Ah, this is why I've been receiving a bunch of very obvious spam/scam mails in my inbox.

I got a classic and obvious 419 scam email today. Kind of felt like I'd gone back to a simpler time.

Yeah my inbox looked like 2005 again—nothing but raw, unfiltered chaos.

Hm. Mixed feelings, I would like a more rigorous approach to this a lot better. CF is really too big to fail now, I've had absolutely no qualms about recommending CF but after the last couple of months I'm revising that until things are measurably better.

Your legacy is one of showing how to apply good engineering principles to complex problems at scale and I think CF is risking that reputation right now.

What "user-triggered censorship" are you talking about?

2-3 users with the proper standing pressing that flag link on a story.

So that would be me. I flag stories about US politics, for example.

Why?

I can read about US politics pretty much anywhere else.

this sounds more like GP believes one of the conspiracy theories about how moderation works on HN

What conspiracy theory would that be?

the one where a handful of people can coordinate to shadowban / flag

unclear if its the one where the official HN mods (there are only 2) believed to be the ones doing this

the reality is that the official mods are largely hands off, when they do get involved, more often than not it is to reverse a community flagging action, which is where most moderation happens, at a large enough community scale that a handful of people cannot wield this much flagging power

If you believe unjust flagging has happened, the best recourse is to email the HN mods, the are very friendly, helpful and fair

If the story has enough votes before then, it is only downweighted, and only a bit at a time. Same with the flamewar detector, it just pulls stories down a bit. After the score is more than (I think?) 10 votes, it won't get entirely flagged unless mods decide it should.

As immortalised in the 1978 song "Greased Ligthnin'" from the film Grease:

    Well, this car is automatic
    It's systematic
    It's hydromatic
    Why it's greased lightnin' (greased lightnin')

I am pretty sure that "hydromatic" there is actually "Hydramatic" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydramatic).

1978 film (based on a 1971 musical) set in 1958 with the high school kids repairing a beaten up 1948 model year car.

If it’s a hydramatic, be careful to only lubricate it with snake oil.

Today, I am revising Portuguese grammar and so I've mostly been exploring the things I can remember well and those that I can't. Portuguese has a lot of verb forms that I need to get right. But it also has really interesting constructions like "ir ter com" which literally means "to go to have with" but is an idiomatic way of saying "to meet up" (with someone) and I keep remembering and forgetting it.

The phrase looks like "intercom." Maybe visualize some kind of mnemonic based on that -- buzzing the call button at a friend's apartment and asking if they want to meet up.

What do you use to revise this? Did you download or make an Anki deck?

Paper. I have revision sheets on paper.

Huh. I would never have thought of "pile up dirty crockery until some later time" as an option!

Thank you. Added it to <https://hnpwd.github.io/> in commit <https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd.github.io/commit/545b02d>. Please feel free to let me know here if I should alter any details of your website.

... Actually, would it be easier to use PRs than work through this thread?

Yes, it would. If someone follows the links to https://github.com/hnpwd/hnpwd.github.io and decides to create PRs, they are very welcome. But if that is too much friction, I'd rather have the links posted here than not shared at all. In that case, hopefully I or someone else will make the code changes to add the website to the directory.

Yes, that's me.

Sadly, Scott Adams' political opinions came to overshadow Dilbert, but I shall choose to remember him as Dilbert's creator and how Dilbert captured a moment in time and work so aptly.

Back when Dilbert was massive my company ran the following ad in cinemas in Silicon Valley: https://imgur.com/a/ZPVJau8 Everyone seeing that ad knew what we were referring to.

Couple of blogs about my KIM-1:

1. My 1976 KIM-1 https://blog.jgc.org/2023/11/my-1976-kim-1.html

2. Getting the KIM-1 to talk to my Mac https://blog.jgc.org/2025/02/getting-kim-1-to-talk-to-my-mac...

Thanks. Nice links. I love the handwritten assembler pic with mapping from mnemonics to op codes. If you had to punch it in on a hex keypad, you absolutely needed that. Unfortunately, I never was organized enough to have different color pens :-)

As a high school student I didn’t have the money to buy a 6502 assembler and I used to write my assembly code out in long hand on graph paper, hand-assemble it and type in the hex in the monitor.

As a 13-year old, I didn’t have an assembler so had to write one first, in BASIC and then eventually in assembler. It was the lack of the thing which made me proficient in building the thing lacking. Plus, my 8-bit machine at the time (Oric Atmos) didn’t have much software distribution in my neck of the woods ..