> since the time I've joined the site (three years ago), I haven't seen a single ban that wasn't warranted, be it due to a single incident of flouting the site rules or a pattern of behavior.
That is hard to say, if you were to look up my final thread, all my comments were deleted, and you have no way of evaluating if the judgement was fair or not. I held the same position, assuming the moderation team was doing a good job until the hammer hit me.
> Regarding the thread you linked, I'll agree it was the admin's fault for writing the passive-aggressive banner that led to that (well-respected) user leaving.
That is what I am getting at. He has "joked"[0] that the job of moderation is stressful, and it is known that he has other problems[1] that aren't making the job easier for him. I believe that this shapes his moderation style, and not for the better. He errs on the side of over-moderation, which was exactly one of the faults HN hat, that motivated the creation of that site.
I think I first found out about the site in 2015. It look me 2 1/2 years to get an invite, and I visited it every day, and frequently contributed links. I belive at some point I was among the top 10 users, but I was kicked out because the main admin had some grudge against me, so when I wrote a controversial comment he banned me. Fair enough, his site. Retroactively I think this was for the better, as the climate was getting worse and worse. I have met some of the most dishonest people on that site and had some of the most frustrating discussions I can recall. In this respect, HN is preferable. What is sad is that I don't think this was always the case, and is it Lobste.rs that deteriorated over time. There was a long thread on this last year: https://lobste.rs/s/zp4ofg/lobster_burntsushi_has_left_site.
When I was banned, I sent a message to the administrators whether I could get a machine readable file of all my comments. I thought to myself, if I had already spent all that time commenting, I might as well repost them on my own site. But the administrators all refused to even discuss this with me. I sent them SQL queries and everything, but they didn't even regard me worthy of a response. This was very disappointing and unprofessional.
So what I want to say to the sibling comments who are looking for invites, consider it twice. There are annoying people everywhere, and I haven't found a website format that can prevent these from popping up.
This was written by Yusuke Endoh, who also wrote this submission to the IOCCC that I remember being arguably more astonished when I saw it for the first time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMYfkOtYYlg (ASCII fluid dynamics).
That is a good point. If you don't need to deal with everyday people to socialize, you don't have to adapt your behaviour to the mean expectation of what is proper and not. I remember reading an interesting socialist argument once, that this is historically unique because capitalism allows people to reduce social relations to that of monetary exchange. As long as you can pay your bills and buy what you need, nobody can complain. It is this perspective that people who retort with "Why do you even care?" implicitly hold, that I am not a fan of.
Why would that be funny? I just wonder how these people have no sense of embarrassment. I suspect part of the reason is that isolated communities encourage this kind of behaviour.
I find the implication that aliens are rational and have no subrational concepts due to tradition and habit interesting, as it sort of implies that these kinds of outgrowths are not necessary and can just be done away with. The narrator starts from a position of not wanting to legitimize or historicize beyond reductive statements like "some ancient civilization did XYZ". I'll admit that I skimmed through the last part of the thread, so I might have missed something, but I don't see any mention of the decimal calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar, or why that failed. I get that this is supposed to be funny, but the indirect message of getting rid of whatever doesn't make conscious sense is simplistic, and spoils the fun for me. Humans are stupid, very funny.
You might be interested in buffer-env, it can automatically load an environment on a buffer-to-buffer basis and make it appear as though it were globally installed. No manual "guix shell ... -- ..." calls needed.
I loath these and related libraries. They promote a style that diverges from regular Emacs Lisp code that makes it hard to read if you are not familiar with the additional language, and on top of that frequently promote a wasteful and inefficient style (e.g. instead of searching a buffer it is converted into a string, split on newlines, filtered and then checked if the filtered list is nil). I've sent out numerous patches to remove these leftpad-esque dependencies from projects that often only make use of one or two functions, that more often than not are just alii for built-in functions. Of all these libraries dash has some kind of a legitimation, but all the rest I consider code smell and makes me question if using the package is even worth it.
Also note that (besides dash), emacs-devel decided against adding any of these packages to the ELPAs. This has made it harder to add a number of packages to NonGNU ELPA, but has been a good excuse to get rid of the dependencies. If anyone is looking for some good Elisp exercise consider sending a patch to replace f/s/... with built-in functionality.
In case dash/f/s/... provide functionality that is not available on older releases of Emacs that one still intends to support, consider using compat (https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/compat.html), a library that I have been developing that attempts to backport recent developments for older releases.
I don't think the point is so much that it does not depend on Emacs, but that it is a phone application.
Full independence seems inprobable, or at least I cannot imagine anyone adding support for all the external types: https://orgmode.org/manual/External-Links.html. IMO Org is a markup language imersed into Emacs, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I used to think that it was not only this, but the rate at which a group grows. Lobste.rs used to be interesting, but it either grew too much or the rate exceeded some point, but it has been moderation issue for a while now. I don't know if a more complicated moderating system would help (having some kind of a priority invite system, limiting the number of invitations per month).
The ability to start a shell with all the right dependencies configured, without requiring root access or permanently installing new dependencies, seems like something useful.
While it is true, these features seem to me to be added because Markdown is (ab)used the way it is. The issue is if you are working in an environment where it isn't possible, e.g. on a server where you only have vi/nano, and not even a TUI browser (or if you don't want to use an editor based on electron).
My issue is that you can still have a nice readme (often even giving a better, brief overview) by sticking to HTML-free Markdown.
Gitlab seems to be slightly better than Github, by allowing things like badges to be listed outside of the README, in the header of the repository page.