about oldschool.technology

oldschool.technology is a small link aggregator in the tradition of Hacker News and Lobsters. people submit links, other people vote and argue in the comments, and the good stuff floats to the top. that is the entire idea.

what makes it old school

• one sqlite file, no cluster, no message queue, no javascript framework
• one statically linked binary written in V
• the interface is a text-mode terminal: 80 columns, no images, no colours outside the phosphor
• browsing and signing in work without javascript. registration requires a bot verification check.

accounts

registration is open but not self-service in effect. a new account is written to the database immediately as:

status            = disabled
approved_by_admin = false

it cannot log in, submit or comment until an administrator approves it, which sets both approved_by_admin = 1 and status = active in one statement. an administrator can also disable, re-queue or ban an account, and disabling one drops its sessions immediately.

ranking

the front page is ordered by points, then by age. points come from registered votes, one per account, and you cannot vote on your own submissions. there is no weighting, no decay and no karma multiplier. the discussed view orders by comment count instead, and newest is by time, so a fresh site is not a ghost town.

feeds

the whole front page is available as RSS at /rss. if you are reading this in a feed reader, the comments are the interesting part and they live on the web page.