zeras

Every system can be gamed, but if it were me and I were looking for a simple filtering solution, I would do something like this ..

Set a policy of X comments required per submission in the last 30 days (not counting last 24 hours) for all submissions, not just "Show HN:" posts.

Meaning, users would need to post X comments before they could post a submission and by not counting the last 24 hours, someone couldn't join, post X comments and immediately post a submission.

It would limit new submission posts to people who are active in the community so they would be more familiar with the policies and etiquette of HN along with gaining an idea of what interests its members.

One thing I noticed recently while going through several of the Show HN submissions was that a lot of the accounts had been created the same day the submission was made.

My guess is HN has become featured on a large number of "Where do I promote/submit my _____?" lists in blogs, social media, etc. to the point that HN is treated like a public bulletin board more than a place to share things with each other in the community.

I love the Show HN section because so many interesting things get posted there but even I have cut back on checking it lately because there are simply too many things posted to check out.

I hope they do something to improve it.

Disclaimer: I'm developing a chat app/serivce as well, but it's not a Slack/Teams competitor.

I personally would love to see real alternatives to Slack and Teams.

Discord has Stoat (formerly "Revolt") and a newer app called "Root" but both of those have a long way to go to replace Discord.

Maybe I am atypical, but to me the biggest problem with Slack is not the 90-day retention (because I would assume any paid version should include message retention), but rather the per-user pricing.

Given your current pricing (at least what you show right now), it seems like your team-based pricing model is a much better selling point for your service over something like Slack or Teams which use per-user pricing, assuming you offer most of the features that typical Slack/Teams clients need.

The only issue I see with pricing is your free tier might ultimately undermine your revenue since the only differences between it and the first paid tier are 15 more users and priority support (which most people should never need).

This is actually a smart and common sense move by Apple.

The non-hardware AI industry is currently in an R&D race to establish and maintain marketshare, but with Apple's existing iPhone, iPad and Mac ecosystem they already have a market share they control so they can wait until the AI market stabilizes before investing heavily in their own solutions.

For now, Apple can partner with solid AI providers to provide AI services and benefits to their customers in the short term and then later on they can acquire established AI companies to jumpstart their own AI platform once AI technology reaches more long term consistency and standardization.

Caching is definitely a useful and even a key component to producing efficent and high performance applications and services.

I think the mistake is not using caching, but rather using it too soon in the development process.

There are times when caching is a requirement because there is simply no way to provide efficient performance without it, but I think too many times developers jump straight to caching without thinking because it solves potential problems for them before they happen.

The real problem comes later though at scale when caching can no long compensate for the development inefficiencies.

Now the developers have to start rewriting core code which will take time to thoroughly complete and test and/or the engineers have to figure out a way to throw more resources at the problem.

I think a fundamental mistake I see many developers make is they use caching trying to solve problems rather than improve efficiency.

It's the equivalent of adding more RAM to fix poor memory management or adding more CPUs/servers to compensate for resource heavy and slow requests and complex queries.

If your application requires caching to function effectively then you have a core issue that needs to be resolved, and if you don't address that issue then caching will become the problem eventually as your application grows more complex and active.

I remember playing Ultima Online and really enjoying that game when I heard about a new first-person MMORPG in development called EverQuest.

I ran a couple of popular game sites back then and had industry connections so I got early beta test access to try out EverQuest.

Unfortunately, I made a bad choice when I chose to make a Human character, which was night-blind. On top of that, it seemed like every time I logged in it was night time and the game was nearly unplayable away from lights, fires and torches for that character.

To make matters worse, I started in Freeport which had several invisible zone walls so on top of not being able to see, I constantly kept zoning which constantly interrupted the game.

As you can imagine, I lost interest rather quickly and went back to UO. I gave my beta account to a gamer friend of mine, who had a much better experience than I had during beta.

When EverQuest eventually launched, several friends of mine bought it so I decided to buy it as well. By then I had learned to make elven characters because they had infravision/ultravision that allowed them to see at night.

It was fun for a little while, but then bad game design concepts led to another problem. They arbitrarily decided to assign some of the classes with experience penalties, including the one I played which had a 40% experience reduction, which was ridiculous.

The problem was that at that time, that information was not well known so I all I noticed was all of my friends were outleveling me because none of their classes had penalties.

Eventually by around level 12 (which took a while back then), I was too low to group with them, despite playing the same amount of time they did, and I could no longer gain experience in their groups.

Since EverQuest was heavily group-focused, I decided to go back to Ultimate Online.

A few months later, I decided to give it another try and made a bard. Suddenly, everyone was inviting me to group and that made the game a lot more fun and led to a lot of great memories.

A few years ago I tried to go back and play it but, either due to age or having less free time, it was just too slow and difficult to play after all of these years.

While I don't play it any more, I am really glad that it is still online and even if it shuts down, there is another player-run (and licensed) rogue server available.

I met so many good friends in that game, including one of my best friends to this day, so I will always have fond memories of it.

Developer here .. I wanted to share a free news and content search engine I have been developing called WhatSubject.

WhatSubject allows you to search for breaking news and content from thousands of sites using strings, words, topics and by specific sites.

WhatSubject also supports smart search URLs so you can just add what you want to search for after the WhatSubject URL.

Show recent content from TheVerge.com .. https://whatsubject.com/theverge.com

Show recent content for the #linux topic .. https://whatsubject.com/linux

Show recent content for "ycombinator" string search .. https://whatsubject.com/ycombinator

You can also combine searches .. @theverge.com elon musk twitter

There are no user accounts on WhatSubject, but there are several settings you can change including the site theme and search result layout format.

You can also take advantage of several content filters including blocking known right-biased sources and/or left-biased sources, political content and paywalled sites.

Your latest searches are shown on the home page as the first entries in the tag cloud followed by other recent popular searches.

You can disable or delete your search history (it is stored using cookies) as well as delete all cookies.

Also, rather than !bangs, I added quick search buttons for other news and search engine sites to the bottom of search result pages.

I built WhatSubject because I wanted a way to find and read site content quickly by topics and sites using a clutter-free interface.

I hope some people enjoy it!

-Zeras

Thank you! It is a simple site that uses an API from another project am developing for the search results.

I will add filters to the search soon, but I prefer to let everyone decide which sources are valid or not valid themselves.

In the meantime, you can add "-site:domain.com" in the search box to block a site you do not want.

Given the situation in Ukraine, I created a quick and easy way to keep up with the latest news on Ukraine from a lot of sites.

You can also search for news and content on other topics as well, but there are not any features beyond the search.

This is just a very simple site that I mainly created for myself to keep up with what is going on in Ukraine.

Let me know if you find any bugs!

The index rate for each source automatically adapts based on the frequency of new content while maintaining a reasonable minimum frequency for sporadic sources.

The goal is to index content as quickly as possible without impacting each site's performance or causing automated defense systems to block the requests.

The Settings page requires that you login, which only requires an email address.

The quick action bar on the search results page also has a smaller cog icon and other icons on it that will allow you to change several settings without logging in, but you must have javascript enabled to access them.

Upgraded accounts gain access to a global filter that can filter unwanted sources from search results.

Non-upgraded accounts can include one exclusion source in searches as well by adding ..

  -@domain.com

Thank you for pointing out the typo. I fixed it in a couple of places.

I also added the spam folder check message to the login link emailed page.

I agree the search page needs to be rewritten and also simplified.

While there is a max sources limit per search, you can include multiple sources in a single search ..

@gizmodo.com @npr.org

The problem is not really the methodology or implementation but the perception caused by it. If you can tell a user "we know you read this" then that implies you are tracking what they read which is something I try to avoid.

I plan to work on a solution, but if I do, users will be able to opt-in or opt-out depending on the implementation.

I really try to avoid using local storage because it delves into potential user privacy issues. I will look more into it as well as other options as I know having a list of already viewed results would be helpful for users.

Thank you for the suggestion! I am familiar with the lang attribute but did not think to use it. It should be live now.

I posted it in the beta notes on the site, but forgot to add it to my comments here.

The Popular search results are currently supplemented by a variety of hand-picked source feeds because the site is new and there is not yet enough traffic history to generate an accurate list of popular content, but that will change once more people start using the site.

Of course people will not be happy with some of the sites selected if the target site has a political bias that they disagree with, but it is only temporary until traffic starts to grow more on the site.

I already have it built into the engine to ignore the supplemental sources once the activity level hits a certain level.

That said, it will still come down to the users. If a lot of users are viewing specific content, it will likely find its way to the home page.

On a side note, you can change your default home page via the Settings page to avoid the popular search results.

That is an area that I need to improve. With a high focus on privacy, it makes it hard to track what users read without creating a user tracking system and that is something I really want to avoid doing.

The thread links use the CSS :visited selector to show the links in a different color to help identify the links you have previously clicked without the site knowing that information itself.

There is a history function for logged in members, but for user privacy it can be limited or disabled by the user via the Settings page and is also auto-purged periodically.

At the very least the site needs to show content that has been added since your last visit and that is something I plan to implement soon.

Thank you! I will admit that I really wanted to go with a shorter brandable name, and I am still considering it, but for now I think the name fits.

I am planning to tweak the mobile/responsive styles on some layouts to make them a little easier to read.

Some of the search layouts will show differently on mobile screens so maybe toggle between them to see if you like one of those better.

I really do appreciate the suggestions.

I have worked really hard to provide as many options as possible for people, but it is hard to anticipate everything people will want or need from it until they use it and tell you so feedback like yours helps.

I have added everything you wrote to my notes from this thread so I will see what I can do to improve them for you.

No, of course not, but if I only included lesser known content in the reader and search engine then few people would use it since they would have to look elsewhere to find content from the major news sources.

Major news sources will always get more overall exposure simply through quantity because they publish so many articles every single day. However, low traffic sites and blogs will get their content promoted at or near the top of the search results when it is indexed in the same manner that the high traffic sites do.

I understand there are sites you dislike which is why I added an Upgrade global filter feature where you can block sites, topics, keywords, etc. that you do not want to see. Other Upgraded users can do the same when they do not want to see content they dislike as well.

Great to hear! Thank you!

I have not posted those details yet as the network security voice in my head screams, "DON'T DO IT!"

That said, I will probably post something on the site soon as I always find it interesting to see how other sites are built.

My intention behind content diversity is not based on political interests, but rather a desire to offer a greater level of exposure for lesser known content and blog sites.

By "diversity" I mean that a developer who writes good articles on python whose blog only gets a few users a day will be treated the same as content from high traffic sites.

Unlike other news services that either have political leanings or are beholden to their advertisers, I want to provide an independent service where people can decide for themselves what they read or do not read.

That is an oversight definitely. The payment flow requires we collect the payment method before the "checkout" page, but it should definitely show all prices prior to the payment method step. I will work on changing that.

Thank you for pointing that out!

Thank you!

The site supports user subscriptions for advance reader and searching functionality, so my hope at least for now is that people will use the free version and at some point want higher limits or more functionality and then upgrade.

I have a lot more planned for it long term (everyone always says that, but it is true) such as an API service, but for now, I am focused on improving the reader service and adding more sites to the index.

I agree and I like that meta search engines offer fuzzy search matching, because sometimes you know what you want but are not quite sure of the best keywords to use to find it.

I just wish more search engines offered an option or default setting where search results would only include exact matches.

Absolutely! I know the main color themes have contrast issues with accessibility. My plan is to create a high contrast theme to help with that.

That said, any other suggestions would definitely be appreciated.

It is really surprising and somewhat irritating that it is not more common.