Looking for Decent Conversation?

103•kmstout•1mo ago

If you have fond memories of misspending entirely too much of your youth on web-based message boards, or you would like to misspend more of your nights and weekends on them now, Google has you covered. Simply add

  inurl:viewtopic.php

to any query, and most, if not all, of your results will be discussion threads on boards running atop phpBB. Similarly, using

  inurl:"index.php?topic="

seems to get Simple Machines fora, and

  inurl:showthread.php

will unearth vBulletin fora. You can also combine them, like so:

  croissant AND (inurl:viewtopic.php OR inurl:showthread.php OR inurl:"index.php?topic=")

Happy holidays, and good hunting.

Comments

davedx•1mo ago

There must be a vbulletin version too!

FergusArgyll•1mo ago

And if you do find an old php message board, absolutely do not add

  ?topic=../../../../etc/passwd

wheybags•1mo ago

My first php script was a file upload server for a lan party. Luckily nobody tried to upload a file named ../index.php, because I realized afterwards that it would have worked :p

6510•1mo ago

I've just tried it on mine but nothing fun happened. What is suppose to?

FergusArgyll•1mo ago

Google / ask AI

Local file inclusion (LFI)

chistev•1mo ago

I posted this 23 days ago -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46100511

I've been enjoying past discussion threads on HN, currently in 2012.

Interesting conversations about how Facebook would fail back then, lol, and about how Bitcoin would not be as valuable as it is today. Who would have known?

Great site, this.

stackghost•1mo ago

HN is (in)famous for being bad at predicting success or failure, cf. Dropbox.

Lots of very intelligent people here but, no offense to anyone, this is the last place I'd come to get product advice.

thekevan•1mo ago

That's selection bias. Most replies in the post were positive.

BrandonM's comment also wasn't that unreasonable in my opinion. Imagine telling someone many years ago that we'd use an app on our phones to get in stranger's car and pay a lot for the privilege as well. His reaction to Dropbox wasn't on point but wasn't tone deaf.

Drew from Dropbox responded to the post at the time and BrandonM responded positively, praising the product.

It was overall a mature and very fair way of saying it wasn't for him.

chistev•1mo ago

Lol. It's not just a HN thing. Humans just suck at predicting the future when that future involves the actions of other humans. Too many variables.

If you had read old discussion threads you'd never know Facebook would be the behemoth it is today.

samyar•1mo ago

Hn is the place where smart ppl give you feedback. I have benefited in many ways from hn.

lisbbb•1mo ago

Except most of them are just book smart (if that) and have little real-world experience.

samyar•1mo ago

I think we disagree on a fundamental level. what i have perceived in HN is that most ppl here tries to point out different angles of things. even if you post something totally positive and beneficial there will be someone to point out the weak points and i love it (you can ignore them or not).

lisbbb•1mo ago

It's because this site is inhabited by redditors who downvote comments such as yours for no other reason except to preserve the paper thin veneer of their superiority.

wojciii•1mo ago

Funny you say this.

I noticed that product that succeeded are almost always products that I wouldn't buy.

So I could be used to determine the success of products. If I like it ..forget it. If i wount buy it, the the uneashed masses will and it will be a commercial succes.

I should sell this as a service ..

ultratalk•1mo ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2270/

wojciii•1mo ago

Hahah. I'm pretty bad at selecting winning stocks. This could be me.

DetectDefect•1mo ago

I would love to see an effort to amass these corpora of knowledge into zim files for offline consumption, similar to stackoverflow et al.

https://library.kiwix.org

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

The Waymo World Model

What Is Ruliology?

How we made geo joins 400× faster with H3 indexes

Jeffrey Snover: "Welcome to the Room"

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Show HN: I spent 4 years building a UI design tool with only the features I use

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

Show HN: If you lose your memory, how to regain access to your computer?

An Update on Heroku

Dark Alley Mathematics

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

Delimited Continuations vs. Lwt for Threads

PC Floppy Copy Protection: Vault Prolok

Start all of your commands with a comma

Was Benoit Mandelbrot a hedgehog or a fox?

How to effectively write quality code with AI

Introducing the Developer Knowledge API and MCP Server

I spent 5 years in DevOps – Solutions engineering gave me what I was missing

Understanding Neural Network, Visually

I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

Why I Joined OpenAI

Show HN: R3forth, a ColorForth-inspired language with a tiny VM

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

Learning from context is harder than we thought

FORTH? Really!?