Show HN: I wrote an HN bot to suggest HTTPS url when people post HTTP URLs It's inspired by this comment I made: https://ift.tt/3dxKQhp. I actually saw several comments with HTTP URL posted, and that was the only one I bothered to comment on. So I thought that this is something better suited for bots than human. I hacked this together over yesterday and today: https://ift.tt/39E50Vx. Basically it uses the Firebase API (https://ift.tt/1s98Sn3) to find comments with HTTP URLs in them, try the HTTPS version, compare the contents, post back a comment if the contents are more than 95% similar. The "95% similar" part was actually the first part I wrote in the code. At first I tried a few existing go packages implementing diff/lcs, but most of them was quite slow and does a lot of allocations when I'm comparing two randomly generated 10KiB blobs, so I wrote my own (https://ift.tt/3dBlOh5), which is optimized for space (it does almost no allocations), and it's also faster because allocations are slow. (I know this is an unfair comparison that most of the existing implementations need to give you an output that can be used to reconstruct the two blobs back, so at least some of their allocations are required and unavoidable) I also wrote a bug that it would find the same HTTP url in every run and post the same comment over and over again. My apologize to dang or whoever dealt with it (or maybe the system is good enough that it blocked those repetitive comments automatically). In the end it successfully made 6 comments across ~4 hours (not including the repetitive ones). All of those comments are flagged (likely due to hn policy), https://ift.tt/3cRlkEJ is the only one that's still visible to other users at the time of writing, if you are curious. I just killed it completely from the request of dang. Although it only lived for a few hours, it's still a fun exercise. Maybe I'll convert it into a reddit bot next? Who knows. April 5, 2021 at 05:52AM
Women Pioneers at Muni: Adeline Svendsen and Muni’s First Newsletter By Jeremy Menzies To close out Women’s History Month, here’s a look back at one woman whose work to bring Muni staff together in the late 1940s created a legacy that lives on to this day. Adeline “Addy” Svendsen was founding editor of Muni’s first internal newsletter, “ Trolley Topics .” Adeline Svendsen sits at her desk in the Geneva Carhouse office building in this 1949 shot. Trolley Topics was a new venture when it started in February 1946. As Svendsen wrote in the first issue it was created, “to bring a little fun, a little news, and a lot of good will to all our fellow employees in the Railway.” Just two years prior in 1944, Muni merged with the Market Street Railway Company, expanding the small municipal operation into the largest transit provider in the city with hundreds of employees, vehicles of every shape and size, and dozens of facilities scattered across town. The newsletter was meant to help unite ...
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