Tlarc Alternatives

tlarc reviews and mentions

• Ford set to announce $3.5B EV battery plant in Marshall, sources say
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Feb 2023

  Just wanted to congratulate you again about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34706153. However you did it, it deserves a post of its own someday so that people appreciate how much skill it took.

  It seems like you'd create a new user account, then transfer the comments and submissions from the old one to the new one, then close the old one. But it's still impressive you're able to keep Firebase, Algolia, and HN in sync while doing that atomically.

  Though I guess you'd need to solve that problem anyway, in order to move hundreds of comments from one thread to another. I'm not sure how you talk to Firebase and Algolia from Arc -- I used curl, and issuing thousands of curl requests tended to take awhile to complete. https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/master/algolia.arc#...

  Hopefully some of the Arc enhancements can be released someday. But in the meantime, thanks for implementing features that you really didn't need to implement. Users would've survived if they couldn't change their names, but now they can, and that's pretty special. Have a good evening.

• Ejaculation Frequency and Prostate Cancer
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Jan 2023

  You're right that it probably is. My main frustration was with the "Posting too fast; please slow down" throwing away comments that you spent a half hour writing. I felt strongly that the user should get an override button, similar to vouch, which lets you post your comment anyway. Obviously, it'd be revokable if abused.

  But it's so easy for us to sit here and say all that when they're the ones in the field doing the work. If they added masterbation to the list, it's likely because they saw a lot of comments correlated with it -- comments that, again, would drive the average user away from HN over time, rather than keeping us together as a community. The false positives are "for the greater good" in that sense, i.e. the cost of doing business.

  It took me a long time to accept this, but there's honestly nothing wrong with that. I used to feel strongly that they were treating users immorally by taking such a callous attitude with them.

  What changed my mind was seeing how moderation is done on all the other websites. It made me appreciate that Dan is consistent – and especially that he's consistently clear with his expectations.

  The mod team has undoubtedly grown beyond himself by now (he's said as much), so it's also impressive that he's trained his team so well. All of the other mods enforce his same rules, which is no small feat. Just look at how hard it is for Facebook or Twitter or (heaven forbid) Twitch to get their mod team to be consistent. Dan's crew is so good that the moderation is almost invisible, which is as it should be.

  I guess all I'm saying is, similar to a canary in a coal mine, I'm highly sensitive to whether the mods seem to be overstepping and suppressing people or ideas. And if I had to point to a specific case of that happening since 2018, I don't think I'd be able to.

  Offtopic from moderation, but Dan's a talented hacker too. https://github.com/gruseom/numen/blob/master/numen.el seems to be his only public-facing work, and it wasn't till I studied it that I saw just how capable he is at designing large systems. There are very few unnecessary parts in that codebase.

  I hope I get a chance to show him my Arc keyword args implementation someday. It dramatically simplified the printing routines https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d... and the dynamic form generators https://github.com/tensorfork/tlarc/blob/feb06f0366bff642e6d....

  Anyway, it just makes me feel a bit sad to see people saying he's low-effort. His efforts are concentrated in specific high-impact areas, which is as it should be. And most of it tends to be mostly invisible -- when he writes code to fight upvote rings or fend off DoS attacks, we don't see it at all, because he was successful.

  Time spent reconsidering whether "masterbation" should be banned is time not spent doing those other things. Or spent with his family, and having a life outside of work.