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Not Fun at Parties
Personal blog · notfunatparties.substack.com · on HN as tomjohnneilldataculture
Not Fun at Parties is a personal blog at notfunatparties.substack.com about data and culture. Since 2021, 5 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times, most often “Inside a viral website”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Not Fun at Parties for the maker's own account of running a viral joke website, including its traffic, server costs and ads, and for a post on a Wordle solver that a JS port was adapted from.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Stupid memes and ramblings about data, tech & economics. The kind of things that make the wrong kind of people's eyes glaze over.
Most-linked posts?
- Inside a viral website4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-03-31
- Optimum Wordle Solver2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-05
What Hacker News says?
> Assuming we are talking about 1MB per visit then that is roughly 70TB. If you visit the site today with scripts blocked, the site still works and the page is only 160kB, including 140kB of images of book covers. And the "I checked the server logs and saw the traffic" part of the story happened before they added these ads (see https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit... for a better timeline)
Comment linking /p/inside-a-viral-website
on “When 70M people visit your joke site”Submitted Inside a viral website as a story · 787 points
HN discussionHere’s a link to the original makers own account of running the site: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...
Comment linking /p/inside-a-viral-website
on “When 70M people visit your joke site”Submitted What Goodreads could have been as a story · 93 points
HN discussionI wrote that up here: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/inside-a-viral-websit...
Comment linking /p/inside-a-viral-website
on “When 70M people visit your joke site”Submitted Optimum Wordle Solver as a story · 1 points
HN discussionA JS version adapted from https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/wordle-solver https://pdanpdan.github.io/wordle-solver/ main code in https://github.com/pdanpdan/wordle-solver/blob/master/src/li...
Comment linking /p/wordle-solver
on “Solving Wordle in 3.64 guesses on average, 99.4% of the time”That's fair about ignoring the training cost. I did write a bit more going into that in a follow up piece here: https://notfunatparties.substack.com/p/ai-is-good-for-the-pl... Do you have any better sources for the power usage stats? It would be good to get a bit closer on that front. Having said that, even if the cost share is closer to 80%, that still puts it on par with a laptop for an average person.
Comment linking /p/ai-is-good-for-the-planet
on “Paragraph Pollution: AI is (probably) greener than you typing on a laptop”