In Japan I’ve seen at Starbucks: a guy bring in a giant power supply and plop it down on top of the table to power his tower and monitor like it wasn’t the most sociopathic thing in the world. And another guy used to set up six or seven screens at his table to “daytrade” — turns out he wasn’t day trading at all, they were all running videos of fake daytrading / stock tickers. (I had a friend at that Starbucks who would give me all the details; they had to ban him eventually for disrupting / getting surly with other customers).
Hacker News is the url I use to test most fussy connections because it's so light, and will load under even the slightest trickle of data. When I was doing research in Ghana, it was the only site I could get to reliably load for news in the field, and thus spent a month reading only HN (good luck getting the _New York Times_ to load without a gigabit connection). Appreciate how it stays — and has stayed — svelte and fast throughout the years.
Thank you for building this; over the years the bus animation has gone a bit wonky, but otherwise the page holds up really well. It’s a great library you built.
I've been using this thing daily for about five months and really adore it. I use it as a Kindle replacement and with Readwise Reader as a longform article dump. I've read more longform pieces in the last few months than last few years combined. The device is incredibly light, and maintains battery even if you leave it idle all day (unlike my kindles which often drained themselves). Anyway, it's been a nice surprise, the palma.[0]
YouTube Premium has to be the best pay-for deal of any service. I'm frankly surprised by how much adblocking talk there is when YouTube comes up on HN. YouTube is doing what I want all services to do: total elimination of ads as part of Premium. The result is it's one of my favorite spaces online, and feels miraculous in the quality and quantity of content (docs, interviews, how-tos, history, music, archival footage).
Grateful for YouTube and enthusiastic to pay for premium.
Wow, just realized it passed its 21st anniversary last month. A few iterations throughout the years, but the current form is basically 13-ish years old, regularly updated.
Substack does suffer from the same potential terminal illness as Medium: An extremely high valuation relative to addressable market. I think both businesses were good low hundred-million-dollar businesses. Medium never found a way to justify their ~$1B cap. Substack's current valuation is currently $650M based on recent funding.
Substack seems to have fostered a pretty good commenting environment for the little I've seen. Especially from authors like George Saunders writing non-political / education-focused "newsletters" (i.e., blogs). In part, this seems to be because of forced login, and the fact that you have a single, shared identity for all publications on the platform (thereby increasing the value of … civility?). But also, of course, the commenters are often limited to paying subscribers, so they are all on the "same team" as it were in a way public, completely open blogs / articles aren't.
Fwiw - paying for YouTube premium removes all ads from all devices and I see it as a strong vote in favor of subscriptions that do so. But, yes, it’s nearly unwatchable in its free state.