong.
I agree. I think that this is a turning point for Reddit but not towards failure: they’re ditching the hardcore nerd audience that made them. But they’ve long since outgrown that audience and will likely (as a company) do just fine without them. As a community there will be a notable loss.
How is this the only response which acknowledges the obvious joke? Are people even reading the words, how do you not see the jokey tone?