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mishu2on We asked teachers how their year went. They warned of an exodus to come

> Teachers are now on YouTube reviewing the latest bullet proof backpacks for kids.

Reading this, my first thought was 'This must be a joke, surely'. But, sadly, it isn't.

mishu2on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

https://www.propup.net/blatta/

I made a very simple feedback/bug report web app which can be integrated into other websites using a one-liner, because I wanted to quickly start getting user feedback for my other projects. Feel free to give it a try.

It was also a fun way to learn ClojureScript, which I now love using for my side projects (although I find I'm slowly moving towards Elixir/Phoenix).

mishu2on Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death is changing to black

Cool, they chose a color where we get to keep saying BSOD.

mishu2on The home computer as a cultural object is physically vanishing (2007)

Something like this? https://xkeys.com/xk24black.html

I saw it recommended here a while ago, haven't tried it myself.

mishu2on Ask HN: What is your “I don't care if this succeeds” project?

https://soliloquy.cc/manana/

My take on the todo list, with a feature the procrastinator in me appreciates. Don't forget to bookmark the URL (with UUID) if you don't want to lose your list, as there are no user accounts.

https://www.propup.net/

Whenever I want to try out new tech stacks, I add a project here. So far I've played with (and really enjoyed) Django+intercooler, ClojureScript + REST API and Phoenix LiveView, but have only made the bug reporting/feedback system public (that's the ClojureScript one).

mishu2on Show HN: On The Record – Bringing accountability to the web

Hello HN, author here.

During the lockdown I managed to start a project I'd been thinking about for a while: a simple website where users can submit predictions/promises made by public figures and then follow up on whether they've come true/been kept. Each author then gets their own track record page and, once their quotes have been put to the test, they also get a credibility score.

I've found it frustrating in the past that people (often policitians, but it by no means limited to them) just keep promising or predicting the wildest things and then pretend it never happened once they achieve their goal.

With all the wild claims about COVID-19 going around this year, one month to go to the U.S. election and parlamentary elections due in my home country soon, I think this site is more timely than ever.

Initially quotes had to be submitted manually and the author had to have a Wikipedia page, but I've recently also implemented Twitter and Reddit bots so that users can easily submit quotes from those web sites as well. Given some of the comments I've seen there over the years, it seemed appropiate.

Please try it out and let me know what you think. Feedback is highly appreciated!

Stack: Django + Gunicorn / nginx, PostgreSQL, some Intercooler.js and vanilla JS to make the experience smoother, Bulma CSS.

mishu2on Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

URI fragments would indeed be better, but you'd be relying on the page author to provide enough granularity. I like the concept of the Chrome extension, but would like to see it standardized since I don't use Chrome.

For my website ( https://ontherecord.live/ ) I'm relying on user feedback/manual moderation, which currently works but doesn't really scale.

I think bit rot is an even bigger problem (either that or people maliciously quoting their own page/a Wikipedia article, which they can then change). I'm considering using the Wayback Machine ( https://web.archive.org/ ) to preserve a copy of the page being quoted, similar to what Wikipedia is doing, because unlike a published scientific article web pages can and do change over time.

mishu2on Htmx – high power tools for HTML

Thank you for your work, I've been a happy intercooler user for a while now. It's great to see the jquery dependency going away.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%...

I completely agree, I think the next step will be to open up user accounts (but keeping them optional), so that I can get a track record for registered users and invite the most active/correct ones to start moderating. At the moment I can go through the submissions myself and it doesn't (yet) take up that much time.

I find the other part (automating validation) fascinating intellectually, but I'm currently focusing 100% on implementing the functionality of the site itself (Reddit integration is at the top of the list), so this will have to wait. If you're interested in discussing this further at any time, you're more than welcome to also reach out (my e-mail is in my profile).

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you, I've been hearing about that book lately. I'll definitely look into it, it seems very relevant to this.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Hey, I think Django has some of the best documentation of any project I know (both reference and tutorials/guides):

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.0/

There is some material on using Django with intercooler.js:

https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/5nj242/psa_intercoo...

https://engineering.instawork.com/iterating-with-simplicity-...

but in the end I did something slightly different: for actions I just have in my views:

  if 'X-Ic-Request' not in request.headers:
    # render full page (which includes the fragment template)
  else:
    # render fragment template (which Intercooler will interpolate into the page)

That way, should I get to that page by any other way (user has disabled JS, I have a link in my page because I want a full page reload), it still works fine. Hope this helps.

I had a look at Unpoly, that looks very interesting and could simplify the backend code even more.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you everyone for your feedback, it's very motivating to see that so many people find this project interesting. I might turn this into a Show HN soon, once the site fills up with some interesting predictions.

On the technical side, the logs show over 6600 unique visitors in the last 12 hours, with over 1100 of them (and 18k requests) during the busiest hour. I know that's not too impressive, but it's still good to see the basic VPS running the server didn't break a sweat (load average peaked at around 0.1).

In the mean time feel free to post content you're interested in, and also contact me (e-mail is in my profile) if you have any feedback. Thanks again!

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you, it's great to get this kind of feedback. Hehe, "tracking the accuracy of the talking heads" sums it up quite nicely.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you, I'm really curious where this will go. The reaction so far here on HN has been very inspiring.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you. I don't think it would be spam, you meant this one, right?

https://pragmaticstudio.com/phoenix-liveview

Those are the videos I've been watching just to get a better idea of the concepts -- I agree, they are well made. I actually found them via HN about a week ago.

I'm thinking of reading this once I finish the videos: https://pragprog.com/book/phoenix14/programming-phoenix-1-4

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you. That was one of the reasons I started the website, I think we desperately need experts, but it's getting more and more difficult to tell the charlatans apart from the experts outside our own field. Glad to see I'm not alone.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you, that's what I'm aiming for as well. If you have any quotes you'd like to follow up on, please don't hesitate to submit them.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you. Follow up is definitely also an issue, see also stories based on a scientific article which is then retracted. I guess information overload is partly responsible, there's always something new happening somewhere.

I've tried to address this by only accepting quotes with a 'due date', so I can easily bring them back into the spotlight (top of the home page in the Open section) once they can be assessed.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you very much for taking the time to provide detailed feedback.

1) Fake quotes do concern me, but for now I've settled on requiring a single reputable source, preferably the primary source (so in your example the DoH press release, if available, would actually be a better source). I've also provided a 'Report quote' button to let users flag fake quotes. I am planning to allow users to validate and/or post additional sources for quotes.

2) I've considered adopting a whitelist approach, but given I can't possibly know all the relevant sources for all the topics which can be covered, I'm just manually accepting quotes for now (the 'does it look credible to me?' test). Things might get even more interesting if/once I start getting quotes/sources on a topic I know nothing about or even in a language I don't understand.

3) Tracking down the primary source is definitely an issue I've already run into when trying to post the first quotes. Ideally, I would like to only accept 'primary sources', even though I know it takes extra work to provide them. Maybe implementing what you suggest in 1) would help with that.

Another feature I'd really like to implement is to automatically archive (on the Internet archive's Wayback machine) the source once I validate it, so that quotes don't lose their sources over time.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you. I didn't know about Kialo.com, their debate concept looks very interesting.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you very much. My initial goal, should the number of quotes get too large for me to follow up myself, is to tag quotes and invite volunteer experts in a specific field to moderate quotes tagged by certain keywords.

Automating that sounds very attractive, but I wouldn't even know where to start. NLP? I've heard algorithms are sometimes used to automatically make trades based on news stories, so I imagine such a system could initially help moderators by providing suggestions/assessments?

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you for the suggestion, I didn't know about the Brier score. It does indeed look very appropriate for the author page.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you. You raise a very interesting point, and I completely agree that predictions should be given much less importance. But, as you say, it is human nature to trust people who look confident, and therefore predictions do hold weight and a lot of people abuse that.

I disagree about promises though, I believe if you promise to (not) do something and then break that promise, you should be held accountable for it. Otherwise, people will keep promising more and more outlandish things, because you eliminate the downside.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

That should provide a good source, thank you.

I've started work on Reddit integration (/u/OnTheRecordBot -- it will be a bot you can call, similar to RemindMe!).

Tags are also already present in the backend, but not yet implemented. I imagine they will be come necessary once the number of quotes/topics increases.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you very much, I was thinking of extending the concept to any (publicly accessible) quotes, like forums, HN, etc. but for now started with:

- Wikipedia authors (because there's some kind of threshold for relevance there)

- Twitter (because I can automate the validation with a bot -- see @OnTheRecordBot).

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

That's a very good (related) idea, I'll have to see how it can be integrated.

I've been thinking a lot about what makes a prediction/promise testable. So far I've summarized my conclusions in the 'How it works' page, but if anyone has any references on this I'd love to hear about it.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you!

Also, there are no user accounts so all submissions/votes are anonymous, in case anyone wants to submit something they're interested in.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

Thank you! I handle this at the moment by requiring manual approval before the content becomes visible on the website (I customized the Django Admin interface a bit), but should the number of quotes become unmanageable I'll start looking for other moderators.

Edit: Also, we try to follow our guidelines on what a promise/prediction should be, you can find them on the 'How it works' page.

mishu2on Ask HN: What's your quarantine side project?

I've launched a side project to let people track the outcome promises/predictions made by public figures and popular Twitter accounts, as I find unrealistic predictions and outright lies can be very damaging:

https://ontherecord.live

The stack is Django + Gunicorn / nginx, PostgreSQL and some Intercooler.js and vanilla JS to make the experience smoother.

I've also been trying to learn Elixir + Phoenix, as I find some of the concepts (e.g. LiveView) very promising.

mishu2on Show HN: Blatta – User Feedback in Seconds

Hehe, thank you for the warning. I chose the name because it is a BUG... reporting tool ;)