For the best experience on desktop, install the Chrome extension to track your reading on news.ycombinator.com
Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | history | MitPitt's commentsregister

Lately I've noticed posts with barely 10 points getting to HN frontpage. Was it always like this?

I believe it's the way the HN algorithm works. In order to give new and obscure posts a shot, it will add them to peoples feeds in their front page and see how they measure. Otherwise new posts wouldn't get seen and the flywheel would never get started.

So everyone acts as a sort of beta tester for obscure posts.


On weekends, yes. During the week, that’s also true if they arrive within a short time frame, e.g., three minutes. Almost no one looks at “New”. That is the real issue.

Maybe the algorithm has some kind of "momentum" to it, taking into consideration the velocity of upvotes.

Not as much competition on the weekend?

If you are looking to see the "true" HN frontpage (i.e. most upvoted posts), I'd recommend using https://hckrnews.com

If you want a list of posts simply ordered by upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/best

I just assume bots

Bots doing what? How would the poster being a bot influence why the post itself makes it to the front page with just 10 points?

It’s about how quickly they get those points. It doesn’t have to be bots. Sending a post to friends with reputable human profiles, and asking for a vote kinda works of most social networks. Some social networks claim they have protection against this but I wouldn’t bet they catch everything.

humanslop

A raspberry zero is more powerful than an enterprise server from the 1990s. A minimalist static website is not impressive. You can fit way more in there.


I hosted my personal email domain on a Zero for almost 10 years. It had about the same capability as the very expensive (and large) Win NT4 machine we used for our 80-person organization when I started my career in tech. I eventually replaced the Zero with a Raspberry Pi 4, primarily because the Zero’s IO ports are annoying (eg, USB is not hot-pluggable!) An RPi 4 is extreme overkill for personal email but it still idles under 1W and when it fails I can replace the entire machine for next to nothing.

The point of failure for all of these machines has been the SD card. They seem to last 4 years almost to the day. I suppose if I set up a RAMdisk they might last longer, but honestly, for the price of an SD card it’s not really worth my time.


I remember in the mid-late 90's how poorly the Exchange server ran that there was a nix server for inbound email just to throttle the ingress. When it was upgraded to a 4-socket server, there was concern when the *nix guys just let everything that was being held during the upgrade through, and it just chugged along. But the moment of panic was palpable. The Unix guys really didn't like that business internals and apps were running from Windows services, so thought it would be funny to try to knock over the new mail server.

Today, you can run mailcow/mailu with all the options on a relatively modest vps. I'm on a cable provider that locks down residential customers and charges over 2x as much for business, so it's cheaper to use VPSes.

On RPi, I've mostly opted to use SSD + USB Adapters as they've been significantly more reliable that SD. There's lots of cases that make this configuration a breeze. That said, I've mostly been running Mini PCs since COVID when the RPi got to be more expensive all-in and slower.


>The point of failure for all of these machines has been the SD card. They seem to last 4 years almost to the day. I suppose if I set up a RAMdisk they might last longer, but honestly, for the price of an SD card it’s not really worth my time.

There are "Industrial" SD cards which should last considerably longer, you can look up a few people have done their own testing. They can be slower but that shouldn't be a blocker for an email server on a pi.


You can also boot (full size, not-zero) pis off USB disks. Or just netboot.


They make high endurance microSD cards that can handle a lot more writes before failing.

OTOH, I corrupted a card by turning off the Pi in middle of writing.


Interesting, what tools did you use for email hosting?

I’m scared of self hosting a mailbox.


Have been using Mail-in-a-box [1] for about 5 years [1]. I haven't done any maintenance for at least 3 years, besides occasionally clicking restart in the admin webpanel every time it does serious security updates.

I don't send a lot of emails from it, but the ones I do are delivered.

[1] https://mailinabox.email/


https://www.xmox.nl/ is pretty good single binary mail solution for personal email hosting, it not too many features of modern webmails are needed.


Self hosting a mailbox is easy - getting email back out is the hard part.


I just use Postfix. I originally ran on NetBSD. I have an alternative approach for spam, so I have no anti-spam tools.


It's a relatively steep learning curve if you're not getting paid to do it. However, in my case, I have been running my personal mail server on a trusted VPS host for well over a decade now. After the initial setup, there is really nothing to do except for regular Linux updates/upgrades. I run postfix, dovecot, roundcube, and rspamd. All of the configuration is in Ansible, so if the host goes tango uniform, or if I want to move it elsewhere, downtime should be minimal.

There are a few open-source one-command mail server deployment solutions that do all of the heavy lifting for you. Some of them might even be pretty good. The problem with those is that if you don't understand how your mail server is put together, you're completely stuck if it breaks.


Hey, it loads! Unlike ~10% of pages on first page of HN, hugged to death.


Also I love the dithered B&W images. The entire aesthetic of the site is great.


The website running on the vape was far more interesting than this. I do wonder if anyone has tried to use the microphone in these devices to listen to audio. Backdoored vape


One could record from the microphone and then transmit via RF side channel.


I am serving a small web interface to control my shutters on an esp32. I even did the experiment to not parse the request and just always respond with the same response, so a webserver for a single page can be trivial (you would have embed images and all other resources into the html then). But of course I am parsing the request, because I need separate routes for the page and for the actions. Since this is on my home lan it doesn't even need ssl. I guess as long as the traffic is low, an esp32 might be able to do ssl. For me that isn't relevant because it isn't on the internet and when I want to connect to it from outside my home lan, I just use wireguard.


Indeed, you can even permanently run one using a balcony solar panel:

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about/the-solar-website/


My thoughts exactly. People regularly run Pi-Hole on these things, which not only is "serving a website" (the dashboard) but is also being a DNS server.


make dark mode the default, then it's a flash of dark in either case


Mullvad becoming popular with huge ad campaigns is very sus. Either way I don't use it anymore because its ip ranges are banned on most websites.


I'm also weirded out by how much ad spend they have. Billboards? Ads on buses? Why? I want my VPN provider to be like the domain registrar Gandi, not super well known, consistent, and no-nonsense.

I am a Proton user now, mostly because I finally realized VPN came with the email service I was already paying for. No complaints.


Gandi is sadly not a great example anymore for this, as they raised prices quite a lot over recent years, especially for their email service.


Come to think of it, that's why I'm on Proton now.


Yeah...

I can't use Mullvad for several banks in the UK with IPv4 - if I switch to IPv6 in the app settings I sometimes can, but often I have to just disable it completely...

I can't use Youtube anonymously (i.e. without logging in) within the last month or so either, as Youtube very often won't play content due to my IP as well...


This can be done and it's called a zero knowledge proof (ZKP) in cryptography. And it's starting to be used in crypto wallets to verify humanity.


Yeah, today I logged into Claude on my iPhone and it asked my approval for Apple to validate that my age range was “Adult” without providing any additional information.

Why can’t this be used everywhere we are being asked to validate our age like adult websites/discord/etc?


I think I've been waiting since the 90s hoping somebody will figure out how to make this a real thing (or was it the early 2000s?)

As I recall it seemed to be just one guy, David Chaum, who did so much to show how so many of these things could work, but the rest of us have somehow managed to do very little with his ideas. What are we missing?


You're missing a drive to make billions or wield power, silly.

Of course there's always been ways to do this ethically. But the ones up top don't make money from that. And they can spend billions convincing people the only way it works is with whatever makes them money.


It increases visual distance to page which strains the eye.


It doesn't. You hold the book at basically the same distance you would normally.


what game needs more?


This is the real answer. Vram is largely dependent on the resolution you're running, and at 1080p 8gb vram is fine. People who want 20GB vram are probably going to build their own machines anyways, the steam machine is meant to be a console replacement to my understanding.


I'd argue that 1080p gaming is also perfectly fine. These days most games have split the UI/window resolution from the game resolution. So you can have 4k sharp text and UI, while the actual game runs at 75%/50% resolution and you largely can't tell the difference while sitting on the couch.


Is it dependent on the resolution your running, or is it the size of all textures that need to be cached in RAM? The amount of data needed to framebuffer 1080p vs 4K isn't that great


Many do, especially at higher resolutions.


I don't think there is any reason a game _needs_ more. I don't think there is any gameplay experience that couldn't be enjoyably delivered on this hardware. And it's a massive disappointment that minimum requirements bloat has been out of control lately.

With how PC part prices have exploded after AI data center buying, I think we will see developers suddenly discover that you don't actually need half these specs to run games.


I doubt the rest of the system will be able to do these high resolution versions. It's basically a console, not a gamer PC.


Especially if you do stuff like "AI" upscaling, frame generation, and raytracing.


What many games need to do more is to better optimize. And I’m talking about graphics, not time to market.


Amber doesn't smell at all. "Amber" scent in perfumery is more like a vibe thing.


To punish them for building a cool bridge or?


If you see it as a punishment to be the first to cross the bridge that you designed, then you should probably be increasing the factor of safety in your calculations and the number of site checks you conduct.


It's only a punishment if the bridge falls down. But if someone is making truck drivers drive heavy trucks out onto a bridge to "test" if it will stand up under the load it only seems fair to me that the engineers who designed and built it take the risk alongside them.


I'm positive those trucks are self driven. There is no need for draconian measures you hoped for. Spaceship engineers aren't forced to go into space.


If crossing the bridge you built is as dangerous as going into space, you've clearly done something wrong.


Well, it's a good way to check their confidence level of their work


Key stone?


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search:

HN For You