Another shadowbanned user here. Used to be an occasional poster, made posts if I had something meaningful to add.
At some point I noticed that I never got replies, but didn't think much of it, continued posting. Then, one day I looked at my profile while I was logged out, and surprise - the the posts for the last few months are no longer there.
Like OP, I went through a few accounts. They worked for a bit, and then responses dropped off. Eventually, I realized that apparently, my new apartment's IP is toxic.
Not sure who a shadow ban is supposed to punish since any spam bot can check just as trivially of they're banned. On the other hand, legitimate users have no idea keep wasting their time submitting their comments to /dev/null.
By now I have given up on trying to comment on HN. I can use my time on better things.
Ironic that a the site like HN can't get a proper quoting markup, can't fix the pre-block scroll, took forever to add support for mobile and comment collapsing, and used blanket IP bans...
That's a really strange phone you're describing. Did it have a single hole on the dial? Where are you from?
I too used rotary phones - I'm 28 (if it makes a difference) and I grew up in a former Soviet republic. The phone had a dial with 10 holes in it: 1-9 followed by 0 (just like on a modern phone keypad, by the way). You stick your finger in a hole over the digit and rotate clockwise until the the stop. Then, take the finger out and wait for it to rotate back to the original position. Then you dial the next digit.
Just FYI, Hacker News seems to be flagging most of your comments and making them invisible or "dead". I was browsing with showdead on and was able to "vouch" for your comment and raise it from the dead.
I'm not sure what to tell you to do to fix this problem, but I thought you might want to know. I think the site tries to trick you into thinking everyone can see your comments when they're actually made dead. So you might never know.
Moreover there is no trivial way to verify that https://github.com/mjg59 is github accout of Matthew Garrett. So all one needs to do is to create account that looks good and most people assume that it's safe.
Obviously I'm not saying that this is the case here. But it might not be the best idea to run whichever github project someone links to under root.
My old manager wanted me to install WhatsApp. WhatsApp wanted to access my phone's address book so that it could upload all of my contact info to their [Facebook's] servers. I denied it, and it refused to work. I didn't want to share my contacts - I just wanted to communicate with a specific set of people. The only workaround I could find is back up and delete all my contacts before letting WhatsApp rummage through my address book.
I wouldn't say this practice is very "consensual".
I've always assumed Claws is the more full-featured fork of Sylpheed, but seeing that they've diverged over a decade ago and are both still in development I'm curious how they compare.
Back in 2001 Claws Mail (formerly Sylpheed-Claws) started as the bleeding-edge version of Sylpheed, in order to act as a testbed for new features for Sylpheed. The idea was to regularly resync with Hiroyuki's main branch, and vice-versa. Claws Mail then evolved into the stable, extended version of Sylpheed, and in 2006 became an entity in its own right, in part due to different goals and the fact that syncing both codebases stopped happening.
Claws Mail has many extra features compared to Sylpheed and is more powerful, yet is just as fast, lightweight and stable.
I'm looking at the screenshots there and getting shuddering flashbacks to when I used to use Linux as my full-time desktop environment.
The composition window which "helpfully" provides a breakdown of "Headers", "Attachments", and "Other" tabs. The preferences panel which thinks customizing the date format -- using strftime format strings -- is something that needs a preference...
You can get the same preference-laden programs for MacOS (which, for some reason, I assume you now use) and Windows, this is not a Linux-thing. Linux users who want to have things decided for them can use Gnome [1] or Unity [2], no such 'superfluous' preferences or extraneous tabs there. Linux does not equate complexity, nor does MacOS or Windows equate sane defaults and simplicity (iTunes comes to mind as an anti-example).
The fact that these programs persist for such a long time indicates that there are people who prefer to make their own choices, no matter how superfluous these might seem in others eyes.
More like: "Non-living things don't move. The bus moves. Therefore, the bus is alive."
This is false because there exist things that are non-living but move.
Similarly, the original "not alive" => "doesn't need resources" argument is false because there exist things that are not alive that do need resources (such as buses), and so needing resources does not imply being alive.
At some point I noticed that I never got replies, but didn't think much of it, continued posting. Then, one day I looked at my profile while I was logged out, and surprise - the the posts for the last few months are no longer there.
Like OP, I went through a few accounts. They worked for a bit, and then responses dropped off. Eventually, I realized that apparently, my new apartment's IP is toxic.
Not sure who a shadow ban is supposed to punish since any spam bot can check just as trivially of they're banned. On the other hand, legitimate users have no idea keep wasting their time submitting their comments to /dev/null.
By now I have given up on trying to comment on HN. I can use my time on better things.
Ironic that a the site like HN can't get a proper quoting markup, can't fix the pre-block scroll, took forever to add support for mobile and comment collapsing, and used blanket IP bans...