HPR2255: The Good Ship HPR

The Good Ship HPR

Hacker Public Radio

What is it?

The podcast called Hacker Public Radio (HPR) is an amazing phenomenon. It has been providing an episode a day every weekday for years, and these episodes originate from the community.

I heard someone refer to HPR as “Crowd Sourced” which seemed like a good way of describing things. It is an open access resource which is managed under various Creative Commons licences, usually CC-BY-SA.

The content is very broad in scope. Anything “of interest to Hackers” is acceptable, which is interpreted in a wide variety of ways.

Access to shows is open to all through the HPR site, where shows back to episode 1 can be browsed, notes read, etc. There are feeds which propagate various updates: to shows, series, comments and email. Current shows are archived to the Internet Archive (archive.org) within a few days of appearing in the main feed, and older shows are gradually being archived this way with the intention of eventually storing everything there.

For example, to find show 1999 on archive.org look for https://archive.org/details/hpr1999. The entire HPR collection can be browsed at https://archive.org/details/hackerpublicradio.

Some history

As you can see, if you examine the details on the website statistics page the predecessor of HPR started more than 11 years ago as “Today With A Techie”, transforming into “Hacker Public Radio” over 9 years ago.

Started:            11 years, 4 months, 12 days ago (2005-10-10)
Renamed HPR:        9 years, 1 months, 20 days ago (2007-12-31)

In the earlier days the frequency of show release was not the predictable 5 per week, every weekday, that it is now. There were gaps, sometimes of several days, and occasionally shows came out on the weekend. Stability was achieved in October 2012 and there have been no gaps since then!

There are currently 280 hosts who have contributed shows at some point in the history of HPR, and at the time of writing in February 2017 show number 2230 has been released. The number of episodes and hosts will be greater when the episodes from “Today With A Techie” are incorporated into the archive.

The Hacker Public Radio experiment has been very successful over the years, but there is a certain fragility in the way it works.

Long notes

The longer notes for this episode which are available here, talk about the details of the problem facing HPR and go on to suggest some solutions.

Links

• HPR calendar page - shows the queue and a graph of the levels over past months
• HPR statistics page - a collection of current and historical statistics about HPR
• How to become an HPR host - instructions on how to become a host on HPR by contributing a show
• Resources:
  • Detailed notes for this episode
  • ePub version of the notes for this episode

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