I generally like the technology and cs-related submissions, as well as the occasional mathematical or philosophical article. Not sure that I'm keen on the "fighting" articles that I'm seeing on the list. Those don't really match what I thought this site was for.
On the netbook theme, it was originally Microsoft that used licensing to limit the amount of RAM they could ship with (1gb?) and support(2gb). This made it impractical to sell anything in the low end on screen size, etc, but above their limit on RAM. It was already impractical to sell anything but windows unless you sold no Windows or AMD if you sold any Intel.. So Microsoft/Intel licensing and illegal behaviors kept a gap in every vendors product line between terrible and medium range for as long as they could.
I think in the next phase, the factor was Intel, older Celerons support more RAM, but Intel realized cpu constraints were no longer as significant as memory constraints, so maxing out RAM on an economy system was outperforming their middle range.
The vendors themselves are IMO far too disorganized to be behind these factors, the death of the desktop/pc is largely about consumers avoiding the results of tactics organized by Intel and Microsoft to maximize their own slices that the vendors got no piece of. The only real exception is clutterware, but even that was probably tolerated and maybe encouraged by Microsoft. They had an interest in obfuscating sources of clean media aside from paying them directly at the time and it also let them claim vendors had sources of income to seek out and later to redirect blame.
My perspective is that the volume is low enough that one reposter or even one blogger greatly influences the average direction of the site.
In that sense, I think someone going in a niche direction with posts could give a niche that interests them (and is not the main perspective of some larger site) a try on this site and have a slight headstart on bringing that niche to the larger sites..
The opposite direction for this site, would be if everything on HN were reposted here or with equal chance.. Then the site/community has no specific direction of its own, and why make comments here that could be made in the larger community with the same general focus?
The question was intended as "what should I be looking to post", since very, very few of my posts seem to get any responses. But with your list of things you're interested in, it seemed clear that very little of it turns up here.
There's very little traffic, and I'm wondering what the few people here are interested in. The lack of traffic is ... troubling. I'm not finding much of interest, and I'm thinking about giving up, but unwilling to do so without giving it a "proper go".
Not really, I find enough compatible with those themes in things like cheapskate guide.
I took your question of what I would like to see to mean what nitches could laarc become known for given what the larger sites cover. If it sails along as is, I also don't see much point.
Tough to say, I kind of like what shows up here about half the time, which is a higher percentage than other sites but still an article every few weeks?
I'd say things that don't fit on lobsters due to site policy and are a bit more eclectic than hackernews.. I.e. no commercial potential computing.. maybe some other STEM topics?
I'm interested in peripheraly following what's going on with guix, *bsds, gopher, suckless.org, etc, but not enough to seek out and evaluate summaries, blogs, etc. Similarly for topics like hobby languages and compilers, embedded, etc.
I wish I could; the software stems from the Hacker News codebase, which has no such feature due to having no database. HN has been heavily critiqued for this over the years.
pg mentioned that it'd be possible to add an "alias" username, such that your name shows up scrambled, and that the links redirect to that. But, even that won't suffice entirely, since Laarc Search still has references to zge: https://search.laarc.io/?query=author:zge&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=... which uses Algolia, a different service.
Hey everyone! For anyone wondering what is this tool and why we need it..
I'd like to wind back couple of weeks ago when I was looking for battery monitoring/analyzing tool and was shocked to find that there existed no such tool on the market, so I decided to build one for myself!
Powir is a tool designed to help people evaluate their power and battery condition of their windows based systems. It achieves the goal by showcasing various metrics collected from the system and doing statistics to formulate an overall benchmark of your system.
Some of its features include:
- 100% portable app with no installations required: download and run! - Provides you with a simple and clean UI to list your battery and system information. - Shows you the trend in battery capacity as well estimate life since the OS was installed. - Ability to export all the data via various formats: PDF (app), JSON (processed), HTML (original report)
I was originally brought on in 2011 to bring the XanaduSpace 'prototype' written by Rob Smith up to releasable quality (after Ted came across coverage of my ZigZag-inspired operating system iX on hackaday).
XanaduSpace (or, at least the version we pieced together from chunks of various different versions -- the author didn't use revision control) was more of a demo & a POC than a prototype, and so salvaging it was more work than we expected (especially because we needed it to be cross-platform and needed to integrate a nice, responsive editor). We (myself and my buddy) ended up rewriting it entirely, and that became a different (never-released) project called XanaSpace.
Part of the XanaSpace rewrite was switching from OpenGL 1.1 to modern OpenGL -- necessary to make editing responsive, and necessary to fulfill certain demands about the amount of text we can display. But fulfilling the text quantity demands (we needed to support arbitrary unicode in arbitrary truetype fonts & be able to display the whole king james bible on screen at once) were tough, and my partner and I burnt out on it. We were working as volunteers anyhow, so we sort of skated along for a few years.
I worked a little bit on the web-based OpenXanadu, released in 2014 (wrote the code to display the little 'X' logo during loading, and also wrote a substantial amount of code to support a caching proxy that we never ended up releasing & an entire editor we also didn't end up releasing), though the current web-based version on the xanadu site (called XuCambridge, formerly XanaBurger) I didn't have any connection to. I'm still occasionally consulted on ZigZag.
Ultimately, the biggest impact of my tenure on Xanadu (aside from being able to brag about attending Ted Nelson's wedding) has been my work with documentation. Both official and internal Xanadu documentation has been a bit hard to make sense of for newcomers: Ted has a carnival-barker sensibility when it comes to style, a love of puns and neologisms that would put Pynchon to shame, extremely severe ADHD, and hasn't written a line of code since the 60s (though he has a deep intuitive understanding of data structures and their performance), so 'documentation' is mostly Ted making up new words and pontificating about how cool his ideas are -- a real shame because his ideas really are good, if you can figure out what they are. So, with his blessing (if not his oversight), I wrote an introduction to Xanadu internals aimed at software engineers not acquainted with the project: https://medium.com/@enkiv2/an-engineers-guide-to-the-docuverse-d080cdbb73a6?source=friends_link&...
Hi! Nice to "meet" you ... thanks for the reply ...
What was it that you were doing on Xanadu? And what sorts of things do you say about hypertext? I'd be interested in a pointer to your writings on those.
By day I work as a software engineer for a heartless global corporation. By night I shitpost about hypertext and leftist politics. For a little while I worked on Project Xanadu, and I write freelance on medium (and for publications like Tedium) as a side hustle. Every november I participate in NaNoGenMo, a 'contest' for writing programs that write novels. I have released nearly 50 albums worth of experimental electronica under the name 'Infocalypse', and published two essay collections. I've been on this site for a few years, but I rarely post.
Yeah it's ridiculous! GPG is badly designed in many ways. A culture of intimidation and slogans like "don't implement your own crypto" has painted us into a corner where there's no good working software for encryption. Another problem is that everybody has demanded ultimate security as priority above ease of use. Something like autocrypt could have been very easy to use and increased the cost of mass surveillance enormously but everyone has been so stubborn.
Hi (I'm not sure if my initial attempt to comment submitted - so I'll post again. Sorry if this ends up being a duplicate). I'm a fiber optic technician who is also a hobbyist programmer. I have written some small applications to help myself and my colleagues do our jobs, although I have never been paid to develop software. I actually studied programming at a small technical college after I finished my masters degree in an unrelated field (Music, MANY years ago). I used to use Java, but have migrated to Clojure for my projects these days. I enjoy lurking here and on Lobste.rs, although sometimes the articles are over my head. Not being a professional programmer, I'm not immersed in the technologies many of the submissions refer to, and a lot of the mathematical or physics related submissions are difficult for me to grok. I enjoy the attempt though, and hope that I learn something.
nice to meet you! I have enjoyed the content you submit.
I studied math properly a long time ago, and I'm recently starting to study at home by myself again. I also did a bunch of hacking and game making in the past, I'm interested in a lot of things. I got a lot of opinions about software and tried to build various lean minimal pieces of kit but I nothing seemed to gain much interest - it's difficult to find community despite the internet existing. Recently I've been playing a lot of difficult puzzle games like Molek-Syntez, Recursed, Stephen Sausage Roll and Hiding Space.
