conesus

Joined 18 years ago

Karma
6,512
Submissions
477
Member since
Mar 11
I live in San Francisco and Western Massachusetts. I run NewsBlur, a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world. A new sound of an old instrument. https://newsblur.com

I also built a wooden remote for home automation called Turn Touch. Small flowers crack concrete. https://turntouch.com

I'm working on Sol Reader, a wearable e-reader for hands-free reading. https://solreader.com

Github: https://github.com/samuelclay

Twitter: https://twitter.com/samuelclay

Personal: https://www.samuelclay.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/samuelclay; my proof: https://keybase.io/samuelclay/sigs/XJa9P917ZfOWSF8-wPYPyyQwR-gjRt3RpnpzdGqvaP0 ] YC Badge: 0x0f73ebd74ed43fbb8534aaab26a711a53edd81a0 HackerSmacker profile: https://www.hackersmacker.org/user/conesus?hs=CXJO9DmNO2ws9B6Bdm

View on Hacker News

Recent submissions

Comment · 26 days ago
Flow is gorgeous and fits this ascii art theme beautifully. I've installed it and have lots of changes I'd like to make. Are you open to PRs or should I maintain my own fork without expectation of upstreaming anything?

Examples of changes I'd like to see:

    1. I want a decay on the flame, so on every state change, the flame slowly works its way back down to a base rate, say at 2 minutes. That would imply that a strong fire is a recently changed state, while a decayed flame is a stale state that hasn't changed in a while.
    2. Automatic choosing of a different animation on every open. I run half a dozen to a dozen agents on a single terminal window (full screened on a 27" monitor) and I already built a way to distinguish sessions from other other with my pre-plugin psuedoterminal crabigator and I'd like to do the same for these animations. Basically a way to distinguish sessions from other other.
    3. More so than just changing animations, I'd like to have a random palette chosen per-animation, so there's multiple flames, but there's the purple-esque flames, the blue-esque flames, the red ones, the orange ones, the yellow ones, and so on.
    4. I'd like a way to integrate the plugin into crabigator so its takes a single section instead of being full width.
Regardless, this is a beautiful mod, reminds me of the type of MUD hacking in the early-to-mid 90s that I used to love as a child, and I'm going to be stealing/integrating this into my workflows immediately.

BTW, I used to have different ASCII art images on each of my servers. Here's a sampling:

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol... https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol... https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/main/ansible/rol...

Comment · 5 months ago
Comment · 7 months ago
It wasn't actually down from overuse, the node.js server hit an unhandled error and fell over. And because this is the first time I was seeing real usage, I didn't have a supervisor in place to restart it automatically. That's handled now, of course.
Comment · 8 months ago
I was a NNW user for years and it's why I eventually built my own news reader. NNW had a lot of great features and I wanted to mostly keep them. You might find that NewsBlur takes a similar path but with a different set of opinions.
Comment · 8 months ago
Seriously. I've been updating NewsBlur with all the pet features people have wanted for years and I'm finding that it's even more enjoyable now with all those AI features built in. Daily briefing, ask AI, story clustering, all of these are AI-flavored improvements to RSS and it's so relaxing to open up my river of news and scroll through all the good stuff without feeling a gross algorithm surfacing endless outrage.

I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.

Comment · 8 months ago
VESA mounts are only a few bucks and give you even better height and tilt adjustment. You also get desk space back. I have a shorter desk (24" vs typical 30" depth) and I have two monitors and a laptop mounted on 3 VESAs and I can extend them so that the monitor edge is inline with the desk edge, giving me the same 24" that a 30" desk would have with a monitor stand.
Comment · 8 months ago
HN caches the profile, sometimes it takes a few minutes for Hacker Smacker to get the latest data. It keeps checking until it works.
Comment · 8 months ago
That was the toughest lift of all! Firefox and Chrome extensions were easy, just had to go through a quick review. Apple rejected the safari extension 4-5 times and wanted me to make changes to the metadata and even questioned the extension itself. Took a lot of back and forth to get the safari extension approved.
Comment · 8 months ago
Hacker Smacker doesn't mean you ignore your foes. Their comments are now labeled with the tiny red orb, giving you acknowledgement of how you've felt about them in the past.

I've used this extension for the past 15 years and I can say that I love seeing foes show up in threads. I still read their comments, but I know going into it that I can probably skip it after the first sentence if I recognize that it's more of what I disliked about them in the first place.

This is a time saving browser extension, freeing me up to scan more HN threads. I now often scan a thread to see if there's any friends, foes, or FoaFs inside.

Comment · 8 months ago
I have not found that to be the case. I have over 150 commenters on my Hacker Smacker foe list and I have only found once or twice that somebody who goes into the red bucket deserves to go into the green bucket.

Now the way I use the friend/foe system of labeling may be different than others, and it's a personal decision for how you choose to label commenters. But the way I do it, if somebody has an opinion that puts them on my red list, that's great to know, because when I see them comment elsewhere I now have the context for why I feel the way I do about them.

Comment · 8 months ago
I made some changes and the extension now recognizes if you can't hover and will allow you to tap to show the orbs before selecting one. It now works on mobile browsers with extensions.
Comment · 8 months ago
Hah, at least I'm consistent.
Comment · 8 months ago
You don't avoid anything, this simply helps highlight commenters in a long thread.
Comment · 8 months ago
I mean the entire extension is about this, but I can quickly scan this thread (or others) and spot my favored commenters.
Comment · 8 months ago

Live from the official Hacker News API

A modern reader for Hacker News · SvelteKit + Skeleton