Top all-time · #9048
The Local Yarn
Personal blog · thelocalyarn.com/articlewebwriting
The Local Yarn is a personal blog at thelocalyarn.com about web and writing. Since 2018, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “The Unbearable Lightness of Web Pages”. The last post was in 2018, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link personal pages on thelocalyarn.com found through the Wiby retro-web search engine, plus a design-docs page on a blog-series idea. One commenter calls one of the pages a favorite find.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The Unbearable Lightness of Web Pages5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2018-01-24
- This Is Your Life (2007)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-27
- The Live Sparrow: Poetry and Translation (2014)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-22
What Hacker News says?
Just the other day I wrote an RSS (well, Atom) feed generator for my site in Racket: https://thelocalyarn.com/code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f
Comment linking /code/artifact/e414aebe97ea8e9f
on “Please Add RSS Support to Your Site”Submitted The Unbearable Lightness of Web Pages as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis tradeoff between the relative virtues of PDF and HTML is a good argument for looking at Pollen (pollenpub.com) a framework for designing your own markup language that is capable of targeting HTML and PDF (or any output you need: audio, Kindle, whatever). A proof of concept is here: https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/secretary/ On every page at that micro-site, you can view the Pollen markup source, or the PDF ve…
Comment linking /excursus/secretary/
on “Why Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF”Submitted Better Web Publishing as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think this blog post of mine from 2007 gives a better (or at least more succinct) answer to this question: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/this-is-your-life
Comment linking /article/this-is-your-life
on “Why time seems to pass faster as we age”Submitted This Is Your Life (2007) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI even wrote a little poem about it at the time: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/birds
Comment linking /article/birds
on “Joyent Public Cloud EOL”Submitted The Live Sparrow: Poetry and Translation (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe content at the link is simply a poor adaptation of Tufte CSS. The text block has been made too narrow, lots of bloggy little headers and footers have been sprinkled everywhere, and marginal notes are used in a frenetic way that competes with the text. The original design of Tufte CSS is good, but even that won’t convince a reader to take a super bloggy blog seriously (and I’m a fan of super bloggy blogs). The de…
Comment linking /excursus/secretary/posts/web-books.html
on “Show HN: A minimalist blog based on Tufte CSS”Submitted The Unbearable Lightness of Web Pages as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAlways loved this story about Lewis Lapham getting a bit of revenge: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/mr-lapham-gets-his-way
Comment linking /article/mr-lapham-gets-his-way
on “Lewis Lapham has died”Submitted The unbearable lightness of web pages as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe argument is that the intangible costs of the current scheme (life under total surveillance) make it desirable to force a direct dollar-value recognition of people's personal data. A while back I made a similar argument[1]. I argued that some high percentage (e.g. 90%) of revenue from targeted ads should be required to be passed through to viewers of those ads. The possibility of the targeted ad market drying up…
Comment linking /article/judicious-change
on “Let's make them pay for using our personal data”Another (competing) conception of “consciousness after death” is that (perhaps depending on the manner of death) consciousness continues but degrades further and further into an obscene, wretched stupidity. See https://thelocalyarn.com/article/death-decay-and-the-haunted...
Comment linking /article/death-decay-and-the-haunted-afterlife
on “Under anesthesia, where do our minds go?”One of my favorite finds through Wiby is: https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/test/index.html which I found through this article specifically: https://thelocalyarn.com/excursus/test/articles/future-proof...
Comment linking /excursus/test/articles/future-proofing.html
on “Wiby – Search Engine for the Classic Web”The initial tweet, 2020-03-05: https://x.com/joeld/status/1235652084264886272 > "I have been working on a reimagining of the blog idea for a few years, and it includes an idea (“series”) that is quite similar to blogchains. See this section of the design docs https://thelocalyarn.com/code/uv/scribbled/Basic_Notions.htm... and partial screen shot. It’s almost ready!" My original response, in full: > "One thought on t…
Comment linking /code/uv/scribbled/Basic_Notions.html?n=1583437204457
on “The Inkhaven Blogging Residency”Four years ago I wrote about requiring companies to pass along x% of targeted ad revenue sales to the users: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/judicious-change I still think this is a good strategy for the purpose of snuffing out the incentives for surveillance business models.
Comment linking /article/judicious-change
on “California governor proposes data dividend”In 2014 I wrote a short post on this subject: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/your-choice It aimed to be a thesis on the topic that anyone could verify by interrogating their own experience. As opposed to most approaches that appeal to either religion or scientific studies. The short version is that free “will” is real; but it is our desires (and how we prioritize them) that we cannot control (and in many cases, ca…
Comment linking /article/your-choice
on “Free Will: Who’s in Control?”These are good examples of the “live sparrow” vs the “stuffed eagle” modes of translating poetry: https://thelocalyarn.com/article/the-live-sparrow
Comment linking /article/the-live-sparrow
on ““The Poet Is a Man Who Feigns””
