Comment by jgrahamc
1 year ago
> While I have no reason to doubt Daniel's good faith, it's hard to believe that HN users would be tired of LLM-related news.
I think the answer to this is... go set up your our LLM News web site and build a community. I really love HN but I wanted more retro computing and gaming news so I created by own site (https://twostopbits.com/) using the HN source code. It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderate it.
I've been in various online communities for over 35 years and I can tell you that by far the best moderated and longest successfully running community is HN (for a while The Well was amazing).
I hadn't see this before, but that is exactly what I've been wanting more of - thanks for setting that up John! I'm curious, do you feel like lower traffic communities like yours serves up the content mix you were hoping for when you started it?
I have no idea. I created it as an experiment. It's fairly active despite being a few months old. We'll see what happens.
I have bookmarked and will post something if I get my Everdrive64 ordered.
1 reply →
> It's not hard. Go build the thing you want and moderate it.
Does the source code include moderating tools, or is it just a bare bones aggregator with a default ranking algo?
There are moderation tools. I can do things like kill a story, ban a domain, ban a user, alter the score on a story, mark a story as dead, lock a story so no one else can edit it, see how many sock puppets voted for the story, edit any aspect of a story.
I modified the default source to have a concept of tags on a story because I wanted people to be able to filter stories by their areas of interest (e.g. everything Commodore 64: https://twostopbits.com/tag?q=c64). All my changes are open and here: https://github.com/jgrahamc/twostopbits
> alter the score on a story
It's cool that you set up your own instance, but do you see no problem with covertly altering the score of a story?
Such secrecy leads to oversized, over-trusted forums, and is what this post seeks to address.
Wow very cool love the retro angle. Assuming you are using Workers for this?
No, I use a lot of Cloudflare products (the domain is registered through Cloudflare, the site is proxied and protected by Cloudflare, I use Cloudflare's free Web Analytics), but I am not using Workers for this.
The HN source base is a monolithic Arc program and Arc is in Racket/Scheme. To use Workers I would have had to get Racket working on Wasm which I simply haven't tried. Also news.arc does a bunch of file system access and I'd have to rewrite that to use Workers KV or something. So, I decided to use lots of Cloudflare and run the Arc code on a VPS I've had for many years. The whole thing is running in a screen session which I can hop into and be in the REPL when I want.