4 ms·

Leave a Trace

77 points by surprisetalk 4mo ago

RiOuseR 4mo ago
[dead]
hk__2 4mo ago
> As a writer, receiving feedback on my work is welcome and rare. This blog gets thousands of readers a month, and yet the amount of direct feedback I’ve received over all the years is a small fraction of that. If you don’t have any comment box it’s hard to give you any feedback.
- knorker 4mo ago
  You're not kidding. There's neither comment box nor email address. Is he expecting us to cyberstalk him to find if someone has doxxed him, just to give a thumbs up? "Why is nobody calling to invite me to parties", says man who unplugged his phone. Edit: Ok, I'm old. For younger people, pretend I said "turned off his phone".
  - hoppyhoppy2 4mo ago
    There is a contact form on the Consulting / Hire Me page, but it takes a little poking around to find it.
    - knorker 4mo ago
      Yeah. Should we just magically infer that he likes getting non-gig contacts on his explicitly gig contact form? The form is under "Get in Touch", and under an offer for a 15 minute call. I don't want that. This reminds me of a friend of mine who in a B2B setting contacted a potential vendor by filling in a form, with his email and phone number as contact details. Instead of emailing or calling back, this vendor continued the conversation by tracking down my friend on LinkedIn and messaging him there! They already had the email and phone number from their form. I'm also not super impressed by the consulting gig's "Johnny Holton" reference talking about Jake's "engineering excellence". A google search says Johnny Holton is an American hand egg player. If I were a potential client going in cold then this would not fill me with confidence in his attention to detail.
- ChoosesBarbecue 4mo ago
  What is the ideal approach for one? Assuming you don't want it to be a public one (to avoid moderation headaches), and you want to avoid automated spam, and your page is a static site, what is the ideal way to incorporate something like that?
  - knorker 4mo ago
    Shaming people for not leaving comments anyway, I infer. /s I put my email address on these things. All spammers already have it anyway. I get some feedback. Or a normal web form with a captcha will create minimal spam. Certainly sufficient for someone not famous. Or you can have a google form. Either with or without google verifying the senders email address.
  - hk__2 4mo ago
    I have a static blog with a public comments system using Disqus; it’s just a JS snippet and it works great. I’ve seen people (ab)using GitHub issues too, or even use gists for blog posts.
  - uukelele 4mo ago
    Maybe giscus https://giscus.app/ https://giscus.app/ It works for static sites, you just need to embed their script, and spam and moderation would be handled by GitHub.
- Gualdrapo 4mo ago
  It can be worse: on a recent post here[0] the author says the contact page on his blog "does nothing but wastes spammers time and effort"[1]. Granted, he links to an email on said page, but why include a fake contact form[2] on your page then? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508069 [1] https://bruceediger.com/posts/honeypot-design/ https://bruceediger.com/posts/honeypot-design/ [2] https://bruceediger.com/contact/ https://bruceediger.com/contact/
dabedee 4mo ago
I think this is pragmatic and useful advice. Often it also helps you work through what you think by writing it down. Left this comment as a trace.
Retr0id 4mo ago
You can leave traces in the physical world too, although it's often looked down on as vandalism.
- NopIdoN 4mo ago
  A teacher told us that if we ever jump off a building, we should make sure to land teeth-first so that we leave an impression.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
  There's non-destructive ways to do so; take a photo, post a review, write a blog post. Actually Facebook and Instagram are known platforms to "leave a trace" like that, its shady side aside. But also, plenty of public places like museums, restaurants - at least where I live - have a "guest book" where you can leave a message. I like to believe other visitors and the staff have a leaf through those every once in a while.
  - Retr0id 4mo ago
    Guest books are neat, but it's rare for someone maintain a guest book for the underside of a road bridge for example (with some geocaches being an exception!)
S7012MY 4mo ago
Great post!
quaunaut 4mo ago
Ignoring the ironically missing way to respond to the post beyond the consult page, this is something I used to reliably do, for exactly this reason: > First, it’s positive and affirming in the aggregate. Despite its scale, the internet can be a lonely place. Most creators create in a vacuum. ... Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet. I think I'll try better to re-establish this habit.
bohrar 4mo ago
I am one of those consumers of the internet, who believes in adding minimal noise. But I see the point being made in the post, and here I am, leaving a trace. If the page had a comment box, would have done it there.
- suncemoje 4mo ago
  And, how does that make you feel?
  - bohrar 4mo ago
    Surprisingly, it just makes me feel more invested in the topic than I would have been otherwise and frankly not worth the time. Also, not surprisingly, I am evaluating whether my comment added any value and I think it just added to the noise.
suncemoje 4mo ago
In contrast: A few years ago I was hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). One of the few rules to follow there is to explicitly leave no trace, in respect to nature and others.
- smugglerFlynn 4mo ago
  People go to nature to interact with nature, not with traces of other human beings. You don't want to ride 4 hours to countryside only to find very same things you've been running away from. In contrast, people go to blogs to find opinions, and traces of opinions of others are usually adding, not subtracting. One can say whole HN is a sandbox for sharing opinions, therefore "untouched" posts with no comments and low points are less attractive.
- OuterVale 4mo ago
  The common saying is 'Take only photographs, leave only footprints.'
  - SoftTalker 4mo ago
    Let me guess, there are signs posted all along the trail about this?
    - suncemoje 4mo ago
      Nope, I never saw that one posted
- keane 4mo ago
  There’s a 501(c)(3) dedicated to this too: https://lnt.org/ https://lnt.org/
- mega_dean 4mo ago
  I used to go hiking in New Mexico and I actually liked when I came across little signs that someone was there: a small stack of rocks, sticks arranged in a crop-circley pattern, a makeshift bridge over a small stream, etc. But the worst part of hiking was seeing brightly-colored bags of dog shit right next to the trail, so I guess overall I’m ok with a general “leave no trace” rule. Then again, someone inconsiderate enough to do that wouldn’t care if there was a rule against it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
logged4upvoting 4mo ago
For me it is more like, i should have started leaving a trace before the invention of modern genAI, now maybe is late. I could have had a trusted trace to prove that I am a genuine human, now I get the impression that faceless new accounts/profiles or whatever are all fake and automatically managed.
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
  It's never too late; the important part is to have a personality and your own opinions. AI is agreeable, they will just go along with whatever information they are prompted with, unless they get an explicit prompt to be disagreeable. But you as a human have morals, values, experience and knowledge that you can apply to e.g. leaving comments or writing things. But this was good advice years ago too. The average Facebook or Youtube comment section feels like it's full of empty drones, repeated and predictable comments that don't actually add much. HN comments are a breath of fresh air in that regard. Reddit can be to some degree, as long as you filter out the predictable kneejerk reactions and "I also choose this guy's dead wife" meme comments.
jongjong 4mo ago
Leaving a trace is something I've been grappling with which seemed incredibly straight forward initially as an open source developer. These days, I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? Do I care about the kinds of entities who will inhabit the future? Or will their value system be so different to my own that I'd prefer not to have anything to do with them. Beyond human nature itself, I take issue with the trend of how human nature seems to be changing over time; for the worse.
- knorker 4mo ago
  > I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? How's your reasoning there? You only want to be nice to people who have earned it? This sounds a bit too close to the "you have to EARN my respect", which is a hallmark of somebody nobody wants to be around. You can only control your own actions. If your "good deeds" are conditional or transactional, then that very much diminishes their goodness.
  - jongjong 4mo ago
    You're right. I have certain values and I'm OK if others expect certain values from me. To me this is ideal. Friendships should not be based on superficial things like money or social status to the point that you have to constantly change yourself over time to maintain alignment. If you pay attention, you will notice that this is how the vast majority of people operate. To me, that's transactional. Having fixed core values and expecting other people to share certain core values is not transactional, it's genuine. These are the kinds of relationships which don't require constant maintenance; you can not talk with the person for years and then resume the friendship like no time has passed, no matter how your situations have changed. If you can change your values based on the latest social trends, then you have no values. The friendship is held together by mutual material benefits; that's transactional. I have no genuine interest in being friends with people who don't have core values. Because then I'd know I'm only in it for the money, and that's a lot of work and stress for me. Maybe second nature to some people. But I'm no good actor. To me it's work. My view of humanity is most people are actors and most people lie to themselves constantly.
gnofoente 4mo ago
[dead]
mulhoon 4mo ago
Years ago I was stuck on a tricky JS bug, I Googled it and ended up on a decent answer on StackOverflow. I implemented it, and it worked! I went back to SO and upvoted the answer, and it said "You can't upvote your own answer" Huh!??? Yes, it was my own answer from years back. Thanks, me! Glad I left a trace.
randusername 4mo ago
Similar idea: don't go through life anonymously. Go to your professor's office hours, learn the names of your neighbors, become a regular at the local sandwich shop and shoot the breeze with staff, ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes. Don't be fooled that social media and conspicuous consumption are the best paths to community.
- jasonpeacock 4mo ago
  That all sounds exhausting (introvert here). The last thing I want to do when out in public is be stuck talking with strangers.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - knorker 4mo ago
    As a fellow introvert, I would recommend that you see it as taking medication. Or getting exercise. You don't do it because you like it. You do it because if you don't, then you'll be worse off years later.
    - jader201 4mo ago
      > You do it because if you don't, then you'll be worse off years later. This feels hyperbolic. While I would agree that community and remaining connected are very important to overall health, I don’t feel like making a habit of talking to strangers is a prerequisite.
      - lukan 4mo ago
        "I don’t feel like making a habit of talking to strangers is a prerequisite." But if you practise that skill, you will then also be able to pick up a conversation with people you do find interesting.
        4mo ago
gravel7623 4mo ago
Nice try NSA.
smugglerFlynn 4mo ago
You were probably thinking about geeks leaving heartwarming comments under a forgotten repository while reading this. But what really makes a trace valuable? Internet growth has proven that scaling traces does not really grow value to the same extent. > Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet. At this exact moment in time there are literal thousands of creators that chase external validation, and millions of lurkers leaving 1-bit "like" reactions under their content. Let's go to popular instagram pages in a search of humanity. > It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea Billions of reactions left on social media so far proved to be very poor indication of quality. > You now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthy In a world of content abundance one rarely has time or motivation to re-visit everything he/she reacted upon. This also works increasingly worse the more "traces" you leave, see #1 and #2.
- moffkalast 4mo ago
  The "traces" I love most is people who post complicated enough issues on github repos that show the depth of their use case. Where there's some detail that's causing them problems, and they would not hit it unless they were actually making use of the project in a productive way. It's sort of the ultimate proof of the work I did being useful for somebody and a genuine motivator to resolve that issue for them too.
password4321 4mo ago
If you really want feedback, make sure you leave something needing correction. "A stranger is wrong on the internet!" xkcd#386
ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago
> Tell them it didn’t work and why. I did that, once, and got an expletive-filled rant about ungrateful, entitled shits (meaning Yours Troolie), in response. These days, I just quietly slip out the back, and close the door behind me.
bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
Gave up waiting after 30s of clustering
dvh 4mo ago
Few weeks ago someone here (let's call him $user) commented here that articles that would most benefited from picture often don't have one, to which someone replied calling it "$user's law", I wanted to comment how spot on the $user was but ultimately didn't and instead just upvoted. I was just about to complain here how I wish I commented so that could find it again, but then I thought, wait a minute, maybe hn tracks upvotes too, and sure enough it does, I was able to find the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001607 > The more an article would benefit from photos, the less likely it’ll have them. -- Waterluvian's Law
ajpaulson 4mo ago
Thanks for the article Jake. It tried twice to subscribe to your newsletter but the page stalled.
1970-01-01 4mo ago
I've found the web is full of these little traces: https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/
jbranchaud 4mo ago
One way that I leave a trace, which is a practice I've adopted from Simon Willison, is to record blogmarks for interesting and useful things I come across. Sometimes I just leave a pull quote, but usually I try to add my own thoughts or make a connection to something else. https://still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks https://still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks
pythonbase 4mo ago
"You live only as long as the last person who remembers you" ~ Westworld
snarky-comments 4mo ago
There was nowhere to comment.
Jotalea 4mo ago
i'll copy the comment i left there: i find it hilarious how no one has "left a trace" in this post's comment section yet. on the other hand, i think having to register an account on an unknown service (i don't know what will Discus do with my data) just to leave a comment is something the average reader (including myself) will not do; this being the exception, not the norm. in fact, i used a throwaway email for creating this account. but i can also see how hard it would be to moderate an account-less comment section. ~~so, i will invite anyone who reads my comment to, instead of only replying here, forwarding any replies to any of my contact methods available on my website: https://jotalea.com.ar/~~ https://jotalea.com.ar/~~ ignore this part, i do read HN often, so i will likely see the replies.

77 points by surprisetalk 4mo ago

[dead]

hk__2 4mo ago

> As a writer, receiving feedback on my work is welcome and rare. This blog gets thousands of readers a month, and yet the amount of direct feedback I’ve received over all the years is a small fraction of that. If you don’t have any comment box it’s hard to give you any feedback.

knorker 4mo ago
You're not kidding. There's neither comment box nor email address. Is he expecting us to cyberstalk him to find if someone has doxxed him, just to give a thumbs up? "Why is nobody calling to invite me to parties", says man who unplugged his phone. Edit: Ok, I'm old. For younger people, pretend I said "turned off his phone".
- hoppyhoppy2 4mo ago
  There is a contact form on the Consulting / Hire Me page, but it takes a little poking around to find it.
  - knorker 4mo ago
    Yeah. Should we just magically infer that he likes getting non-gig contacts on his explicitly gig contact form? The form is under "Get in Touch", and under an offer for a 15 minute call. I don't want that. This reminds me of a friend of mine who in a B2B setting contacted a potential vendor by filling in a form, with his email and phone number as contact details. Instead of emailing or calling back, this vendor continued the conversation by tracking down my friend on LinkedIn and messaging him there! They already had the email and phone number from their form. I'm also not super impressed by the consulting gig's "Johnny Holton" reference talking about Jake's "engineering excellence". A google search says Johnny Holton is an American hand egg player. If I were a potential client going in cold then this would not fill me with confidence in his attention to detail.
ChoosesBarbecue 4mo ago
What is the ideal approach for one? Assuming you don't want it to be a public one (to avoid moderation headaches), and you want to avoid automated spam, and your page is a static site, what is the ideal way to incorporate something like that?
- knorker 4mo ago
  Shaming people for not leaving comments anyway, I infer. /s I put my email address on these things. All spammers already have it anyway. I get some feedback. Or a normal web form with a captcha will create minimal spam. Certainly sufficient for someone not famous. Or you can have a google form. Either with or without google verifying the senders email address.
- hk__2 4mo ago
  I have a static blog with a public comments system using Disqus; it’s just a JS snippet and it works great. I’ve seen people (ab)using GitHub issues too, or even use gists for blog posts.
- uukelele 4mo ago
  Maybe giscus https://giscus.app/ https://giscus.app/ It works for static sites, you just need to embed their script, and spam and moderation would be handled by GitHub.
Gualdrapo 4mo ago
It can be worse: on a recent post here[0] the author says the contact page on his blog "does nothing but wastes spammers time and effort"[1]. Granted, he links to an email on said page, but why include a fake contact form[2] on your page then? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508069 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508069 [1] https://bruceediger.com/posts/honeypot-design/ https://bruceediger.com/posts/honeypot-design/ [2] https://bruceediger.com/contact/ https://bruceediger.com/contact/

dabedee 4mo ago

I think this is pragmatic and useful advice. Often it also helps you work through what you think by writing it down. Left this comment as a trace.

Retr0id 4mo ago

You can leave traces in the physical world too, although it's often looked down on as vandalism.

NopIdoN 4mo ago
A teacher told us that if we ever jump off a building, we should make sure to land teeth-first so that we leave an impression.
Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
There's non-destructive ways to do so; take a photo, post a review, write a blog post. Actually Facebook and Instagram are known platforms to "leave a trace" like that, its shady side aside. But also, plenty of public places like museums, restaurants - at least where I live - have a "guest book" where you can leave a message. I like to believe other visitors and the staff have a leaf through those every once in a while.
- Retr0id 4mo ago
  Guest books are neat, but it's rare for someone maintain a guest book for the underside of a road bridge for example (with some geocaches being an exception!)

S7012MY 4mo ago

Great post!

quaunaut 4mo ago

Ignoring the ironically missing way to respond to the post beyond the consult page, this is something I used to reliably do, for exactly this reason: > First, it’s positive and affirming in the aggregate. Despite its scale, the internet can be a lonely place. Most creators create in a vacuum. ... Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet. I think I'll try better to re-establish this habit.

bohrar 4mo ago

I am one of those consumers of the internet, who believes in adding minimal noise. But I see the point being made in the post, and here I am, leaving a trace. If the page had a comment box, would have done it there.

suncemoje 4mo ago
And, how does that make you feel?
- bohrar 4mo ago
  Surprisingly, it just makes me feel more invested in the topic than I would have been otherwise and frankly not worth the time. Also, not surprisingly, I am evaluating whether my comment added any value and I think it just added to the noise.

suncemoje 4mo ago

In contrast: A few years ago I was hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). One of the few rules to follow there is to explicitly leave no trace, in respect to nature and others.

smugglerFlynn 4mo ago
People go to nature to interact with nature, not with traces of other human beings. You don't want to ride 4 hours to countryside only to find very same things you've been running away from. In contrast, people go to blogs to find opinions, and traces of opinions of others are usually adding, not subtracting. One can say whole HN is a sandbox for sharing opinions, therefore "untouched" posts with no comments and low points are less attractive.
OuterVale 4mo ago
The common saying is 'Take only photographs, leave only footprints.'
- SoftTalker 4mo ago
  Let me guess, there are signs posted all along the trail about this?
  - suncemoje 4mo ago
    Nope, I never saw that one posted
keane 4mo ago
There’s a 501(c)(3) dedicated to this too: https://lnt.org/ https://lnt.org/
mega_dean 4mo ago
I used to go hiking in New Mexico and I actually liked when I came across little signs that someone was there: a small stack of rocks, sticks arranged in a crop-circley pattern, a makeshift bridge over a small stream, etc. But the worst part of hiking was seeing brightly-colored bags of dog shit right next to the trail, so I guess overall I’m ok with a general “leave no trace” rule. Then again, someone inconsiderate enough to do that wouldn’t care if there was a rule against it, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

logged4upvoting 4mo ago

For me it is more like, i should have started leaving a trace before the invention of modern genAI, now maybe is late. I could have had a trusted trace to prove that I am a genuine human, now I get the impression that faceless new accounts/profiles or whatever are all fake and automatically managed.

Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
It's never too late; the important part is to have a personality and your own opinions. AI is agreeable, they will just go along with whatever information they are prompted with, unless they get an explicit prompt to be disagreeable. But you as a human have morals, values, experience and knowledge that you can apply to e.g. leaving comments or writing things. But this was good advice years ago too. The average Facebook or Youtube comment section feels like it's full of empty drones, repeated and predictable comments that don't actually add much. HN comments are a breath of fresh air in that regard. Reddit can be to some degree, as long as you filter out the predictable kneejerk reactions and "I also choose this guy's dead wife" meme comments.

jongjong 4mo ago

Leaving a trace is something I've been grappling with which seemed incredibly straight forward initially as an open source developer. These days, I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? Do I care about the kinds of entities who will inhabit the future? Or will their value system be so different to my own that I'd prefer not to have anything to do with them. Beyond human nature itself, I take issue with the trend of how human nature seems to be changing over time; for the worse.

knorker 4mo ago
> I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? How's your reasoning there? You only want to be nice to people who have earned it? This sounds a bit too close to the "you have to EARN my respect", which is a hallmark of somebody nobody wants to be around. You can only control your own actions. If your "good deeds" are conditional or transactional, then that very much diminishes their goodness.
- jongjong 4mo ago
  You're right. I have certain values and I'm OK if others expect certain values from me. To me this is ideal. Friendships should not be based on superficial things like money or social status to the point that you have to constantly change yourself over time to maintain alignment. If you pay attention, you will notice that this is how the vast majority of people operate. To me, that's transactional. Having fixed core values and expecting other people to share certain core values is not transactional, it's genuine. These are the kinds of relationships which don't require constant maintenance; you can not talk with the person for years and then resume the friendship like no time has passed, no matter how your situations have changed. If you can change your values based on the latest social trends, then you have no values. The friendship is held together by mutual material benefits; that's transactional. I have no genuine interest in being friends with people who don't have core values. Because then I'd know I'm only in it for the money, and that's a lot of work and stress for me. Maybe second nature to some people. But I'm no good actor. To me it's work. My view of humanity is most people are actors and most people lie to themselves constantly.

gnofoente 4mo ago

[dead]

mulhoon 4mo ago

Years ago I was stuck on a tricky JS bug, I Googled it and ended up on a decent answer on StackOverflow. I implemented it, and it worked! I went back to SO and upvoted the answer, and it said "You can't upvote your own answer" Huh!??? Yes, it was my own answer from years back. Thanks, me! Glad I left a trace.

randusername 4mo ago

Similar idea: don't go through life anonymously. Go to your professor's office hours, learn the names of your neighbors, become a regular at the local sandwich shop and shoot the breeze with staff, ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes. Don't be fooled that social media and conspicuous consumption are the best paths to community.

jasonpeacock 4mo ago
That all sounds exhausting (introvert here). The last thing I want to do when out in public is be stuck talking with strangers.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- knorker 4mo ago
  As a fellow introvert, I would recommend that you see it as taking medication. Or getting exercise. You don't do it because you like it. You do it because if you don't, then you'll be worse off years later.
  - jader201 4mo ago
    > You do it because if you don't, then you'll be worse off years later. This feels hyperbolic. While I would agree that community and remaining connected are very important to overall health, I don’t feel like making a habit of talking to strangers is a prerequisite.
    - lukan 4mo ago
      "I don’t feel like making a habit of talking to strangers is a prerequisite." But if you practise that skill, you will then also be able to pick up a conversation with people you do find interesting.
      - 4mo ago

gravel7623 4mo ago

Nice try NSA.

smugglerFlynn 4mo ago

You were probably thinking about geeks leaving heartwarming comments under a forgotten repository while reading this. But what really makes a trace valuable? Internet growth has proven that scaling traces does not really grow value to the same extent. > Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet. At this exact moment in time there are literal thousands of creators that chase external validation, and millions of lurkers leaving 1-bit "like" reactions under their content. Let's go to popular instagram pages in a search of humanity. > It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea Billions of reactions left on social media so far proved to be very poor indication of quality. > You now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthy In a world of content abundance one rarely has time or motivation to re-visit everything he/she reacted upon. This also works increasingly worse the more "traces" you leave, see #1 and #2.

moffkalast 4mo ago
The "traces" I love most is people who post complicated enough issues on github repos that show the depth of their use case. Where there's some detail that's causing them problems, and they would not hit it unless they were actually making use of the project in a productive way. It's sort of the ultimate proof of the work I did being useful for somebody and a genuine motivator to resolve that issue for them too.

password4321 4mo ago

If you really want feedback, make sure you leave something needing correction. "A stranger is wrong on the internet!" xkcd#386

ChrisMarshallNY 4mo ago

> Tell them it didn’t work and why. I did that, once, and got an expletive-filled rant about ungrateful, entitled shits (meaning Yours Troolie), in response. These days, I just quietly slip out the back, and close the door behind me.

bcjdjsndon 4mo ago

Gave up waiting after 30s of clustering

dvh 4mo ago

Few weeks ago someone here (let's call him $user) commented here that articles that would most benefited from picture often don't have one, to which someone replied calling it "$user's law", I wanted to comment how spot on the $user was but ultimately didn't and instead just upvoted. I was just about to complain here how I wish I commented so that could find it again, but then I thought, wait a minute, maybe hn tracks upvotes too, and sure enough it does, I was able to find the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48001607 > The more an article would benefit from photos, the less likely it’ll have them. -- Waterluvian's Law

ajpaulson 4mo ago

Thanks for the article Jake. It tried twice to subscribe to your newsletter but the page stalled.

1970-01-01 4mo ago

I've found the web is full of these little traces: https://xkcd.com/979/ https://xkcd.com/979/

jbranchaud 4mo ago

One way that I leave a trace, which is a practice I've adopted from Simon Willison, is to record blogmarks for interesting and useful things I come across. Sometimes I just leave a pull quote, but usually I try to add my own thoughts or make a connection to something else. https://still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks https://still.visualmode.dev/blogmarks

pythonbase 4mo ago

"You live only as long as the last person who remembers you" ~ Westworld

snarky-comments 4mo ago

There was nowhere to comment.

Jotalea 4mo ago

i'll copy the comment i left there: i find it hilarious how no one has "left a trace" in this post's comment section yet. on the other hand, i think having to register an account on an unknown service (i don't know what will Discus do with my data) just to leave a comment is something the average reader (including myself) will not do; this being the exception, not the norm. in fact, i used a throwaway email for creating this account. but i can also see how hard it would be to moderate an account-less comment section. ~~so, i will invite anyone who reads my comment to, instead of only replying here, forwarding any replies to any of my contact methods available on my website: https://jotalea.com.ar/~~ https://jotalea.com.ar/~~ ignore this part, i do read HN often, so i will likely see the replies.