The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

My post about banning a Chinese web bot? Apparently, that was really about me being shadow banned from Hacker News … which is news to me

Oh my! This is hilarious:

Developer gets shadowbanned by Hacker News and asks for a real IP ban instead

Sean Conner discovered he's been shadowbanned from Hacker News and would rather just be banned at the IP level if they don't want him there. SEAN'S BLOG POST | HACKER NEWS DISCUSSION

Unsupervised Learning NO. 495

I can see how the author might get that from if they only read the headline on Hacker News, but (to his credit) he spelled both my first name and last name correct, so he must have clicked through to my post (where my name shows up at the bottom of the page) but not read the actual post.

Wow!

But given the author writes about AI, perhaps he had his AI write the summary for him. Given the two errata he mentions about his previous newsletter, if he does use an AI, perhaps he needs a word or two with it …

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… over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore …

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No AI was used in the making of this site, unless otherwise noted.

You have my permission to link freely to any entry here. Go ahead, I won't bite. I promise.

The dates are the permanent links to that day's entries (or entry, if there is only one entry). The titles are the permanent links to that entry only. The format for the links are simple: Start with the base link for this site: https://boston.conman.org/, then add the date you are interested in, say 2000/08/01, so that would make the final URL:

https://boston.conman.org/2000/08/01

You can also specify the entire month by leaving off the day portion. You can even select an arbitrary portion of time.

You may also note subtle shading of the links and that's intentional: the “closer” the link is (relative to the page) the “brighter” it appears. It's an experiment in using color shading to denote the distance a link is from here. If you don't notice it, don't worry; it's not all that important.

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