conesus

For the Premium Archive tier, NewsBlur attempts to download a blog's entire backlog to backfill stories, whether it's exposed through paging or RFC 5005. Here's more info about how NewsBlur does it: https://blog.newsblur.com/2022/07/01/premium-archive-subscri...

It wasn't actually down from overuse, the node.js server hit an unhandled error and fell over. And because this is the first time I was seeing real usage, I didn't have a supervisor in place to restart it automatically. That's handled now, of course.

I was a NNW user for years and it's why I eventually built my own news reader. NNW had a lot of great features and I wanted to mostly keep them. You might find that NewsBlur takes a similar path but with a different set of opinions.

Seriously. I've been updating NewsBlur with all the pet features people have wanted for years and I'm finding that it's even more enjoyable now with all those AI features built in. Daily briefing, ask AI, story clustering, all of these are AI-flavored improvements to RSS and it's so relaxing to open up my river of news and scroll through all the good stuff without feeling a gross algorithm surfacing endless outrage.

I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.

VESA mounts are only a few bucks and give you even better height and tilt adjustment. You also get desk space back. I have a shorter desk (24" vs typical 30" depth) and I have two monitors and a laptop mounted on 3 VESAs and I can extend them so that the monitor edge is inline with the desk edge, giving me the same 24" that a 30" desk would have with a monitor stand.

HN caches the profile, sometimes it takes a few minutes for Hacker Smacker to get the latest data. It keeps checking until it works.

That was the toughest lift of all! Firefox and Chrome extensions were easy, just had to go through a quick review. Apple rejected the safari extension 4-5 times and wanted me to make changes to the metadata and even questioned the extension itself. Took a lot of back and forth to get the safari extension approved.

Hacker Smacker doesn't mean you ignore your foes. Their comments are now labeled with the tiny red orb, giving you acknowledgement of how you've felt about them in the past.

I've used this extension for the past 15 years and I can say that I love seeing foes show up in threads. I still read their comments, but I know going into it that I can probably skip it after the first sentence if I recognize that it's more of what I disliked about them in the first place.

This is a time saving browser extension, freeing me up to scan more HN threads. I now often scan a thread to see if there's any friends, foes, or FoaFs inside.

I have not found that to be the case. I have over 150 commenters on my Hacker Smacker foe list and I have only found once or twice that somebody who goes into the red bucket deserves to go into the green bucket.

Now the way I use the friend/foe system of labeling may be different than others, and it's a personal decision for how you choose to label commenters. But the way I do it, if somebody has an opinion that puts them on my red list, that's great to know, because when I see them comment elsewhere I now have the context for why I feel the way I do about them.

I made some changes and the extension now recognizes if you can't hover and will allow you to tap to show the orbs before selecting one. It now works on mobile browsers with extensions.

Hah, at least I'm consistent.

You don't avoid anything, this simply helps highlight commenters in a long thread.

I mean the entire extension is about this, but I can quickly scan this thread (or others) and spot my favored commenters.

There's na open issue to address this exact need. I haven't figured out a good compromise yet, but an option to include symbols would be good.

https://github.com/samuelclay/hackersmacker/issues/3

The layout doesn't shift down. It only moves the meta information to the right of the user name over a little bit.

Ahh, I have you green orbed, and I recognize your username from NB. The system works!

Thanks to the HN moderators for re-posting this after I posted this a few days ago. I only notice now that it's on the front page.

Happy to answer any questions. Let me tell you, I've really enjoyed having those writers that I like highlighted on this comment thread because it makes it very easy to scan it.

I think it's important to remember that this is not about hiding writers you disagree with. It's simply about making it so that you can read more Hacker News threads and quickly scanning the comments, teasing out those writers that you agree with. It's also fun to read the writers you disagree with, if anything, to reinforce your opinion of them.

There's nothing about this that's horse blinders. It's literally a way to highlight riders that you both agree and disagree with. It actually makes it more likely that you're going to engage with the ones you disagree with, because now they have a red orb.

That's absolutely correct. I started programming at eight in 1993, so I have a soft spot for those types of icons.

The reason I have this extension is because I don't want to hide those comments. I want to be able to read them when I quickly scroll a thread. Oftentimes, I'm reading so many Hacker News threads that I want to be able to pull out the commenters that I like. I even like reading the comments from commenters that I dislike in the hopes that I see if I still disagree with them.

I'm not hiding anybody. I'm just making it more apparent when they're commenting

Oh man, I had no idea this got reposted and I just discovered now, 8 hours later. Anyway, I kicked the server and its back up.

This new remote control handoff is neat but still requires you to remember to do the handoff. Oftentimes I’m waiting on an agent and then walk away.

I built Crabigator[1] and it's a wrapper around `claude` and `codex`, so its ready for coding on the go on start and already streaming. Plus, crabigator shows many parallel windows, separated by repo/project/machine, so you can manage multiple agents seamlessly.

[1]: https://drinkcrabigator.com

I always preferred gmud, but zmud has all the bells and whistles. All I needed was ANSI color, aliases, triggers, and command history.

How can I get access?

N.U.T.S. 3.3.3 4eva! There was a NUTS 4, but about a decade too late.

Say more, what’s the influence? My favorite branches were Diku/Merc and Circle based. SMAUG, Envy, ROM. Somewhere on a hard drive lives Abyss of Curak, my colorful and (in 1998) briefly popular MUD.

Everything is a tradeoff, including aging. You [can] become wiser but at a sizable expense.

Here's what I did to make voice (now WisprFlow, before Superwhisper) a habit:

  1. Install Karabiner-Elements, a free macOS keyboard remapper[0]
  2. Map F19 -> F5 (mic button) in Karabiner-Elements
  3. Choose F19 as the voice hotkey in your voice app

And now you can use the handy F5 mic button on your Apple keyboard. WisprFlow automatically has it set for:

  - press and hold to talk
  - double tap for indeterminate listening until you f5/esc

That workflow alone, of using the f5 key and switching between the two modes of speaking (holding or double-tap), has freed up a not insignificant part of my working memory. Turning abstract thoughts into text is higher cost than turning them into voice.

I predict individual offices[1] will be more popular as a choice for startups.

[0]: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org

[1]: https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1281887

Now that's dangerous to do because the conversation history in Claude Code now also reverts the code to that point. So while this technique may have worked in the past, it no longer works.

I built NewsBlur and it's always interesting to me to hear people talk about the UI as a retro feel, but when I look at the competitors, I feel they aren't dense enough with information. Minimalism has gutted our ability to process more than a bit of text at once and I think that's tragic.

> Most of the blacksmiths in the 19th century drank themselves to death after the industrial revolution

This is hyperbolic and a dramatic oversimplification and does not accurately describe the reality of the transition from blacksmithing to more advanced roles like machining, toolmaking, and working in factories. The 19th century was a time of interchangeable parts (think the North's advantage in the Civil War) and that requires a ton of mechanical expertise and precision.

Many blacksmiths not only made the transition to machining, but there weren't enough blackmsiths to fill the bevy of new jobs that were available. Education expanded to fill those roles. Traditional blacksmithing didn’t vanish either, even specialized roles like farriery and ornamental ironwork also expanded.