Svip

I notice that the earliest version of this post[0] is dated 1999, whilst the latest version is modified in 2001 (see the main link). Which year would be appropriate to mark it on HN? 1999? 2001?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20000310230940/http://sites.inka...

Ah, that would explain why those fixes are noted as "since 6.3.8".

     -        public $version = '6.3.6';
     +        public $version = '6.3.6.2';

Why would you break the version standard? Maybe there are scripts expecting a specific format or some such. Also, given the majority of this change, I think 6.4.0 or even 7.0.0 is more in order, but at least 6.3.7.

Edit: To make matters worse, elsewhere in the code, it's referenced as 6.3.8. Very confusing.

To keep it simple, this is also a response to your sibling: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41807715

It's been a long time since I switched to Cloudflare. Looking through my email archive, it was December 2015. I uncovered an old discussion[0] about the switch, but it only seems to highlight that the server is slow.

But I think it speaks to my lack of skill in this area. I have no actual professional training in system administration, and entirely autodidactic in this area. Though it sounds like Weird Gloop can also provide guidance in these matters rather than simply taking on the hosting. I won't deny that at times I have felt defeated, and that may truly have been my reasoning for switching to Cloudflare.

Though this post and response so far have given me hope.

[0] https://theinfosphere.org/Table:Server_news! (the exclamation point is part of the URL, in case HN ignores it)

Importantly, I have since set up Cloudflare before the website to help. I am just using their free tier, but looking at their analytics, they say we got about 350k HTTP(S) requests in the last 24 hours.

Had it not been for Cloudflare, I am not sure my server could have handled that. Before I did that, I set up Varnish as a cache provider for users who are not logged in. That is effectively the second line of defence now.

The server itself is a dedicated server at Hetzner. I use the server for a bunch of other things, that see nowhere near the same activity as the Infosphere, and I also use it for my personal screen+irssi setup. But all in all, the server costs me about 50 euros a month.

Though, again, Cloudflare is basically the single most important reason it's not costing me more, and why I have not needed to hand it over.

A bit of a follow up to this; after a bit of thought, I am considering reaching out to Weird Gloop. I do not feel I am able to give The Infosphere the care that it deserves. And with Futurama back on Hulu, we are naturally seeing an uptick in activity. We have a very restrictive sign up in place, because I don't have time to moderate it anymore. It keeps the spam down, yes, but also new users away.

Note: The reason I'm writing I'm _considering_ reaching out and not just straight up reaching out is because the domain itself has a different owner than me, and I want to make sure they are also approving of this decision.

I was approached about a decade ago to combine The Infosphere with then Wikia's Futurama wiki. I asked it was possible to do a no-ads version of the wiki, and while initially they seemed like that might be possible, they eventually said no, and so we said no. So now there are two Futurama wikis online. I still host The Infosphere, haven't checked the Fandom one in years.

Fortunately for me, Futurama isn't as popular as Minecraft (for some reason!), so I've been able to pay out of my own pocket.

A good way to address this is to ask "why did the Roman Empire not have an industrial revolution?" Bret Devereaux already did a great job on this[0], but the short-ish answer goes like this:

Britain had basically been laid barren from trees (other areas of Europe had seen similar instances), but they still needed to heat houses. With firewood scares, and coal basically lying on the ground, particularly in Yorkshire, coal was an easy alternative.

And so Britain became dependent on coal for heating, but eventually the coal was not simply to be lifted off the ground, it now had to be dug up from mines. Mines weren't exactly a new thing, but these mines were huge comparatively, and the labour required was thus much larger than usual, and that informed the idea of using a steam engine to bring up the coal from the mine (after all, the coal was right there).

[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

"Power" technically means more than mere electricity (or electric power). In the UK, the modern steam engine can trace its origins back to either 1764 or 1712 (depending on how you count). Even in the one in 1712 served to help lift coal out of a mine, a form of reliance. But even if we limit ourselves to steam trains and regular service, the Liverpool-Manchester railway from 1830 is also a form of reliance. In any case, Britain has been reliant on coal-fired power (in the broadest sense) for a lot longer than 140 years. And in the narrower sense, it took decades for electricity to be a bare necessity.

Will we finally see the introduction of the Forge[0]?

[0] http://www.heroesofmightandmagic.com/heroes3ab/forgetown.sht...

> We had in our possession a life casting of Peter Cushing’s face. It was made not long after New Hope, so it was very accurate in terms of Cushing’s age, etc.

Not mentioned is that the cast he is talking about was made for the movie Top Secret!, where Peter Cushing plays a bookshop proprietor with a distorted face around a magnifying glass.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuYTVl0iOkk

Even if we'd argue that the Republic was an empire before it was the Empire (which we probably should for other reasons), Rome probably at the earliest became an empire in the 300s BCE (and that is probably stretching it), and probably stretched to the 400s CE (if we ignore the eastern half). But even by that count, around 1 CE would at best be the "middle Roman Empire", hardly late by any calculation.

https://nitter.poast.org is a working Nitter instance. Only problem I have in Firefox is watching videos shared on Twitter.

Mærsk is kind of a bad example, because they made real security mitigations afterwards.[0] I cannot speak to whether they whitelist applications, but neither can you.

[0] https://www.csoonline.com/article/567845/rebuilding-after-no...

I use irssi in a screen with a Discord plugin to Bitlbee, so I can connect to Discord using IRC. I'm sure WeeChat or tmux are fine, but I am not reconfiguring my setup again. It's been working for over a decade now.

I wonder if it would be possible to find an even more populated square km, if one started turning it.

Just for the record, the name "Lego" comes from »leg godt« which means to play well. The earliest toys from Lego were not the iconic bricks we know today.

In Danish, they are called »legoklodser« (i.e. Lego bricks); seldom is the word capitalised.

I've tried that before, and I've not been able to find stickers that will last long (trust me, you'll have sweaty fingers from time to time). A better solution is to use a white permanent marker on the keys instead. It doesn't last, obviously, but it doesn't make it awkward to type, and you can just re-apply it as the keys lose their labels.

The | and \ keys are different places on Norwegian and Danish keyboards.

Finally, someone offering a proper Danish keyboard. Denmark, Sweden and Norway have long been stymied with the low-effort that is the Nordic keyboard layout. The problem is if you are not familiar with keyboards, then the labels are supposed to help you, but they don't on the Nordic layouts, because it just show three different keymap's labels on some keys, but you don't know which belong to which.

I know Apple also offers a proper Danish keyboard, and I've seen some modern Thinkpads with proper Danish keyboards.

I normally use a US Intl keyboard, but whenever I see a Danish keyboard, I struggle to find the | key.

More specifically, a consumer asked the authorities if they should be legal, and then they investigated.

The phrase "where the Sun never sets" was first used to described the Spanish Empire, but was later adopted for the British Empire.

Wikipedia entries generally don't have years added to them, as they are not the original text, but rather text about the text. If you linked to the original text (or a translation will do), then the original year makes sense (unless the translation's date is more important).

I am mistaken. Théoden does not plead with Grima in the book. But Théoden is less eager to throw out Grima, when the truth has been revealed at Edoras compared to the movie. I must have confused the scene in the films for happening in the book, even though I had just read the book, though notably, Théoden continues to refer to him as "Grima" while everyone else calls him "Wormtongue". Regardless, I was talking about the events at Orthanc in the third book, in the second volume, chapter The Voice of Saruman, not the events much later in the Shire.

Edit: It's not the scene in the movie I confused it with, it's that Théoden does remark that he hopes Grima can come back after the incident, but he does not in fact plead directly with Grima.

> For example, letting Grima leave edoras because 'enough blood has been spilled' is really cool, but dubious and questionable.

My read has always been that Théoden was still unsure about what to do with Grima after what has been revealed. He is clearly angry at him, but it is also difficult for him to let him go, after he had has been his closest council for so long. When they meet Saruman and Grima at Isengard, Théoden even tries to plead with Grima again. And it doesn't make sense that Théoden is trying to lure Grima, because if he is trying to be cunning, he would well know that Grima would never bother, instead, it reads as Théoden still holding out hope.

So yes, it is questionable to send Grima away. And Tolkien isn't exactly subtle about it.

Mostly, yes. Particularly in the terms of "Discord-difying forums". But you cannot have multiple subforums for your community on Reddit (unless you do something weird with subsubreddits, but those won't be clearly visible). Discord allows you to have several channels. Additionally, I'd like an alternative that isn't threaded like Reddit and HN. Threaded communities have their place, but classic chronological topics also do.

Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?

> It needs to physically restrict the speed of the car.

There are situations, where it would be dangerous if you cannot exceed the speed limit. All cars in Japan are limited to 160 km/h, even though the fastest speed limit is 120 km/h, this to allow for situations where exceeding that limit is necessary.

I'm not sure I would describe Stellantis as a US carmaker. The majority of its marques are European, and it's headquartered in the Netherlands.