Hacker News Reader

Comment by caseymarquis | Hacker News Reader

Fastly Engineer 1: Seems like a common error message. Can you check stackoverflow to see if there's an easy fix?

Fastly Engineer 2: I have some very bad news...

Well, with SO, at least you can search on Google and view the version cached by Google just fine.

With Reddit however, these days almost all comments are locked behind “view entire discussion” or “continue this thread”. In fact, just now I searched for something for which the most relevant discussion was on Reddit; Reddit was down so I opened the cached version, and was literally greeted by five “continue this thread”s and nothing else. What a joke.

Try “site:old.Reddit.com”

That's not going to work.

  $ curl https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt
  User-Agent: *
  Disallow: /

Also, even if search engines are allowed, old.reddit.com pages are not canonical (<link rel="canonical"> points to the www.reddit.com version, which is actually reasonable behavior), so pages there would not be crawled as often or at all.

Yeah it's crazy how bad user-hostile reddit.com has become. Fortunately old.reddit.com is still available, but for how long? If only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.

> only Javascript did not exist, it would be impossible for UX people to come up with something that bad.

Arrange the html so that the list of comments is at the end (via css). Keep the http connection open, have the show more button send some of request, and when you receive that request send the rest of the page over the original http connection.

As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.

Well technically everything is possible. But Javascript was precisely designed to encourage this kind of patterns.

> As usual, solve people problems via people, not tech.

So true..

How would you make the button send a request without js and without navigating to another page?

Maybe css to load an image on :active or is there some better way?

Here are two robust techniques that I haven’t seen actually employed in production for maybe fifteen years:

① A submit button or link targeting an iframe which is visually hidden. (Or even don’t hide it. If only seamless iframes had happened, or any other way of auto-resizing an iframe: relevant spec issues are https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/555 and https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/1771.)

② A submit button or link to a URL that returns status 204 No Content.

(CSS image loading in any form is not as robust because some clients will have images disabled. background-image is probably (unverified claim!) less robust than pseudoelement content as accessibility modes (like high contrast) are more likely to strip background images, though I’m not sure if they are skipped outright or load and aren’t shown. :active is neither robust nor correct: it doesn’t respond to keyboard activation, and it’s triggered on mouse down rather than mouse up. Little tip here for a thing that people often get wrong: mouse things activate on mouseup, keyboard things on keydown.)

Mhhh, iframes all the way down. Could make a nice experiment.

Yep:

.button:active { background-image: url('/some-reference-thats-actually-a-tracker'); }

“Continue this thread” links don’t depend on JavaScript at all.

“View entire discussion” couldn’t be implemented perfectly with <details> in its present form, but you can get quite close to it with a couple of different approaches.

I think the infinite scrolling of subreddits is about the only thing that would really be lost by shedding JavaScript. Even inline replies can be implemented quite successfully with <details> if you really want.

When it goes away you can try teddit.net

Why wait? Teddit has been a great substitute for reading in a mobile browser, and making an iOS shortcut for transforming Reddit links was pretty straightforward.

Yeah I’m going to stop using the platform when they get rid of this . Not interested

Why wait? You are wasting your life away.

And commenting on HN is any more productive?

Impossible? Man, it's crazy how fast people forget things like good old fashioned <form> GETs and POSTs. It would obviously be a full page refresh, but other than that the same awful UX could still be implemented.

Reddit's attempts at dark patterns are embarrassing from all perspectives. If you use dark patterns it's a laughably abysmal implementation. If you abhor dark patterns, it's a frustration.

It's just enough to annoy you but not enough to make everyone leave the platform

Not _yet_, the same was said about Digg once.

The mobile version is literally unusable. Half the subs show an error and you can't load most comments.

I think it's because there haven't been any interesting alternatives. I know if I ever see one I'll probably switch in a femtosecond.

On the same day that old.reddit.com stops working I'll leave.

Preach!

That and third party access to their API.

Sync is so much better than the official app it's not even funny.

They've actually done a masterful job of finding this balance. I've been on reddit for 15 years and would have quit if they didn't leave the old interface available.

I honestly thought Reddit would die when they introduced Reddit awards, it seemed like such an obvious cash grab. You can't underestimate the amount of community momentum that the site has though.

Its one of the three major sites I use. Yeah...

Eh, as far as funding methods go, letting people throw away money is not the worst one.

I wanted to suggest site:old.reddit.com since I use that version with automatic redirect, but this:

https://old.reddit.com/robots.txt

is very different from this:

https://reddit.com/robots.txt

I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known.

I'm not sure how far are we from being able to do full text internet search. Or rather even quote search, preferably some fuzziness options. That would be cool, Google's quotation marks were really neat back when they were working.

> I guess there is a market for search engine (maybe accessed through tor) which does not care about robots.txt, DMCAs, right to be forgotten etc. Bootstrapping it should not be that hard since it can also provide better results for some queries since nobody is fighting about the position until it's widely known.

That’s not going to happen before Cloudflare is dethroned. See this recent thread for some perspective: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27153603

And even if there’s no Cloudflare, large sites that people want to search will always find ways to block bad bots.

The only thing I can think of that might work is using crowd-sourced data, with all the problems that come with crowdsourcing.

Sadness.

There is a solution for all this mess and I'm blocking HN and a few different domains until I implement at least the first step after which I can share it here.

Wonder what the story is behind these two...

    User-Agent: bender
    Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass
    
    User-Agent: Gort
    Disallow: /earth

Easter eggs

It's neckbeard humor.

I'll have you know our beards were neatly trimmed when we added those.

I know you, and I find that hard to believe ;)

It might be related to the time few years ago when Google added exclusions for user agent t1300 in regard to its founders. Gort seems to be a robot from old scifi and bender might be something similar.

Bender is from Futurama, Gort is old classic scifi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gort_(The_Day_the_Earth_Stood_...

I reod some people use false slugs in the robots.txt as a honey pot of sorts. IPs that actually read the robots.txt, ignore the disallow, and still access the uri are outright banned.

Ha, that would have been a really smart idea! Sadly we didn't think of that at the time. But we had other honey pot URLs.

Then when a flamewar breaks out you just have to get your adversary to click a link to get them IP banned.

That's the good old Easter eggs, perhaps a memory from when Reddit was a nice place. They stop appearing and are replaced by dark patterns once sites jump the shark.

Just some fun humor we added for other nerds who read robots.txt files.

try editing your hosts file to redirect reddit to old.reddit

/etc/hosts

reddit.com old.reddit.com

www.reddit.com old.reddit.com

np.reddit.com old.reddit.com

I am archiving subreddits on Github in plain-text org-mode. If you have some subreddit in mind, open an issue, and I'll create an archive repo for it.

- https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_HPfanfiction

- https://github.com/NightMachinary/r_rational

Stack Overflow is down, can someone tell me how to declare a static multidimensional array in C++?

Google and DDG surface SO results cached within their own page. Here’s the copied answer:

int main() { int arr[100][200][100]; // allocate on the stack

    return 0;
}

Haha! That sounds highly plausible!

Haha! That explains why the internet was down for a while!

Oh man, how do we keep a pocket copy of SO? All of our jobs depend on it.

no they don't, but if yours does you can download a complete datadump of SO from them.

You can use kiwix (https://www.kiwix.org/en/).

It is an open-source software that allows you to keep and read offline static versions of websites in a specialized archive format (zim-files)

It was originally designed to allow you to read wikipedia offline, but there are also dumps of stackoverflow available on the relevant page : https://wiki.kiwix.org/wiki/Content_in_all_languages

Here, just pin the underlying IPFS object, or use this one hosted by cloudflare: https://ipfs-sec.stackexchange.cloudflare-ipfs.com/

You can download the database dump from https://archive.org/details/stackexchange.

https://kapeli.com/dash also has the ability to download offline archives of SO. Its interface is very good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com