For the price, these Sun workstations were slow as hell to me. X was horribly laggy. The UI put me off Unix GUIs for a decade. The mouse was meh.

I love the industrial design of these pizza boxes, though. I didn't mind when I was running them headless as IRC servers or web hosts.

Couldn't you say the same of drug testing spectrometers etc? The end operator of the equipment has to appear in court to testify to the proper operation of the machine. [0]

[0] Unless the defendant waives that right and stipulates to the prosecutor's statement about the machine.

This literally occurs; one of the reasons that the drug testing lab is usually somewhat local. The prosecution called the individual who ran the test as a witness, and he had clearly been called for similar things many times before.

There's an absolute ton of niches which are completely anchored to Twitter. It's hard to get a whole raft of people to move at once :(

And still needed...

All I remember from 3001 was a bit about velociraptors being used as gardeners and babysitters.

Moderating Reddit subs can be a huge money maker. I know people making $100K/year from it. There are cabals, especially in the adult sections. Reddit has tried to address this recently by limiting the number of subs a person can moderate, but that just causes these big accounts to create more user accounts and split all their subs up that way.

I must be old and naive but you can make money with subreddits?

On the adult subs, at least, menu links, sidebar links and banner ads, automod reply links, and by limiting your sub to only paying guests or your own managed models.

Plenty of subs blatantly allow certain brands to advertise while banning anyone else. Kind of amazed Reddit themselves haven’t put more effort into to stopping it since it kinda sidesteps their in house advertising.

At scale they will. For now, someone else puts the effort into growth marketing, eyeball capture. Reddit eventually changes the rules, seizing control, thereby acquiring users for less human cost (as opposed to missed revenue opportunity).

Because said 100k'er are probably paying off someone inside reddit. Remember when Ebay sent some couple bloody pigs masks? Yeah evil people work at companies.

Corruption

It's even worse than that. They preemptively ban you outright on lots of major subs for posting on other subs. For instance, I can't interact with r/pics because I once commented on r/redditachievements. And a housemate once upvoted a pic on there which got us both banned for a week because Reddit thought I was trying to do a run-around on the ban.

I still love Reddit for all its flaws though.

Reddit is fantastic, to me. It's worth the struggle to get past the initial bullshit.

There are a lot of flaws, though. Their appeal system is very broken, for instance.

Which in itself is annoying, IMO. It creates a whole separate set of problems. You need karma, so people post in karma-farming subs to get a few crumbs. Then you get auto-banned from a dozen of the top subreddits preemptively for farming.

Reddit hasn't been as overrun by bots yet, for the most part, although how long they can hold out I don't know.

maybe not overrun by spam, but the amount of bots I see on popular subs is definitely not 0

This is one of the best things about HN. The sheer number of times someone has posted a link and the author or someone significant to the project deep within some megacorp makes a green account and starts answering questions that you never thought would get answered. Some of the most golden replies come from greenies.

Yes, and we've always gone out of our way to protect those. It's perhaps the thing I hate the most about our software that sometimes it kills such posts.