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nathcd

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arxiv.org 1mo ago

Warehouse-Scale Interprocedural Code Layout Optimization with AlphaEvolve [pdf]

nathcd
3pts0
andymatuschak.org 3mo ago

Apps and programming: two accidental tyrannies

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www.tigerdata.com 3mo ago

pg_textsearch 1.0: How We Built a BM25 Search Engine on Postgres Pages

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ourworldindata.org 8mo ago

The end of progress against extreme poverty?

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www.vox.com 1y ago

Something remarkable is happening with violent crime rates in the US

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6pts1
watch.ocaml.org 4y ago

Experiences with Effects in OCaml [video]

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www.hillelwayne.com 5y ago

We Are Not Special

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www.hillelwayne.com 5y ago

Are We Really Engineers?

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www.nytimes.com 5y ago

Populist, Prisoner, President: A Convicted Kidnapper Wins Kyrgyzstan Election

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news.ycombinator.com 5y ago

Ask HN: What to do with old technical magazines and journals?

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www.tarsnap.com 5y ago

The spiped secure pipe daemon

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threadreaderapp.com 6y ago

Minneapolis City Council looking into disbanding police department

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www.youtube.com 6y ago

Why Don’t Americans Trust Experts Anymore? [video]

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github.com 6y ago

ble.sh: Bash Line Editor

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text.npr.org 6y ago

In Blackbeard Pirate Ship Case, Supreme Court Scuttles Copyright Claims

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www.youtube.com 6y ago

IBM WorkPad 20X: The 1998 Palm PDA Experience [video]

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github.com 6y ago

OCaml: compilation of pattern matching

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usesthis.com 6y ago

Uses This: Graydon Hoare

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itch.io 6y ago

Autumn Lisp Game Jam

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fivethirtyeight.com 6y ago

Media Bubbles Aren’t the Biggest Reason We’re Partisans

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www.sicpers.info 6y ago

...and in the end there will be the command line. (2015)

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www.skyhunter.com 6y ago

An Introduction to Petname Systems (2010)

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www.skyhunter.com 7y ago

An Introduction to Petname Systems (2010)

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www.youtube.com 7y ago

Xanadu Basics – Visible Connection (2018) [video]

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www.youtube.com 7y ago

Xanadu Basics – Visible Connection (2018) [video]

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docs.idris-lang.org 7y ago

Syntax Extensions in Idris

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web.archive.org 7y ago

Inventing Fundamental New Computing Technologies

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contnet.org 7y ago

ContNet

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www.nealstephenson.com 7y ago

Why I Am a Bad Correspondent

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www.aaronsw.com 7y ago

RSS 3.0 (2002)

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2pts0

Some of the comments here remind me of online commentary about some place called "the orange site". Always wondered who they were talking about...

Ha, I kind of agree with you, and I'm a little embarrassed it's as upvoted as it is. I just love the silly little video of him saying it and then cracking up. It pops into my head a lot and gives me a laugh. I just felt like sharing it to be goofy. Didn't imagine it would end up at the top of the thread!

How I Use AI 2 years ago

Occasionally I come across comments that make me think “wait, there’s still developers out there who don’t use AI? Like, not at all?” Not just programmers who think that AI is overhyped, no, but programmers who don’t use AI in any shape or form: no ChatGPT, no Copilot, no Cody, no local models, nothing.

Surely this is feigning surprise. The oldest thing in that list is like 18 months old or something, and he's surprised to find literally any programmers that don't use them? I bet I could find a programmer out there who's never used Google, let alone brand new subscription AI services.

I have never had this problem. Do you have any example feeds you encounter this with? Are you sure its not just a bug in your reader?

I mean, it's hard to say whether it's a bug in my reader, given that the RSS spec makes no mention of how relative links should work. I've variously used Newsbeuter, Newsboat, Newsblur, and The Old Reader and have never not had this problem.

(Edit: an example from this morning: Newsblur didn't know what to do with the footnote links in Dan Luu's blog [https://danluu.com/atom.xml]. Aside: Newsblur seems to be responding with 500s for about every other request today. sigh isn't technology wonderful?)

Having RSS completely static means that hosting an RSS feed is super simple and does not require the increased attack potential of a dynamic service - something that the current federated web protocols completely fail at.

Pagination would work fine with static hosting. And "updates-since" requests wouldn't preclude static hosts from ignoring them and working exactly how they work now.

I agree with you about federated web protocols though - I'm pretty bummed ActivityPub requires an inbox, otherwise I think it would pretty much work with static hosting.

I don't think creating a separate RSS-only web of links makes sense.

You're right, it doesn't really make sense. I think the crux of my frustration there is that we've got a syndication system that's bolted on top of the web, rather than properly integrated. It's probably the best that can be done though, without an entire separate hypertext system.

Lots? Really? iframes are more dead than RSS, at least for anything outside of ads.

Youtube and Vimeo embeds are mostly where I see them.

> or content that only makes sense with JS enabled

Limiting RSS to static mostly-text content provides a lot of consistency.

I'm not complaining that feed items can't execute Javascript; I'm annoyed that sometimes the (textual) content of the post refers directly to other content that's only there after JS adds it. (I'm not blaming authors, this is just a problem of the content being written for a webpage and then being included in a different context. Again, an issue of the syndication system having been bolted onto the web.)

Ugly, yes, but how is this a problem in practice? Just because it's not as hip as JSON?

No, I don't particularly love JSON either. XML does indeed work okay, but I pretty regularly (a couple times a year, maybe?) see broken feeds because of mis-escaped content. I think one of the feed generators of someone I follow produces bad CDATA tags too. Pretty hard to mess up JSON escaping (as much as HTML-in-JSON makes me shudder).

All formats do indeed suck, but not equally (YAML does suck equally, though). Your point about HTML is the best argument for XML though, since every client needs an 8 million LOC HTML parser anyway.

It was probably a mistake to resurrect this flame war about serialization formats. XML works, it's just a bummer.

I don't want everything every day.

Yeah! I'm with you. Although I don't use it, I really like some of the features of https://fraidyc.at/. For the majority of feeds I follow, I don't need to keep track of unread status, and high-frequency feeds would be much more bearable if they were grouped together to avoid taking over an aggregated listing. I feel like a lot of client defaults tend to hew too closely to email clients or something.

These are the fault of broken RSS feed generators. The RSS feed should contain a textual summary of the article.

"Should" indeed. But a standard that isn't followed isn't exactly helpful to me.

This is working as intended and not an issue. I don't think any alternatives would make sense.

Yeah, I agree that an alternative doesn't make sense for RSS in particular, but it's not hard to imagine an only-slightly-more-featureful syndication system where individual feed items are directly addressable.

It's just a shame that I've got this really nice, personalized feed reading interface, and I get pulled out of it every time I follow a link.

I'm a very happy daily RSS user, but we ought to be upfront about its ginormous deficiencies:

- every day I deal with broken links and broken images because my feed reader doesn't know from which URL it should resolve relative links

- there's no pagination mechanism, or way for a client to ask for "all posts since last Friday". If you want your feed to always have all posts available, you need to include the entirety of your archive in every feed response.

- if I want to follow any link I get kicked back out to a bloated web page

- lots of posts include iframes, or content that only makes sense with JS enabled

- XML

Despite this, I still love RSS. It's what we've got and we should continue to make the most of it. But it also sucks, and it's not any surprise that mostly only technical people use it. I think feeds are pretty much doomed to keep breaking and disappearing. Many of the replacements or pseudo-replacements that people come up with seem fine, but the problem - as always - is getting people to actually use it, which mostly never happens.