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Lobsters

github.com

11–20 of 212 posts

Re: Lobsters

#11
Not a fan of having to beg for an invitation. Seems like HN is able to handle moderation with a small crew.

Re: Lobsters

#12
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel versions in Gemfile tend to make things harder to update and often end up accidentally retaining some old version. You won't get a random version bump unless you do `bundle update` anyway, since you have a lock file. Unless you really need a specific version, let those gems be free :)

> Unless you really need a specific version, let those gems be free A wet dream of anyone looking for a method to perform a supply chain attack.

that is what Gemfile.lock is for. You are not getting a new version unless you do ask for it explicitly.

Re: Lobsters

#13
post #8
post #5

Would be less of a ghost town if they allowed sign ups rather than via invitation only. Appreciate that's kinda the point of the site, but if it's a ghost town then it's clearly petered out.

Quantity may have a quality all its own in warfare but for comments having the invite tree and accountability is pretty nice! I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.

Invite doesn't always guarantee insightful comments.

Re: Lobsters

#14
I had a lobster account and a bunch of invites once upon a time. Totally forgot about it. Closed gate HN never really appealed to me.

Re: Lobsters

#16
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel versions in Gemfile tend to make things harder to update and often end up accidentally retaining some old version. You won't get a random version bump unless you do `bundle update` anyway, since you have a lock file. Unless you really need a specific version, let those gems be free :)

> Unless you really need a specific version, let those gems be free A wet dream of anyone looking for a method to perform a supply chain attack.

Those are just as easy when using the standard "semver compatible with the specified version" approach. The lockfile will prevent such attacks on build, and on upgrade it doesn't really matter security wise if the new version has the same major version.

Re: Lobsters

#17
post #5

Would be less of a ghost town if they allowed sign ups rather than via invitation only. Appreciate that's kinda the point of the site, but if it's a ghost town then it's clearly petered out.

They discuss under "invitation tree" how it's possible to get an invite if you want one.

https://lobste.rs/about

I don't have an account although a couple things I wrote got posted there, if I'd realized it at the time that apparently qualifies me.

Overall I don't know if the quality is better than HN, even if the SNR is higher, there is just so much less total that the sum of good stuff is lower. It's almost completely free of politics, gossip, non-tech stuff though which is nice. For example I don't think any of the OpenAI drama was covered there.

Otoh the links posted there are essentially a subset of what's posted on HN.

Re: Lobsters

#18
post #8
post #5

Would be less of a ghost town if they allowed sign ups rather than via invitation only. Appreciate that's kinda the point of the site, but if it's a ghost town then it's clearly petered out.

Quantity may have a quality all its own in warfare but for comments having the invite tree and accountability is pretty nice! I'd rather have (2) really insightful comments than 300 trying to promote themselves.

From my experience in invite-only forums, it can only assure some bottom line (mainly, fewer troll posts), but it doesn't help at all on the quality of comments.

The only thing I saw that ever significantly improved the quality of comments is vote-based comment system when it firstly started to emerge (I'm thinking Reddit in its first few years). But unfortunately it nowadays has been gamed to death, probably even worse than old public forums.

Re: Lobsters

#19
post #5

Would be less of a ghost town if they allowed sign ups rather than via invitation only. Appreciate that's kinda the point of the site, but if it's a ghost town then it's clearly petered out.

[deleted]

Re: Lobsters

#20
post #6

No version numbers in the Gemfile? That's brave.

I feel versions in Gemfile tend to make things harder to update and often end up accidentally retaining some old version. You won't get a random version bump unless you do `bundle update` anyway, since you have a lock file. Unless you really need a specific version, let those gems be free :)

Being harder to update is the point.

With ruby being untyped and lazy evaluated, it's even worse. If any library's api changes between versions, unless you're sure you have a unit test for that function, it'll happily deploy and crash in production.

Plus as long as you're using a service like snyk.io to make sure that you're covering security vulnerabilities, there's usually not much reason to updating if it works.

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