Hey there HN'ers,

After my post a while ago about what I pay for bandwidth I got a bunch of
inquiries who my hosting party is.

I've asked them if I can go public with the numbers, the answer is yes,
so here is the deal that I'm getting with all the figures and specs of
the machine. Note that this is not the same as the offer on their
website, it is substantially better, both in payment terms as well
as in the monthly fee. This works out to about E 1.45 / Mbit / month
with a machine that has 36T local storage included. The catch is

This post on HN:

http://www.skorks.com/2010/02/how-to-become-a-spammer-as-a-programmer-re...

And the one that it refers to have me thinking about what SEO, spam and other tactics really are about and how you can draw the line between what really qualifies as 'spam' and what is still 'clean'.

It's a surprisingly hard problem, it seems that everybody has their own definition of what qualifies as spam and what does not.

Let me outline a bunch of commonly used (and imo very spammy) SEO techniques to illustrate what this is all about:

I'm wondering if this has happened to others on the HN leaderboard.

Jan 11th I was approached by Dana Oshiro from 'readwriteweb'.

Initially it was just some friendly banter but after the third email it was pretty much an open door that the idea is that I post or write about the stuff that is sent to me.

So I stopped responding at that point because I definitely do not think it isn't ok to try to game HN in this way, if you want your stuff posted simply make an account and post it yourself, the community will decide either way, you don't need me for that.

After talking to 'david927' and more recently 'morphle' my interest in a longtime dormant project called 'softbricks' has woken up again.

The idea behind softbricks is a computing fabric that you can create out of simple building blocks connected to each other in two or three dimensions.

Think 'lego' but make it calculate.

The question then becomes how simple can you make a brick, how many 'gates' do you need to make it all work.

Programmers can usually agree on whether the answer to a given problem posed is 'correct' or not.

For instance, in most languages there is an equivalent to the program:

print 3+4

And we expect the output of the program to be '7'.

But when you look at cellular automata the concept of 'correct' output is more complicated.

For instance, take 'life', by Conway.

I assume that everybody is familiar with the game of 'life', but in case you're not, in a nutshell the 'cells' on an infinite grid are governed by a few very simple rules:

HN has grown since the time that it was launched, but how much it has grown is dependent on which metric you use.

For the purpose of this analysis I've only looked at the users that actually contribute to HN, so that's people that post and / or comment.

As far as I could resist the temptation I've tried not to analyze the graphs but to simply present them with some explanation of what you are looking at, I'm curious what kind of non-numerical trends you can pick out.

Today on HN someone posted this link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/7016266/Man-arrested-under...

About an English man that got himself arrested for - get this - a tweet.

It's gotten to the point where you can apparently spend a night in the slammer for tweeting about stuff.

If that isn't a sign that 'the terrorists have won' then I don't know what is.

What's next ? Thinking ? Writing ?

So, here I'm going to have to confess... I'm a terrorist too.

This is a terrible mangling of a piece of code by Eric Lavigne (thanks!), I take full responsibility for any lines starting with and the afterword.

I'm a total newbie when it comes to clojure, so when I got my hands on a little clojure program to play the game of 'island-wari' I went and dissected it bit by bit, clojure manual in hand to see how it works.

I took the feedback on the original posting to heart, specifically the following items:

- there was an error in the graph, I misspelled a tag which caused 'technology' to be there twice

- dead links were not visibe, this skewed the graph, this was remarked several times.

- the legend was less than legible

I've corrected those elements in the graph and have put a new version of it in the place of the old one.

HN visitors are generally worried that HN is changing, and most of the worries center (obviously) around whether or not it is changing for the worse.

I thought it would be nice to either know that it really is changing or lay the matter to rest, so I sampled a bunch of postings done since HN was started and tagged them with a number of categories.

Of course I can't go through all of the items that have been posted through the years but it will give some insight.

Judge for yourself and see if you think there are obvious trends indicating long term change: