I like to use example.com/net/org

bonus, these have both http & https endpoints if you needed a differential diagnosis or just a means to trip some shitty airline/hotel walled garden into saying hello.

I usually load my blog to check internet connectivity.

I work at an e-waste recycling company. Earlier this week, I had to test a bunch of laptop docking stations, so I kept force refreshing my blog to see if the Ethernet port worked. Thing is, it loads so fast, I kept the dev tools open to see if it actually refreshed.

yep, I do exactly the same thing. If HN isn't loading, something is definitely fckd.

Oh it's lwn.net for me!

I find pinging localhost a bit more reliable, and faster too.

I blame HN switching to AWS. Downtime also increased after the switch.

To each their own, but I find the text for the number of points and "hours ago" extremely low contrast and hard to read on your site. More importantly, I think it emphasizes the wrong thing. I almost never really care who submitted a post, but I do care about its vote count.

Anyone who goes to the trouble of making their own HN front end is entitled to complain as much as they want, in my book! Nicely done.

> Sadly financial incentive is almost always towards tricking people into doing something they don't want to do instead of just actually giving them what they fucking want.

Northstar should be user satisfaction. For some products that might be engagement (eg entertainment service) while for others it is accomplishing a task as quickly as possible and exiting the app.

The one and only thing I'd do is make the font bigger and increase padding. There's overwhelming consensus that you should have (for English) about 50–70 characters per line of text for the best, fastest, most accurate readability. That's why newspapers pair a small font with multiple columns: to limit number of characters per line of text.

HN might have over 100 chars per line of text. It could be better. I know I could do it myself, and I do. But "I fixed it for me" doesn't fix it for anyone else.

For me, Slashdot became full of curmudgeons. It’s pretty tiring when every “+5 Insightful” on a hard drive article questioning why you’d ever want so big of a drive, or why you’d require more than 256 colors or whatever new thing came out… like why are you even on a technology enthusiast site when you bitterly complain about every new thing? Basically either accept change or get left in the dust and slashdot’s crowd seemed determined to be left in the dust… forever loosing its relevance in the tech community.

Plus Rusty just pushed out Kuro5hin and it felt like “my scene” kind of migrated over.

As an aside, Kuro5hin was the only “large” forum that I ever bothered remembering people’s usernames. Every other forum it’s all just random people. (That isn’t entirely true, but true enough)

It's not bad. I still read it, but less than HN.

Slashdot looked a lot like HN with high information density. It was fast and easy to read all the comments. Then a redesign happened because of web 2.0 or "mobile-first" hype and most of the comments got hidden/collapsed by default, sorted almost randomly etc. So a new user would come there and say "wtf this is a dead conversation" or would have to click too many times to get to the full conversation. So new user would leave, and so would the old ones because the page was so hard to use. It just lost users and that was that. All because of the redesign which they never wanted to revert. Sad really because I still think it had/has the best comment moderation by far.

The only one I remember is adding the ability to collapse comment threads

Yep. Dang is basically the only one I notice.

I use this script: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/441566-hn-avatars-in-396-b...

Doesn't really help a ton with recognizing but it makes it easier to track within a thread.

I routinely notice a handful of people, such as Thomas Ptacek, whose opinions I have opinions about, and then in context I notice e.g. Martin Uecker for C and especially the pointer provenance problem (on which he has been diligently working for some years), or Walter Bright (for the D language), or Steve Klabnik (Rust)

There are people who show up much less often and have less obvious usernames, Andrew Ayer is agwa for example, and I'm sure there are people I blank on entirely.

Once in a while I will read something and realise oh, that "coincidental" similarity of username probably isn't a coincidence, I believe the first time I realised it was Martin Uecker was like that for example. "Hey, this HN person who has strong opinions about the work by Uecker et al has the username... oh... Huh. I guess I should ask"

HN goes to some lengths to de-emphasize the usernames, leaving them small and medium grey against a light grey background. It's not easy to track usernames here. Some other forums put far more emphasis on them, even letting users upload icons so you can tell who is who at a glance.

For me it's more a recognition after the fact thing: "Oh that was a good comment who said that? Oh that guy, yeah not surprised."

I don’t even slightly.

What's a markdown link tag?