"Art of Travel"[1] is one of those websites.
When I read that website I was impressed how lovingly it was put together. The overall experience was so good that I didn't even think about evaluating its design.
> Redditors may be the tastemakers of a small incredibly self-referential corner of the Internet, but have approximately zero influence on the Internet that everyone else uses.
Some reddit topics/threads were featured on the frontpage of popular German news websites during the last months.
(Spiegel Online, Yahoo News, Süddeutsche)
I thought about creating something very similar for years but never began actually working on it.
Chances are, many people were thinking about building such a platform during the last couple of years. It is weird reading about my "own" idea for the first time, though.
I noticed this pattern too, but doubt that it is healthy.
It might help reaching goals but at the same time it distorts your perception of reality quite drastically. This again, can become very dangerous.
> HN's most attractive feature from day one has always been the positive, intelligent, supportive community. Those are not traits you tend to find in your typical 9-5 programmer
I guess this is because HN attracts people that aren't just programmers but also entrepreneurs. A good hacker has to figure out worst-case scenarios. A good entrepreneur, on the other hand, has to look for value in everything to find business opportunities.
"* It completely ignores people that read the post but didn't vote. There really is no way to get a perfect count of this no matter how much scroll logging, but you could approximate it and then include it in the calculation."
Would it help if there was an incentive to vote?
You could, for example, increase a user's score by a point for each vote given but weight the vote with more points.
This way user who write good comments and active readers could benefit.
But then again, this could tempt some users to abuse the voting system.
I can't predict which of these two reactions would prevail.
To log bits of information quickly I added this to my .bashrc:
log(){ date >> ~/log/$* ; cat >> ~/log/$* ; }
I try to keep it simple but I keep several files.
There is one for general ideas which is called "projects", another one to log new words I've learnt called "voc.en" (English is a second language for me)
and so on.
This is a great idea! I've been using text docs like this for a while, but the problem that keeps happening to me is I go open the file to add something to it, and get distracted by reading the stuff in the file and forget what I was about to add!
I'm going to try this CLI method since it'll be impossible to read old stuff and get distracted while trying to add something.
The scary part wasn't necessary to experience something wonderful.
I am producing electronic music myself. These days, where the internet is mainstream I don't dare posting anything online.
About 9 years ago, things were different. I was a 15 year old kid and enjoyed producing trance music. My setup was extremely primitive and my music in a way, too.
But I managed to make those tracks sound quite euphoric.
Then (that's how I actually learnt HTML & CSS) I set up my own webpage and put that stuff out there.
(later, that project turne into a little net-lable where 4 people were posting their music for free and we started doing remixes for one another)
To my surprise, quite some people were downloading my songs. Some even burnt them onto CDs and listened to them in their cars. (Back then, internet-browsing and recordable discs weren't exactly cheap. So in a way, they were paying for my music!)
The "highlight" was when a DJ from a big Ukrainian radio station played the tracks in his show & on one of his gigs. Some of the listeners posted positive feedback on that station's website.
Perhaps, programming turned me a little paranoid, but today I am quite scared of what could potentially be done with every bit of information you put online. It is true that wonderful things can happen, but (unknown) dangers aren't to be underestimated.
