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Comment by Uptrenda | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking through this guys website for 'today I learned' and at first I'm impressed by how many of them there are. But then I start thinking: when you're trying to solve a problem you search for a lot of data. None of his posts are attributed. He's getting all his information from somewhere and then he goes and posts these articles just ripping off other sources.

I can understand when its based on your original work but this website reads more like basic questions posted on Stackoverflow. E.g. 'how to connect to a website with IPv6." Tell me he didn't just Google that and post the result. 0/10

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You should look harder! I attribute in plenty of these pieces, where appropriate.

Here's a query showing the 23 posts that link to StackOverflow, for example: https://til.simonwillison.net/tils?sql=select+*+from+til+whe...

And 41 where I credit someone on Twitter: https://til.simonwillison.net/tils?sql=select+*+from+til+whe...

More commonly I'll include a link from the TIL back to a GitHub Issue thread where I figured something out - those issue threads often link back to other sources.

For that IPv6 one: https://til.simonwillison.net/networking/http-ipv6

I had tried and failed to figure this out using Google searches in the past. I wrote that up after someone told me the answer in a private Slack conversation - saying who told me didn't feel appropriate there.

My goal with that page was to ensure that future people (including myself) who tried to find this with Google would get a better result!

(I'm a bit upset about this comment to be honest, because attributing people is something of a core value for me - the bookmarks on my blog have a "via" mechanism for exactly that reason: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark )

I tried to reproduce the OP's complaint. Of the 5 most recent TILs, only 1 did not reference some other source as inspiration. One literally gave "thanks" to tips obtained elsewhere.

I'm offended on your behalf! :)

I've been following you for some months now, and you always put links of your sources.

So please, feel 100% free to ignore that person

Hm, I guess most half-assed techy blogs are 0/10 then.

Honestly I don't see a problem with the few posts I looked at. It's like recipes. You can't copyright recipes. At least it's not AI-generated blogspam, but a modicum of at least curating went in here.

Remember what this is.

This is the author's notebook, which happens to be public. It's okay.

Thats actually allowed, if you run your own personal website.

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