Entertainment

Facebook’s Fascination with My Robots.txt ยท Random Notes

Facebook’s Fascination with My Robots.txt ยท Random Notes

๐Ÿ”ฅ Explore this must-read post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: For the past 4 days โ€” and probably more since I don't have logs beyond that โ€” Facebook has been hitting the /robots.txt of my self-hosted Forgejo instance several times per second. The user-agent is facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php). I expected the UA header to be nontrustworthy, but all the requests are also coming from Meta's IP address ranges. The interesting thing is that no other file is being accessed. Just robots.txt over and over and over again. Facebook's documentation states: The primary purpose of FacebookExternalHit is…
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Blocked

๐Ÿš€ Explore this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ’ก **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Blocked Your request has been blocked due to a network policy. Try logging in or creating an account here to get back to browsing. If you're running a script or application, please register or sign in with your developer credentials here. Additionally make sure your User-Agent is not empty and is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block. You can read Reddit's Terms of Service…
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The Resistor Network: QRTape | Audio Playback from Paper Tape with Computer Vision

The Resistor Network: QRTape | Audio Playback from Paper Tape with Computer Vision

โœจ Check out this insightful post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ“Œ **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Here is a project that I have been tossing around in my head for at least a year or two now. Given advances in audio compression algorithms and computer vision: could reasonably high-quality audio be stored on a paper tape?This is a fascinating concept to me. When considering the complete history of storage media from early cylindrical engraved records through to magnetic tape it is evident that achieving high quality and reliable data storage is both challenging and expensive. When specifically considering magnetic tape,…
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Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours

Crawling a billion web pages in just over 24 hours

โœจ Check out this insightful post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: โœ… **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Contents tl;dr: 1.005 billion web pages 25.5 hours $462 For some reason, nobody's written about what it takes to crawl a big chunk of the web in a while: the last point of reference I saw was Michael Nielsen's post from 2012. Obviously lots of things have changed since then. Most bigger, better, faster: CPUs have gotten a lot more cores, spinning disks have been replaced by NVMe solid state drives with near-RAM I/O bandwidth, network pipe widths have exploded, EC2 has gone from…
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Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel

Elsevier Shuts Down Its Finance Journal Citation Cartel

๐Ÿ’ฅ Check out this must-read post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: โœ… **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: On Christmas Eve, 9 โ€œpeer-reviewedโ€ economics papers were quietly retracted by Elsevier, the worldโ€™s largest academic publisher. This includes 7 papers in the International Review of Financial Analysis (a good journalโ€”it has an 18% acceptance rate): Plus two more retractions in Finance Research Letters (29% acceptance rate):Two days later, three more papers were retracted at the International Review of Economics & Finance (30% acceptance rate):Combined, these 12 papers have 5,104 citations.All 12 papers had one thing in common: Brian M Lucey, Professor of International…
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What I learned designing a (barebones) UI engine

What I learned designing a (barebones) UI engine

๐Ÿš€ Explore this must-read post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ“Œ **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: The UsecaseI wrote a custom UI framework in PyGame, a library used for software rendering (graphics on the CPU), to support my experiments while giving me a standard interactive layer using event-driven paradigms similar to other UI frameworks.The requirements were specific:It needed to be transparent - I didn't want my UI layer to add extra cost over standard software rendering, which means no workarounds to get it to display custom canvasesIt needed to be in Python - The main goal is to have an interactive…
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How close are we to a vision for 2010? โ€“ Terence Edenโ€™s Blog

๐Ÿ’ฅ Read this awesome post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ“Œ **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Twenty five years ago today, the EU's IST advisory group published a paper about the future of "Ambient Intelligence". Way before the world got distracted with cryptoscams and AI slop, we genuinely thought that computers would be so pervasive and well-integrated that the dream of "Ubiquitous Computing" would become a reality. The ISTAG published an optimistic paper called "Scenarios for ambient intelligence in 2010". It's a brilliant look at what the future might have been. Let's go through some of the scenarios and see how…
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How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard

๐Ÿš€ Check out this trending post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ“Œ **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: How I built Timeframe, our family e-paper dashboard - Joel Hawksley Joel Hawksley / joel@hawksley.org / โ†home 2026-02-17 TL;DR: Over the past decade, Iโ€™ve worked to build the perfect family dashboard system for our home, called Timeframe. Combining calendar, weather, and smart home data, itโ€™s become an important part of our daily lives. When Caitlin and I got married a decade ago, we set an intention to have a healthy relationship with technology in our home. We kept our bedroom free of any screens,…
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GitHub – BilalG1/openslack: Open-source Slack

GitHub – BilalG1/openslack: Open-source Slack

๐Ÿ’ฅ Check out this awesome post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: ๐Ÿ“Œ **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: Open-source Slack Real-time team messaging with channels, threads, DMs, huddles, search, and file sharing. Self-host in minutes with Docker. Quick Start Prerequisites: Bun (v1.1+), Docker git clone https://github.com/BilalG1/openslack.git cd openslack bun install cp .env.example .env docker compose up -d bun run --filter @openslack/api db:migrate bun run dev Open http://localhost:3000. Feature Comparison Feature Slack OpenSlack Messaging Channels (public & private) โœ… โœ… Direct messages โœ… โœ… Threaded replies โœ… โœ… Rich text editor โœ… โœ… Emoji reactions โœ… โœ… Message edit & delete โœ… โœ……
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CIA World Factbook Archive

CIA World Factbook Archive

๐Ÿ’ฅ Discover this must-read post from Hacker News ๐Ÿ“– ๐Ÿ“‚ **Category**: โœ… **What Youโ€™ll Learn**: โฎ โฏ Regional DashboardGlobe choropleth with COCOM regions and capital markers โฎ โฏ Timeline MapAnimated choropleth across 36 years with time series โฎ โฏ Communications AnalysisInternet, mobile, broadband penetration indicators โฎ โฏ Map CompareTwo synced maps for side-by-side year comparison โฎ โฏ COCOM Region DetailRegional map with country-level KPIs and indicators โฎ โฏ Intelligence DossierICD 203 country assessments with all indicators โฎ โฏ Global RankingsSortable country rankings by any indicator โฎ โฏ Global TrendsWorldwide indicator trends across all editions โฎ โฏ Compare CountriesSide-by-side indicator comparison…
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