RSS Is Better Than Twitter - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/rss-is-better-than-twitter-1833624929 <comment><USER2> I just wish Mozilla introduce subscribing to RSS as a first class feature in Firefox. If they can introduce and integrate Pocket, I think an open technology like RSS deserves a fair chance. But they'd need to invest a little bit to make it easy to subscribe—similar to following on Twitter/Instagram or Liking pages on Facebook—to receive site updates. Having to find and enter byzantine URLs is not the way to go although personally, I do not have any trouble doing that as I have been using RSS and feed readers for more than a decade, but that is not the case for everyone.

I just wish some consortium of like minded companies like NYT/WaPo/Guardian/BBCs/Other national dailies, Reddit, Mozilla, and even Microsoft can huddle together and come up with a new name/identity and spread it and popularise it. One can always wish.

As one commentator said in the linked article: protocols are better than platforms.

Edit: The issue here is not about obtaining the feature with add-ons and extensions, which there are many. When the focus of the organisation is on something idealistic (open web), is it too much to expect them to add it to the core of the product?

<comment><USER3> I'm considering integrating RSS with Polar:

[https://getpolarized.io/](https://getpolarized.io/)

Ton on my plate now trying to focus on shipping mobile and a few other features too.

I like the idea of Polar having data sources that are high quality and that the user can just easily subscribe to specific PDFs, research, or high quality content feeds.

We're also going to add social content discovery which is sort of like a Twitter feed but just people who are annotating content on Polar.

<comment><USER4> I am starting to get annoyed seeing you promoting it in _every_ thread of a vaguely relatable topic. Could you please tone it down a bit? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love RSS feeds.

You can convert Twitter to RSS: [http://twitrss.me](http://twitrss.me)

Websites that don't have RSS: [https://feedity.com/](https://feedity.com/)

Email to RSS: [https://zapier.com](https://zapier.com)

Hackernews RSS:[http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300](http://hnrss.org/newest?points=300)

You can even use RSS for finding a job: [https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=d...](https://www.indeed.ca/jobs?q=millwright&l=Toronto,+ON&sort=date)

<comment><USER6> Are you aware of an open source/non-commercial email to RSS solution?

<comment><USER5> No. But Zapier is free for limited applications.

But yes, wish TinyTinyRSS would offer all this functionality. Other RSS readers might be better, but I always return to TinyTinyRSS.

<comment><USER6> An open, distributed web demands open source tooling. I can appreciate benevolent corporations (Zapier goes above and beyond for their users, and is generous with their free plan), but nothing lasts forever; open source code once public can always be maintained and built upon further.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Lots of things changed between when I started to heavily and systematically consume content online (in about 2006), and today. But one thing didn't: RSS is still the crucial cornerstone of my online content consumption.

For me, RSS never was dead or less relevant than in the past. On the contrary: Since I keep adding feeds on a very regular basis, it's still growing in importance.

Fortunately, 95 % of blogs and media sites still provide RSS feeds. As long as this is the case, RSS will remain crucial to me.

<comment><USER8> Calling RSS dead only sounded like marketing from media sites as they got scared of being consumed outside of their platform but it was never dead from consumers' perspective.

<comment><USER9> A lot of journalist types seem to have switched to Twitter in the aftermath of Google Reader. But yeah, RSS never died in the real world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love RSS, and have for years. My first blog post ever was about RSS: [http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4](http://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/4) . I recently wrote that new developers should use RSS: [https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss- rea...](https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/03/25/use-an-rss-reader/)

But reading through the post and the comments here, I'm sensing an omission. What Twitter (and social media in general) provides that RSS doesn't is _interaction_. I don't login to twitter all that often, but when I do, I see things like this: [https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330](https://twitter.com/mikekarnj/status/1106582308235235330) and this: [https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704](https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/1106812630985928704)

I doubt I'd be privy to the discussions happening on Twitter if they were happening any other way (blogs tried to do it with comments and pingbacks, but that isn't as good as Twitter, and not as open to everyone, since you have to run a blog of your own).

This is the secret sauce for me. In fact, if there were a way to only see conversations in Twitter (and ignore all the posts with no responses) that would have a lot of value for me.

RSS is great for reading, but for conversing, it's not a good fit.

<comment><USER11> Has anyone tried to build conversation into RSS? An RSS item that is related or responsive to another RSS item?

(Or is that what Mastodon is trying to do?)

<comment><USER12> The classic relation is a link. Atom has the Atom Threading Extensions, to document conversation in feeds.

One problem of course is notifying the thread starter of new decentralized comments. There were Trackback, Pingback, Webmentions for web pages. For feeds there was the Salmon protocol [2], enabling notification of new comments to swim upstream. According to Google's documentation Salmon would have been an API of Google Buzz. But that started with a privacy scandal and shortly thereafter Google decided they needed their own closed social network. Salmon was later used in OStatus 1, I think.

There was a lot of activity in the 2000s transforming the RSS/Atom ecosystem into something of a decentralized social network. Extensions like Activity Stream for richer data, AtomPub, Salmon, OpenID, Webfinger, PubSubHubbub (now WebSub) to turbocharge feeds with a Publish/Subscribe thingy and a lot more, that I'm now forgetting. The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the name changes.

And yes, if you squint the right way stuff like ActivityPub (Mastodon) and the Indiewebcamp Microformats are practically feeds.

[1] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4685)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_(protocol)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmon_\(protocol\))

<comment><USER13> Thank you for information. It seems that Salmon is used in Diaspora so it somehow could work.

> But that started with a privacy scandal

What was the privacy scandal?

> The rule of thumb is that the problems stay the same, but the syntax and the > name changes.

What problems are? I suspect that there should be problems with spam as anybody could add their comments (although protocols seems to contain some countermeasures) and maybe some kind of DoS of anybody "posting" too many comments. But what other problems are?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Although I am a big fan of RSS, I find this article very disingenuous.

The author complains about the chaos, vulgarity, and hostility of Twitter, but those complaints would apply to almost any social media platform.

Then he suggests replacing it with RSS feeds from curated, professional RSS sources, which is not social media. You could achieve the same things on Twitter if you just followed the same curated, profession Twitter feeds.

This is really just a roundabout argument that can be summarized as "don't read the comments."

<comment><USER15> The solution to "too much RSS" is the same for Twitter. Unsubscribe/unfollow. Twitter does not require you to follow someone to interact with them. I follow relatively few people directly yet I have themed lists following other accounts. If I want local news I check my local list.

Twitter works quite well in this regard vs. Facebook where you need to be "friends" to interact.

<comment><USER16> As a counterpoint you're unlikely to be doxxed, lose your job, or any of the other social "features" using RSS. While one could simply say nothing and hope to avoid this, it's still up to the Twitter algorithms to display relevant content, which could change at any moment. Effectively it's about control, with Twitter you're hoping for benevolence as you're the product, with RSS you're the customer.

<comment><USER17> > it's still up to the Twitter algorithms to display relevant content

What do you mean? I just see a chronological list of tweets, not a randomly- ordered list like facebook

<comment><USER18> I find myself having to swap off Twitter's algorithmic feed once or twice a day on mobile.

<comment><USER17> Huh, I didn't know there even was an algorithmic feed. I haven't used the official Facebook app since it stopped being Tweetie, so I wasn't following the changes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Considering how i read HN and thus how i'm reading this — and that i don't have a twitter account — i guess i have to agree!

RSS is very, very nice. Especially for keeping track of all the journals I have to keep an eye on.

<comment> m-p-3 And it's super easy to use these feeds to automate stuff. Half of my IFTTT are about monitoring RSS feeds and taking an action upon them.

The other halfs are webhooks.

<comment><USER20> Interesting. Do you mind to explain this a bit more?

<comment> m-p-3 For example I have a Kobo eReader (Glo HD) and I like to read on it and unfortunately there is no builtin RSS reader app available for it but it does support Pocket natively. My workaround is to either monitor some RSS feeds with specific keywords in IFTTT, and send the URL article to my Pocket account, which in turns get synced to my Kobo every night.

I also want to get notified right away for articles that use a specific keyword, so I have other applets that will send an IFTTT rich notification to my phone with the link to the article.

Or you know, I have some other RSS feed I use with a torrent client to automatically fetch "stuff", and once the download is completed, I configured the torrent client to send an HTTP POST request with the torrent title to IFTTT, which in turn send me a push notification to let me know a download was completed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I completely understand and respect the author's sentiments. However, it is unfair to compare RSS to Twitter. Twitter is a place where anyone and everyone can express their opinions while RSS is a technology and a mechanism to get an updated feed from services and blogs we care about. Most of these blobs and services will be well written or perhaps professionally written articles. These are two very different systems that tap into fundamentally different types of information sources.

 _In short, RSS is a feed of (mostly) professionally written articles while Twitter is full of amateurs expressing half baked thoughts in 140 characters. It is unfair to compare the two._

<comment><USER22> That feels kind of like a historical circumstance. I could easily imagine something based on RSS where people just express small blurbs like on Twitter. Heck, I've even thought about abandoning Twitter's UIs and creating RSS feeds for all the people I follow. At least then I'd be able to get chronological ordering and read/unread markers on tweets that way

<comment><USER23> An RSS feed is an XML file that lives under some URL. The RSS reader (or aggregator) _polls_ that URL periodically and picks up new items that have appeared.

It's like a web page, itemized into a very regular syntax.

If you want to "tweet" using RSS, you need a URL somewhere where you can upload updates to XML content; then give people that URL.

Either you have to join some website where content (like blogs) you create are exported as RSS feeds, or else run your own domain.

<comment><USER22> What part of my comment made it seem like I need to be educated about what RSS is? I think it would have felt nicer for you to inquire rather than just tell me what RSS is.

I'm saying that it's easily possible to imagine a world where the uses of RSS vary from what they're used for today — different from the parent commentor.

<comment><USER23> Your comment didn't educate HN readers sufficiently; I thought it could use a technical backgrounder which could help others imagine the use cases and trade-offs. (I don't understand the Twitter architecture enough to add that for comparison, but perhaps many readers are more familiar with Twitter than RSS due to its popularity.)

<comment><USER22> Okay, that makes more sense. Maybe if you had included some of that context it would have been helpful in properly interpreting your comment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Lately, I've been getting back into RSS to stay up to date with industry news. I've noticed a lot of industry blogs still support RSS.

On Mac, I've been using Leaf with no real complaints.

I've found many blogs happily serve rss content, even if a button isn't explicitly advertised. Some of the url's I'll try:

* example.com/rss.xml

* example.com/index.rss

* example.com/?feed=rss

* example.com/feed/

* exmample.com/feed/rss

<comment><USER25> I usually find RSS feeds by looking at the page source code:

      - ctrl+u
      - ctrl+f rss
      - ctrl+f atom (only if "rss" was not found at step 2).

I can't remember of any site providing RSS on which this hasn't worked. Actually, even for sites that advertise their RSS feed, this approach is the fastest for me (because of the lack of consistency of such advertisements).

<comment><USER26> Same, except I favor the Atom protocol because from previous research (performed a long time ago, to be fair) it was strictly an improvement over RSS in every regard.

There is a highly-rated extension to automate this, but I've grown to distrust extensions that require "Access your data for all websites", and scouring the page source for the relevant <link> tag is not particularly cumbersome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell There are some things I like to follow on twitter, but I wanted them integrated in my RSS feed setup, so a few months ago I wrote a simple app which gates twitter to rss, and which can be deployed as a Google Cloud Function. If anyone is interested:

[https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Fu...](https://www.grepular.com/Twitter_to_RSS_with_Google_Cloud_Function)

<comment><USER27> There is also [https://www.twitrss.me/](https://www.twitrss.me/)

<comment><USER28> I use twitrss.me's perl code to do my own thing locally and I've found that twitter throttles me scraping from my home IP _very_ heavily. I can scrape my twitter users/searches about 3 times per day if I space them out correctly. Any more and the pages just stop returning anything at all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> A lot of people were using RSS. Then Google found RSS feeds were hurting Google ad revenues and so Google killed it. Since Firefox these days trails Google, it too stopped supporting RSS feeds

<comment><USER30> I was there during the turndown. As I remember, RSS had almost no impact on revenue positive or negative. That is why Reader was shutdown actually. Because not enough people used it to impact the bottom line and make it worth keeping.

<comment><USER31> I don't buy it, because then they would've killed Google+ way earlier.

<comment><USER32> Multiple factors go into the decision to kill a product; Google+ had a much larger investment and profile, it would make sense Google would be more skittish about killing it than Reader.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Although the title is a little bit provocative, i tend to agree that RSS is a better way to consume news than Twitter or any other social media platform by the way. Social platforms should be used for social, not for news, but i guess Twitter is a special case in that one of its core values is to deliver news in real time. But do we need realtime? Twitter being a social platform, it means you can't easily avoid trolls, offensive/aggressive/idiotic comments...

Off the top of my head, some issues i had with RSS and/or with the tools/RSS readers: \- RSS can become en echo chamber if you have a limited number of feeds \- Too many feeds and your feeds are flooded with a lot of noise \- want to check the top stories of the day, or trending content? need to use a different tool than your RSS reader. \- want to follow some social feeds but without the noise of social platforms?

I wrote something about the signal/noise ratio in RSS recently: [https://firstname.lastname@example.com/rss-less-noise-more- informat...](https://email@example.com/rss-less-noise-more- information-983ea20cb05e)

To solve these issues, i'm trying to bring something to the RSS ecosystem, and i built a news platform mixing RSS and traditional news aggregation. It has features to limit the noise and help avoid echo chambers. You can follow Facebook pages, Twitter users, etc... add your newsletters to declutter your mail box, and much more to come.

You can check it out here: [https://aktu.io/about](https://aktu.io/about)

</comment><comment><USER34> "the charming pop-ups that everyone uses because fuck you"

Between the cookie popups, the GRPD "choice" popups, and the sign-up-for-some- email-crap popups, each of which takes 1-2 seconds to appear - sometimes in parallel and sometimes in sequence - the web is a garbage fire.

There definitely needs to be a retraction of sorts in terms of technology and content delivery. I also think we have passed "peak information". On the internet, everyone has a voice. At first that was good, but now the signal to noise ratio is so bad that good, accurate, useful content is just rounding error. The same is also true for television/film as well as the commercial music industry.

That's not to say there are not still great people creating great content, but there are mass numbers of people polluting the mediums and making it increasingly difficult to find the good stuff.

The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!)

<comment><USER35> _> The current rate of decline of value of the internet suggests that there will be some significant disruption this decade. I wish I had the solution (or knew who to bet on!)_

Books.

That's what I've retreated to as the internet has been ruined. It's all about low barrier to entry that ruins anything with the shiftless/idle masses becoming involved. No one wants to pickup a book and read, they want to offer smart ass one-liners or harass people on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. That's most people's entire life, same behavior in the workplace, then they die. That's why I'm a developer, the barrier to entry is high enough that I enjoy and appreciate most people that I work with. Same concept as with media.

Books are proof-read, edited and vetted for reasonably accurate sources in most cases. In general, publishing them is hard enough that as a consumer I can rely on them being one of the better mediums.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Remember when Twitter offered RSS feeds? It made the service actually useful.

<comment><USER37> There's a number of bridges from Twitter to RSS. I read Twitter in Feeder. See [https://feeder.co/knowledge-base/rss-feed- creation/twitter-r...](https://feeder.co/knowledge-base/rss-feed- creation/twitter-rss-feeds/)

<comment><USER28> But nothing you can do yourself without getting throttled by twitter.

<comment> mike-cardwell If you get your own free developer API key, you're allowed to call the "statuses/user_timeline" 1500 times per day. So you can follow 1500 users before getting throttled, if you only want an update a max of once per day. Or 62 users if you need hourly updates. etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> kris-s I think part of the issue with RSS is the real pain of dealing with XML. I'm mildly cheering for something like [https://jsonfeed.org](https://jsonfeed.org) \- which would be a big step towards making a decentralized system more of a reality.

<comment><USER38> Eh? It's not like teams of elves are tripping over hand-coding this stuff. And even if they were, JSON parsers tend to be _way_ more strict than RSS readers (which are actuakly very liberal interpretations of XML). But again, nobody in their right mind is manually generating or templating this stuff. And if you are, there are a dozen RSS-gen libraries for every single language. Let one of those handle it for you.

Doing this in JSON does not suddenly mean you don't need a convention (aka standard) for fields and types. It's data exchange. The reader needs to know what your data means. You still have pubdates, links, titles, descriptions and you still need to label them in a semi-strict way somehow.

All in all, JSON will save you a few bytes but it would just be another standard on the pile, just with no libraries around to write the RSSJSON format.

JSON doesn't fix XML.

<comment><USER39> Of the three formats I support, RSS, Atom, and JSON, the RSS feed is the smallest.

        RSS: 33,228
        Atom: 43,433
        JSON: 36,137

<comment><USER38> I'll be honest —and it'll make me sound like an arrogant dbag— but that doesn't pass my sniff test. "jsonfeed" is lighter than equivalent RSS for several small reasons.

Can I see?

(To be clear to anybody reading this out of context: I'm not claiming that JSON is best —far from it— just that I would expect it to be a few bytes lighter in transit.)

<comment><USER39> Sure.

        http://boston.conman.org/index.atom
        http://boston.conman.org/index.json
        http://boston.conman.org/bostondiaries.rss

Each one contains the full text of the past 15 entries.

<comment><USER38> Thank you for sharing that. It took me a little while before I noticed it, but your JSON files have more _data_.

Each item has a id, date_published and tags field which do not feature in the RSS. Together these account for around 250chars per item or 3750chars per 15 item feed. Cut out those fields and the JSON would be 850chars shorter.

Also, you're preserving tab and newline characters _around_ HTML. This affects JSON more because a newline is valid between RSS tags. In JSON a newline becomes two characters "\n", as a tab becomes "\t". Going "spaceless" on output would save you 1372chars from your JSON feed (and half as much from RSS/ATOM).

I will confess, my sniff test didn't account for using quite as many HTML attributes as you do :) Escaping double-quotes costs you 334 in JSON.

The overall difference is much slighter than I had expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Twitter is like an internet Rorschach test. It's a very general platform that offers little guidance, so people use it in fundamentally different ways.

I didn't get the headline until I saw that apparently the author think Twitter is for getting news. I'm sure some people do, but this is strange to me. I use it to keep up with friends and acquaintances, and with the goings-on at certain local organizations. Other people use it to get better customer service. There are many ways to use it. RSS isn't even in the same species as most of them.

</comment><comment><USER23> I don't use RSS much, but fire it up whenever searching on Craigslist for something. Havning multiple CL searches registered as feeds in a feed reader leads to a much more efficient workflow than using the site directly. The presentation of the items is better: you get something very analogous to an e-mail inbox, in which you can easily delete unwanted items, and hide ones you have read. And all of the multiple searches appear like folders and update automatically; you see a count of new items in each one.

</comment><comment><USER41> > On the surface, Twitter's main value proposition is that it delivers up-to- > the-second news.

Not really.

Most of the people I know , including me, go there for just one reason: To know the public opinion.

<comment><USER42> Twitter is actually very bad at this. It's designed to amplify the most fringe, outrageous, and reaction-provoking hot takes, and trending stuff. A lot of sensible people either don't comment on twitter, or their voices get drowned in a sea of outrage and more engageable reactions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Openness on its own is not a significant competitive advantage. Twitter provides comments, retweets, and already has friends and celebrities.

RSS is still there on the publishing side for major publishers and all popular blog platforms. So why is it not as popular as email? Maybe individually visiting websites is good enough and maybe that itch is scratched by Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER44> Can you track trending topics with RSS?

Can you carry on a conversation between content creators and subscribers over RSS?

Can you discover new content by following a RSS social graph?

RSS is better than Twitter in only one aspect and that's the one-to-many subscriber model. And that's the least interesting and least profitable thing that Twitter provides.

<comment><USER45> I think it's a fairly silly comparison overall, but it doesn't help when you judge by technical features rather than what kind of content the ecosystem encourages, which what actually matters.

Twitter is extremely noisy. It tends to overwhelm actual articles that people put some effort into with shallow, witty zingers. If you're not looking for witty zingers, it doesn't really matter what other features it has.

RSS is just a file format, but it enables a larger ecosystem that works better at showcasing good content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> If you look at both Twitter and RSS superficially, you can easily decide one is better than the other. If you've ever tried and failed to create your own "perfect" news reader as I have, you'll realize both suck, and have for over a decade now and they're never going ever improve. The real issue isn't the pros and cons of one platform vs. another from an informational or social perspective, the real issue is much more fundamental: Information overload.

I wrote about this, oh, 9 years ago [1]. And then a few years later as well [2]. I did an analysis of the quantity of news items, posts and tweets coming through my custom feed reader and realized it was - and always will be - impossible to keep up, no matter how I organized, grouped, condensed, summarized and displayed it all.

The basic, undeniable fact is that most RSS sources are filled with repetitive information which are nearly impossible to group or update properly. And if you follow any more than a few dozen accounts on Twitter, you are going to miss most of their posts on a daily basis (regardless of their quality, there's just too many). Most of Twitter, in fact, is simply people talking to themselves. (And Facebook is basically useless in terms of gaining any actual knowledge.)

All news feeds - whether they are from RSS, Twitter, FB, Insta, SnapChat, WeChat, TikTok or anything else - are simply not scalable. So pick which you enjoy most, limit the number of sources to only those most important or useful to you, and get on with your life. Until AI gets to the point where it can sort through all the information out there for you - a la Apple's Knowledge Navigator - the only difference between any stream of data is superficial at best.

1\. [https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the- fireho...](https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/drinking-from-the-firehose)

2\. [https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep- trac...](https://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/but-how-do-you-keep-track-of- everything)

<comment><USER47> I have 50K regexs on a black-list to filter feeds on my reader. AI would help with some, but this brute force method goes a long way too.

<comment><USER46> That's... amazing! I admire your dedication (addiction?). :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Every couple of months I search for a better news reader… cycle through Flipper, Feedly, NewsBlur, & 4-8 others… once more acknowledge how good Google Reader really was, and go back to scrolling through Twitter/Reddit

I'd probably pay large amount of money now for a news reader w/ these 4 features * Extract stories from my feed/lists on Twitter & Reddit and aggregate comments on these from people I follow * Learn from my 'more/less like this' on individual stories * Allow me to tag sources and create auto- tagging filters * Clean/intuitive Web UI & mobile client

<comment><USER49> Have you tried [https://bazqux.com](https://bazqux.com) ? It was built right after Google shut down Reader and very much resembles and improved upon it in multiple ways. Super fast too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> They're very different.

RSS only let you listen. And it only works if you already know who you want to listen to.

Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline.

But RSS is just a format for sharing data. There's no built-in client for having a conversation, for tracking conversations. You ultimately still need a point of centralisation (like HN) to talkk shit about the stuff you're reading.

All in, article is silly nonsense. Apples are way better than oranges.

<comment><USER50> > Twitter et al expose you to other content you're not already "following" by > letting the people you do follow quickly push things in your eyeline.

How is that different from the people whom you do "follow" with RSS recommending other feeds or individual articles, or quoting these articles, with their own comments?

(Mostly agreed about the point regarding third-party pushed conversations.)

<comment><USER38> > How is that different

We *could( each publish feeds of what we liked, or re-feed them with annotations. And we could follow other individuals (ie friends, acquaintances) and they us, and we could control access to levels of feed with authentication. We could have feeds of our friends (and their URLs). As well as feeds of our own throwaway commentary on life. Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter (without comments) with RSS.

The "how is that different" is that we don't. There's both a technical networking obstacle as well as an interface. You and I likely know how to host this stuff but our grandmas don't. There's also nothing —there could be— to tie this together in an interface.

Twitter et al do this crap for us, for "free".

<comment><USER50> > Yeah, you could quite easily build something like Facebook and Twitter > (without comments) with RSS.

People already have!

I'm going to use the example of Wordpress, as I know for sure that it does offer RSS out-of-the-box, but there are alternatives.

If your grandma, say, has a wordpress blog, then RSS comes for free. If she knows what a hyperlink is (even if she doesn't know what it's called) then she can paste links to individual articles or blogs or news-sites. The reader can read whatever is recommended in their web browser and if it was (part of) an RSS feed, they can subscribe. In principle, you could even have an RSS feed reader that checks all links for whether they are associated with RSS feeds, to avoid the "web browser" step.

I don't think that a non-self-hosted wordpress blog is significantly more difficult to use than Twitter. There _will_ probably be people who can use the latter, but not the former; however, I think that it'll be a tiny minority.

With Wordpress you could even have an RSS feed of comments and pingbacks, partially (but not globally) solving the third-party comments problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> RSS is just a way to list the last articles of a website in a generic way.

It is very far from what Twitter offers, on Twitter you can exchange with people, reply and discuss content (yeah this is not the best way to do it, but you can do it), you can alert people or organization (how many time, thanks to RSS we alerted a company about a bad practice or contacted their customer support ?)

Maybe Twitter is not the best at what it does, and maybe we need something that allow to us to exchange but RSS doesn't provide that.

PS: I'm not saying RSS is bad

<comment><USER52> Don't forget the main thing twitter offers: spamming your notification feed with impossible-to-disable garbage in order to prop up whatever the hell engagement metrics they decided on.

I have basically stopped using it ever since they started doing that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> But RSS doesn't replace Twitter.

As much as the Twitterati May argue they need to be on Twitter to be informed, the reality is that the need Twitter fills is the need to broadcast your own views all over the world.

A blog post, which requires a lot more effort, since it's expected to be a little more substantial, may get 0 views, while a silly comment in response to a controversial topic on Twitter could easily get a few hundred likes, which makes people feel important.

And RSS does not replace that aspect of Twitter.

<comment><USER54> Yup, I agree with you for some twitter accounts. I find myself often pruning who I follow on Twitter so much so that I then find I am mostly getting tech announcements of papers and conferences, release announcements, etc.

Periodically, I start following more people, then the pruning cycle repeats.

I feel sometimes that I spend too much time on twitter and HN, and so I go on cycles for time spent per week there also. Really good to use a monitoring tool to let you know cumulatively how much time you spend a week on different media.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> Part of the problem that I don't think people talk about needing twitter for work is how they don't separate it as publishing platform and a news platform. I think it is much better to use a kindle that you update before you go to work than using twitter as both.

It really helps to limit it to a finite amount of content for you to consume as well as making it so you don't have the almost non-existent barrier of instantly being able to react to the news.

<comment><USER54> Good idea. You can also use something like Instapaper to mark articles to read but set aside a few times a week to actually carefully read these 'curated' articles. For me a big benefit for doing this that when I do sit down to read what I have 'curated', I discard half as being not something I need to spend time reading. Instead on Instapaper, just bookmarking articles, then deleing the bookmarks after reading works well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> If anyone is interested in the soap opera that shaped the early days of RSS, read "RSS has been damaged by infighting among those who advocate for it". This is from 2006, and captures the chaos of the times:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been- damaged-...](http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/rss-has-been-damaged-by- in-fighting-among-those-who-advocate-for-it)

</comment><comment><USER57> I miss using Newsfire before it stopped getting updates.

[http://newsfirerss.com/](http://newsfirerss.com/)

<comment><USER58> Well...if it is working for you, you can keep using it

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I personally quite like twitter, although I tend to lurk rather than actively participate (don't feel I have much to say I guess)

In some ways my twitter feed is almost like RSS, and the people I follow tend to be interesting people who post interesting content or links to other content they've found.

<comment><USER60> That's similar to how I use Twitter.

Private Account, no followers, only selected accounts I follow to keep my feed clean of clickbait, useless discussions and the usual twitter outrage. It's a great tool, but I think I'm not using it as it's supposed to be ;) I'm just not interested in participating in useless discussions with trolls and people who try to sell me their product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Once Google Reader died, I found The Old Reader (theoldreader.com) and just ran with that.

I never stopped using RSS, and trying to get syndication from Twitter would cause my head (and my Twitter feed for things I actually care about) to explode.

I'm sad that we still have to remind people of these things.

</comment><comment><USER62> If you are interested in RSS, I did a twitter-thread [3] recently on interesting projects in the space. Reproducing here: If you are interested in helping revive #RSS, a thread on some good FOSS projects around RSS:

1\. RSS-Bridge[0] - RSS Feeds for websites that don't give you one. Supports instagram/facebook/Google Search and many more (150+) websites. Very easy to contribute, and there are open requests for lots of providers. (I added a Amazon Price Tracker Bridge in <150 loc). Yes, I get a RSS notification when there is a price change on something I follow[1].

2\. MiniFlux - Golang+Postgres based self-hosted RSS feed reader. Minimal/responsive design with keyboard shortcuts [https://miniflux.app](https://miniflux.app)

3\. 3. tt-rss - A highly configurable PHP based RSS feed reader. Supports plugins and has tons of options. UI is similar to Google Reader. [https://tt- rss.org](https://tt-rss.org)

4\. Winds - A Beautiful Open Source RSS & Podcast App powered by @getstream_io. I haven't tried self-hosting it yet, but it looks really great. Also, under very active development. [https://github.com/GetStream/Winds](https://github.com/GetStream/Winds)

5\. FreshRSS - Lightweight PHP/SQlite self-hosted feed reader. Looks great as well. [https://freshrss.org](https://freshrss.org)

6\. Kill the Newsletter - Subscribe to a newsletter with a one-time generated email address, it generates a RSS feed for you. Your inbox stays clean. [https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com](https://www.kill-the-newsletter.com)

7\. OPML Generator - Generates OPML Files using subscriptions on other sites. Supports GitHub stars (generates a file you can import to follow releases from all your starred repos on GitHub) [https://opml.bb8.fun/](https://opml.bb8.fun/) (Personal project, so count this as a shameless self plug)

8\. RSS never really died, so revival is a misnomer in that sense. All major news publications still support RSS. The entire Podcast ecosytem works on RSS. You should also look at WebSub and ActivityPub (both W3C recommendations) if you're interested in this.

9\. And finally a cool new idea - build a Telegram Channel to RSS Feed generator. Will open up so much hidden content to the open web.

10\. Bonus: [https://www.youneedfeeds.com/](https://www.youneedfeeds.com/) Info site that you should share with your friends to help them get started with RSS.

[0]: [https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge](https://github.com/RSS- Bridge/rss-bridge)

[1]: [https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss- bridge/pull/741](https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/pull/741)

[3]: [https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902](https://twitter.com/captn3m0/status/1018850458675408902)

<comment><USER63> I'd like to mention [https://contentgems.com](https://contentgems.com) \- a free web service that follows any RSS feed you want. It then gives you powerful filters to include/exclude content you're not interested. You can also connect your twitter home timeline to extract all articles linked to from a tweet. And finally, there are workflows that you can use to re-mix RSS feeds and produce new ones. Paid plans give you more resources, however the free plan is super valuable for individual users. Disclaimer: I'm one of the co- founders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I've tried to use RSS before, but the big hangup for me is most sites don't put the full article in the feed, just a title and summary. To me having to go back and forth just kills the whole thing.

<comment><USER65> How many times a day do you visually rescan over the same stuff? The minimal time spent going back and forth (alt+tab) is nothing compared to the time saved never having to reconsider the same headline more than once.

<comment><USER58> I don't get your point. If two sources post an article about the same event, I am going to get the "similar" title twice.

<comment><USER65> If they go to the same url, any decent reader will recognize it as already marked read. But that's not what I meant. Most news sites have much of the same stuff on the front page for hours, sometimes days. How many times do you skim over that looking for new stuff?

<comment><USER58> Oh. That is actually quite annoying. Have been wanting to get my rss setup of quite sometime, but couldn't get the motivation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I load in RSS feeds on my HN alternative ( handlr.sapico.me ) , one company is using it as a knowledge feed ( accounting niche). So I definitely agree with the title of this topic.

</comment><comment><USER67> WordPress now powers 30% of websites. Get an RSS feed from a WordPress site by adding /feed/ to the URL. You can also get RSS feeds from WordPress categories and tags.

</comment><comment><USER68> Twitter is basically Outrage as a Service, it is not a good information platform.

I still miss Google Reader, I think it was a serious mistake to kill it off, and doing so largely killed RSS too.

</comment><comment><USER69> I'll take this chance to recommend Blogtrottr as a perfect alternative to Google Reader, if used along with Gmail Reader.

</comment><comment><USER70> They're different things with different purposes. Both are useful. This is clickbate.

</comment><comment><USER71> Gizmodo:

1 page of blocked items on my NoScript 23 blocked items on my Adblock Plus

And now I can read the article..

</comment><comment><USER72> RSS is like articles without comment sections, completely pointless nowadays. If you can't read corrections, conflicting opinions for something, you might just as well go watch TV. The whole point of Twitter is that it's commentary, not a feed of published articles.

<comment><USER73> 90% of internet comments are low effort garbage that simply isn't worth anyone's time. The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words, and need 5 to 20 twitter posts to get a full idea of their concepts.

RSS is a different network of users, so it really can't be compared to Twitter. But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to be tracked and edited separately.

Then comes the blogs out there which pretty much use Twitter as a glorified RSS feed. They just post announcements whenever they post a blog post. This is necessary because of the network effect, but I would argue that RSS is a superior technology for this use case.

<comment><USER72> > _90% of internet comments are low effort garbage that simply isn 't worth > anyone's time._

In line with blog articles and TV. At least on Twitter, it's easy to block someone forever.

> _The other 10% of high quality, high effort posts take more than 280 words_

That's simply not true. You can often deliver important information in 140 characters.

> _But those mega tweet 10 posts in a row threads would be far better served > by a classic blog and RSS feed... Rather than 280 word chunks that have to > be tracked and edited separately._

That's not a huge problem compared to the issue of content quality and it's even less important when you accept that your previous statement is simply not true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> rss subscribing to the commits of github repos is a great way to keep up with projects. i've been using reederapp ios without an external sync service for a year now, its great.

</comment><comment><USER75> Would like to see `RSS + customizable AI` as a protocol.

</comment><comment><USER76> RSS is fine and good, but it's not comparable to Twitter. Maybe if all you do on Twitter is follow newspapers then it's comparable, but that would be a pretty dumb way to use Twitter.

</comment><comment><USER77> I'm the one who still likes RSS.

</comment><comment><USER78> They should make commenting and karma like this and Reddit a standard in RSS. Let people comment on RSS.

</comment><comment><USER79> For once, I thought this was something related to the political scene in India. Now that it's election season and the right-wing (BJP/RSS) actually protested against Twitter on roads alleging them to be left aligned or supporting the opposition.

</comment><comment><USER80> I did use RSS through Google Reader briefly back in 2009. Then I found out about Twitter, and immediately thought of it as a modern response. Unifying the web's news feeds into one technology was such an obvious solution, its emergence was unavoidable, no matter what way it came. Web platforms always had some form of portal, blog publishing service, general discussion board, or better yet a single tap service where everything anyone wants to know, or at least thinks they do is encapsulated.

What these older services failed to capture that made Twitter and other "social" media sites so popular is the "social" aspect. The automated synchronized posting structure that RSS provides may be more efficient than user-driven Twitter. But with Twitters' intuition, popularity, and ability to communicate within that vast user space is enough to outweigh any of RSS's technological advancements. RSS always seemed like a technology for techies, Twitter brought the feed to laymen.

<comment><USER81> Peak Internet for me was using Google Reader, sharing articles, and having discussions about them with my Google Buzz friends.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> RSS actually meant, mostly, that you had to have something worthy of RSS'ing ... a blog, an article, something.

Twitter? any old Joe can just post some bullsh!t that marinated in their minds for -0.5 seconds and that just gets added to Twitter and potentially my timeline.

Yes, RSS is far better than Twitter for some uses. Uses that are actually of value.

<comment><USER60> > RSS actually meant, mostly, that you had to have something worthy of RSS'ing > ... a blog, an article, something.

Exactly this! I really miss the time of the internet before social media, when it was more about quality content then clickbait articles. I was a heavy user of Google Reader until it got shut down, but couldn't find any worthy alternative, so I used Twitter as a news feed reader from then on. It's ok, but it's hard to ignore the noise sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Surprised No one has mentioned Miniflux [https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux](https://github.com/miniflux/miniflux)

</comment><comment><USER84> RSS is great and I use RSS to read some parts of Twitter but you can't really compare the two (at least not in its current form) but it could be extended to allow feedback, etc...

</comment><comment><USER85> Add responses and maybe.

<comment><USER19> You mean "add rss to your own blog and set a link back on your blog roll"?

Internet 1.5 was pretty nice, in hindsight.

<comment><USER37> Yup. To add to that, posting a reply to your own blog and setting rel="in- reply-to" and notifying the author with Webmention provides standard decentralized comments/notifications. See aaronparecki.com and the indieweb community for examples.</comment></comment></comment>


Thinking the unthinkable – Might there be no way out for Britain? [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.tullettprebon.com/Documents/strategyinsights/Tim_Morgan_Report_007.pdf

<comment><USER2> The debt driven economy is collapsing under unmanageable debt load. There is some refreshingly frank language used in this report.

"An early objective for government should be to put an end to the state of national denial over the true condition of the economy"

</comment><comment><USER3> So after skimming this, it looks like they spend pretty much the whole 34 pages saying "the economy is bad and it isn't getting better." Fine, but I'm not sure that implies disaster. Aren't the typical solutions for massive debt either a) default or b) inflation? Since Britain has its own currency, it can just inflate away its debt if worst comes to worst. I didn't see any place where they even considered this possibility.

On an unrelated note, I'm pretty impressed with how well Firefox's new PDF engine renders this large PDF. It's a bit slow, but not bad.

<comment><USER4> Inflating away debt has been government policy since the second world war: [http://monevator.com/a-history-of-uk- inflation/](http://monevator.com/a-history-of-uk-inflation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It should be noted that this is from July 2011.

</comment><comment><USER6> On one level, it reads like right wing think tank propaganda, given that the conservative party didn't oppose many of the things labour did. Indeed, one reason labour won power was that it adopted conservative economic policy. Old socialist policy was never going to work. But, all of the things that set up the false economy was conservative doctrine. That is why "new" labour had business support and won. So, yes labour got it wrong, but the conservatives would have too. Conservatives love a property, borrowing and spending boom. Its how Thatcher made her name in the 80's. A British disease.

However, fascinating for me was the bit right at the end:

Where the general public is concerned, one of the most distressing features of Britain's evolution over the last two decades has to have been the relentless spread of surveillance and coercion. Britain is plastered with warning notices, CCTV and speed cameras, and other aspects of the surveillance state. Government needs to start stripping away much of this panoply of surveillance and coercion, and to enshrine in law the primacy of individual liberties.

So presumably, part of their conclusion is that all this is actually damaging the economy. And, that conclusion was pre Snowden...

</comment><comment><USER7> Was the first half garbled for anyone else. I thought I was looking at a piece of conceptual art for a minute.

<comment><USER8> Scrolled down until it started working, then back up and it was fine. No idea why. Chrome on OSX.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Might be time to buy a boat.</comment>


US intelligence researching DNA for exabytes of data storage - <AUTHOR> https://sociable.co/technology/dna-data-storage/ <comment><USER2> your getting kinda close to home... there are echos of LaMarkian thought, as well as L.ron Hubbard's Thetan mechanism in this article...

this \/ can come in handy for the project...

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410333/sequencing-a- singl...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/410333/sequencing-a-single- molecule-of-dna/)

...and these \/ may be applicable depending on what type of mental floss you like to use...

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419590/quantum- entangleme...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/419590/quantum-entanglement- holds-dna-together-say-physicists/)

[https://www.researchgate.net/project/Quantum- DNA](https://www.researchgate.net/project/Quantum-DNA)

...breadcrumbs anyone?...</comment>


Creationism vs. Darwinism in Education in the USA - <AUTHOR> http://www.campusexplorer.com/Creationism-vs-Darwinism-in-Education/ <comment><USER2> 63% of teachers believe in intelligent design OR creationism? wtf, people!?

<comment><USER3> Double WTF... I dread the day I'm hit by a car and instead of being treated by proper medical personel, I get treated with homeopathy and get sent to a herbal-and-newage based ER.

<comment><USER4> <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0> (Mitchell and Webb Look - Homoeopathic Hospital)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What 'Google Scale' Problems Exist In Today's World? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> This one might fit: Getting voice recognition right.</comment>


Cappuccino vs jQuery - <AUTHOR> http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/2010-07-05-Cappuccino-and-Web-applications/ <comment><USER2> I bumped you just to support your excellent use of tl;dr in the post. :)</comment>


Ask HN: Need a Terms of Service template for online marketplace - <AUTHOR>

I'm building an online marketplace for users to sell goods to each other.  (e.g. craigslist, ebay)  The business model is closer to ebay in that a small % transaction fee is taken after each sale.  Do any of you have terms of use that I can customize and use until I have the cash to have a lawyer draw up a custom one? <comment><USER2> ours is very basic, in fact it might be too basic:

<http://www.nextproof.com/terms/> our transaction fee is actually spelled out on our pricing page only <http://www.nextproof.com/pricing/> (I've been experimenting with different fees so I didn't want to forget and not update it in both places)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can we see a beta version?

Whilst I don't think they have a business model worth following, listia overall is a good execution.

</comment><comment><USER4> No clue but I know that I'd try <http://www.docstoc.com/> if I was looking.</comment>


Great software talks - <AUTHOR> https://orftz.com/pages/2012-04-07-software-talks.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The author here. I'm always looking for more great talks. I'd love to hear your suggestions. Or pull requests: <https://github.com/orftz/orftz.com></comment>


New KDE Slimbook launched with Ryzan-4000 series processor - <AUTHOR> https://www.neowin.net/news/new-kde-slimbook-launched-with-ryzan-4000-series-processor <comment><USER2> Probably worth mentioning that they also do a non KDE version of these two laptops without the KDE branding on the lid and with your choice of a number of different Linux distros (or windows) pre-installed.

Here is the 14" model: [https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro- x-i7-1-compr...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro- x-i7-1-comprar)

and 15" model: [https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x-15/pro- x-i7-2-co...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x-15/pro- x-i7-2-comprar)

<comment><USER3> of note those machines are machines with Intel Processors in the same chassis, and are not AMD powered.

<comment><USER2> Yeah sorry - they messed up the links for the AMD and Intel versions of the laptop. The links that I gave originally linked to the AMD versions (even though they have i7 in the URL). The new correct URLs are:

[https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro-x-amd- compra...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook-pro-x/pro-x-amd-comprar)

[https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook- pro-x-15/pro-x-15-amd-...](https://slimbook.es/en/store/slimbook- pro-x-15/pro-x-15-amd-comprar)

<comment><USER3> No sorry, my bad too - I missed those options altogether when I was looking at the website.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wow, this laptop is serious business, it's the only less-than-15-inch laptop I could find with 32GB of RAM below 1500 EUR (it's only 1069!). Does anyone have any experience with these ones, any reviews?

<comment><USER5> The thing is, a lion share of all AMD notebooks on the market is developed, and manufactured by a single OEM.

If you look inside recent lenovos, or huawei laptops: scratch, scratch, and you see Qinghua Tongfang logos on PCB, and body parts. The PCB design, and parts list is nearly identical.

Very few big brand companies have in-house engineering for laptops, and the few who have, have it for Intel only.

<comment><USER6> This is really cool information.

My current laptop is a €3.000 Lenovo X1, which I'm not particularly impressed by.

I was impressed by my 440s which lasted 5 years though.

Where would you suggest I go for my next laptop?

<comment><USER5> X1 has a 15w ULP CPU. Is it the performance that doesn't satisfy you? If so, the 45W Ryzen should indeed blow it out of water.

I cannot find any new machine on the market with the OLED screen X1 has though.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, it's an X1 extreme with a i7-9850H, also 45W. Compute capability wise, I'm quite happy.

I've been disappointed with build quality compared to the older 440s. The nvidia prime setup with a shared frame buffer also makes the external display ports more or less useless under linux.

I feel like I've paid a high lenovo premium for a more-or-less average notebook. If all branded laptops are using the same platform, I'm wondering if there's a way to avoid paying that premium.

<comment><USER5> Well, I myself have not seen any notebook as of late that satisfies my standards on build quality too.

I myself long time dreamed to build my own, fully custom, factory quality notebook, and possibly spin a small business around that.

Dell XPS has set a new high in laptop quality after a decade of boring, rebranded OEM designs, and Taiwanese cookie cutter engineering, but it is still not reaching the level of Japanese notebook brands before 2008.

I could've vouched for Panasonic, but they don't have 45W models. And despite their still excellent quality, they are not aiming at the power user demographics, like programmers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> These Ryzen chips look like game changers for laptops. Intel has stagnated for so long in comparison. Preliminary reports show near desktop performance for the Ryzen chips, and they blow Intel mobile chips out of the water - like 200% faster and much better thermals for sustained computing. On the downside, I've read rumors that Intel is leveraging its OEM relationships to keep AMD processors out of top of the line models such as Thinkpad X1. Intel is also preventing AMD laptops from using TB3. So it seems the options for an AMD laptop right now will remain limited - but I hope this will improve over the next year or so as demand increases for the cheaper and faster AMD laptops. You should not be buying an Intel laptop anymore IMO.

<comment><USER8> Meanwhile I would be happy if my AMD GPU was able to support OpenGL 4.1 like it used to do with fxglr, instead I have to be happy that it does OpenGL 3.1 at all with Mesa 20, or reboot into Windows to enjoy DirectX 11.

<comment><USER9> Which GPU do you have? According to [https://mesamatrix.net](https://mesamatrix.net) the radeonsi driver for GCN and RDNA cards supports OpenGL 4.6 (the latest), and the r600 driver for older TeraScale cards supports 4.5.

<comment><USER8> Which given my hint about FXGLR doesn't do me much good.

[https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon- hd-6310-igp.c22...](https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon- hd-6310-igp.c2286)

With fxglr, I enjoyed OpenGL 4.1, hardware video decoding, even though as you see from the specs, it can do more than that on Windows.

With the wonderful open source driver, I get OpenGL 3.1 without hardware video acceleration.

<comment><USER10> Do you mean fglrx?

Regardless, the problem is nobody wants to spend development time supporting 10+ year old cards when there isn't enough time to support all the features on newer cards.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, which proves the point that having FOSS drivers is just publicity if there isn't anyone willing to do the job.

My laptop works perfectly fine, so the consequence is me switching to Windows, where Asus still keeps its DirectX 11 drivers for the laptop up to date for Windows 10, although the laptop was bought during Windows 7 days.

<comment><USER10> Or that whoever manufactured the device didn't care about supplying/maintaining drivers for Linux so the community is left maintaining them. There's nothing stopping the device manufacturer from spending the time to support the device like they do on Windows, they just don't think it's worth it due to the smaller market share (which makes sense from a business perspective).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have never heard of Slimbook and most of what I can find on Google is in Spanish. Are they any good? Do they design the laptops or are they rebranded like System76's Clevo made laptops?

<comment><USER12> Someone at Phoronix[1] forums suspected it to be made by TongFang. Seems to be same laptop which Tuxedo[3] is also selling.

[1] [https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest- phoron...](https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/phoronix/latest-phoronix- articles/1195427-tuxedo-computers-launches-a-linux-laptop-with- ryzen-7-4800h-ryzen-5-4600h/page2) [2] [https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/hunyv6/my_mechr...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/hunyv6/my_mechrevo_code01_tongfang_pf5nu1g_review/) [3] [https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux- Note...](https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux- Notebooks/15-16-inch/TUXEDO-Book-Pulse-15-Gen1.tuxedo#!#h4-configurator)

<comment><USER13> Also sold as the Schenker Via 15 Pro [1]. Wonder if it will also come with a 4K OLED display option (Tuxedo will also offer one on the configurator within a week).

[1] [https://bestware.com/en/schenker- via-15-pro.html](https://bestware.com/en/schenker-via-15-pro.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Unfortunately cloudflare has blocked my access to [https://kde.slimbook.es/](https://kde.slimbook.es/) :(

<comment><USER15> We're sorry, 50% of the internet is not available to you.

1\. Please try again later.

2\. Please solve 10 captchas to train our machine learning stuff so you can access it.

3\. Please use our Google (TM) login to get tracked on every breath you take. We have to see you are breathing because robots don't breathe.

4, Please volunteer to your ISP to find the other customers with hacked computers that are sending spam with the ip that was rotated to you, and clean their pc.

<comment><USER16> This is too real.

Especially captcha hell with absolutely no way out if you get rotated a 'bad' IP.

<comment><USER17> This is a systematic problem when you use tor.

I would really like a journalist to investigate this, by the way. The goal of a captcha is to prove you're human. What is the goal of 10 captcha in a row?

I can make two hypothesis:

1\. it's meant to discourage humans from using privacy preserving tools like tor, so it would be basically an agressive action to prevent them to access the content and force them to abandon their privacy tools

2\. it could be a mean to identify the user by doing behavioral fingerprinting, by checking their movement speed, time of pattern recognition, etc, based on multiple inputs.

I can't think of a case where such practice is not malicious and would not require scrutiny.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've been looking at Lenovo and Asus/Acer equivalents of this and must say that this crop of Ryzen chips seems to be very decent.

However, most of the interesting models seem to be unavailable outside the US, as most brands dump older hardware revisions as "back to school" gear in Europe.

So this might be an alternative if you want a 48XX now...

<comment><USER19> Yeah I've been on t495 for almost a year and, it's a blasphemy I know, but i'm happy I upgraded from t420.

And I know people with intel-based thinkpads (both linux and windows) complaining about horrible performance because intel power management.

Hopefully the trend will continue I used to put intel everywhere but today I have no problems with AMD (especially on linux).

That said my t495 came faulty from factory (trackpoints button not working properly) the quality issues are well documented if you search for that (iirc toms hardware chief editor wrote about that as well) but they changed it for me for free and upgraded to ryzen7 for free as well, that's a fair deal I would say.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Looks rather nice, but "up to 5 hours battery with real use" for the 14" model is pretty awful, to put it mildly. They should get a lot more running time from a 47Wh battery than 5h. Only one USB-C port (apparently without charging support?) is pretty stingy, too. And one of the USB-A ports is only USB 2.0? WTF

<comment><USER5> I would rather be glad them being so honest.

We have a laptops with even smaller batteries from major brands who claim 10+ hours battery life.

13 inch LG Gram used to have a microscopic battery, while they claimed 16 hours of life from it. They got into quagmire with press coverage, and nearly doubled the battery size in the next generation.

Half of battery life on a modern laptop is basically battery size/screen size, and you can't do anything about it except adding a bigger battery.

It's still possible to make a laptop with terrible battery life if you get a single "power hog" part.

For an Intel system, a CPU, and its VRM may take less than 1W in idle, but a bad WiFi card, DP-LVDS bridge, USB hub, Thunderbolt chip, SSD, or terrible power supply can easily blow the power budget above 6-9W in idle.

Even seemingly innocuous parts like SD card readers, keyboard/touchpad controllers, sensors, wacom chips, embedded controllers can be very bad at idle power consumption, to the extent they take more power than idling CPU.

<comment><USER20> Sure, some manufacturers claim outrageous battery life numbers that noone has ever managed to achieve outside of a lab. But my 2017 X1 Carbon with a 57Wh battery does manage close to 10 hours of actual light-ish use (with Linux). Macbooks' running times are apparently pretty close to what Apple claims, too. But 5 hours advertised running time is just bad, even if it actually manages that much.

<comment><USER21> _> 0 hours of actual light-ish use (with Linux)_

There is Linux and there is Linux. Do you run KDE? It's basically the heaviest DE around, so it's bound to impact power-management.

<comment><USER22> I don't think that's true anymore. Gnome 3 is heavier these days, and Plasma even beats XFCE on some metrics. It's actually quite easy on the battery.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold-...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2019/10/23/bold- prediction-kde-will-steal-the-lightweight-linux-desktop-crown- in-2020/#3d02f90626d2)

<comment><USER23> This is obvious running on weak hardware or constrained VMs. Modern Gnome is nearly unusable, while KDE is fine down to fairly low specs, especially if you dial down the animations.

<comment><USER24> It was like this on Plasma 4 after it had stabilized also.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Looks very nice, perhaps the replacement for my MacBook when it finally dies.

</comment><comment><USER26> No one pointed out: Ryzan!

</comment><comment><USER27> This is pretty cool. Are there any other laptops with linux on them out there ?

<comment><USER28> That's a pretty easy search to do I think.

Slimbook and Tuxedo Computers are selling similar rebranded models in the European market, and Purism and System76 in the US.

From the major brand names, Lenovo is supposed to have preinstalled linux as an option for their T line, and there's Dell also that sells the XPS Developer edition.</comment></comment>


PHP Has Grown Up, You Should Too - <AUTHOR> https://donatstudios.com/PHP-Has-Grown-Up

<comment><USER2> php gets a lot of flack, for something powering the vast majority of sites on the internet.

I belong to the Boston PHP group. I have never seen a group of people that don't really care about the language and just want to build something cool. A large portion of the Boston PHP talks are on thing web development that aren't php (javascript, git and so on). They even teach a online class on javascript.

PHP developers tend not to love the language like python and ruby. Its not the new hotness. But it works fine and runs fast, I kinda like it.</comment>


Making Cython as easy as Python - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Russell91/runcython <comment><USER2> This strategy should be more common! In the source tarball, there should be one main program which you start. The compiling should be an implementation detail of the main program.

The same for web applications. I never liked the idea of reintroducing a separate build (concat/minify/compress) process whenever the sources change. Instead, the production mode should be as simple as the debug mode: When the main page is requested per HTTP, first rebuild the client JS app as needed, then deliver it to the browser.

Caching the build result should be no different from any other caching of automatically-generated resources.

I use this approach for almost all new software that I write and I'm quite satisfied with that. The main program (e.g. "bin/mytool") is a wrapper shell script or Python script that runs the build as needed, then starts the program. In the simplest case, this is a wrapper around "make && ./run_tool".

Of course, the program should indicate the build with a small message to stderr, especially if the build takes some seconds or more. Moreover, it should be possible to trigger the build individually such that distros can build packages from that. On the other hand, running the program with "-h" or "\--help" is a kind of build-only process, too.

<comment><USER3> It's practical, but on the other hand, that goes against the security practice of not allowing the executable zone (be it memory or filesystem) to be writeable.

I personally prefer to precompile stuff, even running "python -m compileall" to create .pyc files, to avoid having to keep that path writeable by the user running the program.

<comment><USER2> Good point! However, if you go down that route in a web application, don't forget to pre-compile templates, and do the same for all other cached things that are "code-like".

More generall, I find W^X hard to enforce in typical web applications. Sure you can mount directory read-only, disable access to /tmp and observe what happens. But then they might use the database as template cache, or whatever.

In most (web) application I'd be happy if they had a central directory where they write stuff into (bonus points for making that directory configurable), instead of scattering generated files all across the source tree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Cython, Numpy, Numba (and others) are what make me skeptical that any of the numerical computing competitors to Python (Julia, or to a lesser extent Lua/JS/Clojure even compiled Scala etc) can displace it at. Why would you abandon this wonderfully friendly, malleable language with easily the largest set of options for _anything_ you might like to do, for something nominally faster on an artificial benchmark (which inevitably ignores the above 3 libraries), when by dipping into any of these you get C-speed in such an accessible and friendly way, most of the time beating the competitors easily on performance.

The only real threats to Python to me come would from a properly parallelized language that would use the GPU/multicore natively in vector form. I don't see that anywhere yet.

<comment><USER5> The problem with the Python ecosystem is that there exist a lot of libraries for scientific computation mostly incompatible with each other (blaze, numpy, numba, numexpr, dask...). Some of them try to reintroduce types in order to compile to native code, thereby losing the advantages of dynamic typing. In short, it is a mess, and everyone is trying to add on this because the existing ecosystem is big and the cost of rewriting everything is deemed too high, so people try to fix python limitations at the library level, sometimes making python more cumbersome to write tha a conventional statically typed language (I am looking at theano).

I don't think that Lua is that much of an improvement, and I do not have big hopes for the JVM. The growing number of projects trying to improve the situation with value types, off-heap allocations and C compatibility are a sign that the VM is not suitable for scientific computing and will not be much better for a while.

I instead hope that Nim will take a leading role for scientific computation. It has an easy syntax and is flexible enough to write libraries such as numpy. At the same time it is fast and C compatibility is trivial. Of course, there is a library ecosystem to build, but I think that this is more doable than trying to work against the language itself. I am trying to start this effort with [https://github.com/unicredit/linear- algebra](https://github.com/unicredit/linear-algebra) but the road is very long and I hope it takes off.

I cannot really comment on Julia as I do not know it welll enough

<comment><USER4> I am intrigued by Nim. Does it have a REPL though? I think an official REPL (not a third party hack) is mandatory for scientific/numerical computing. Ocaml is the only compiled language I can think of which has a credible REPL, officially supported.

<comment><USER5> It currently does not have a REPL, and that is its main limitation right now. I think it is still suitable for more complex workflows where you would not do it in the REPL anyway - think training a large neural network. I hope something will come after 1.0 is out...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its an aside, but recently Python 3 has got annotations. It would be nice if cython supported annotation syntax, so that type-annotated cython was as much as possible valid python than can also be run through an interpreter.

I understand a lot of the nuances, particularly the lack of in-function annotations etc. My own foray into Python type annotations is obiwan [https://pypi.python.org/pypi/obiwan/](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/obiwan/)

</comment><comment><USER7> "Runcython aims to simplify the process of using Cython without sacrificing scalability."

I know this is being a semantic weenie, but I hate when people use scalability when they mean efficiency.

<comment><USER8> And I hate when people use efficiency when they mean speed.

Python -> Cython speeds up you program but does not change the complexity of your algorithm.

<comment><USER9> How do you suppose it speeds it up then?

I'll give you "the complexity of your algorithm" likely doesn't change, but how that algorithm is processed _is_ usually more efficient when compiled through C, rather than running through a Python interpreter, if only because of how it's running.

<comment><USER8> I agree it is faster by running it through compiled C code.

Saying "my code is more efficient than your code" might be acceptable, but saying "my code is efficient" drives me mad when it is used as a synonym for "my code is fast". Take a look at [1] and the note that this is not about optimization. Efficient algorithms are usually algorithms with close to optimal time or space complexitiy.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_efficiency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_efficiency)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seeing how this uses mktemp, I assume the results of runcython build are not reused. Is that correct? If sou, wouldn't it make sense to save the results? Maybe with a switch?

Also feature requests: Windows support for run/make would be nice. Cross- compile options for make would be awesome.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is great to see! I don't know if it was inspired by runhaskell, but it does appear to be similar. I have to say, this kind of tool is something I have come to feel is incredibly helpful and important for my dev workflow.

I spend most of my time developing in statically-typed, compiled-to-machine- code languages; obviously, one of the major advantages of more dynamic or interpreted languages is the ability to rapidly prototype. This type of tool allows me to quickly prototype something without losing all the power, control and other benefits of my languages of choice (in particular, Haskell these days).

Things like this make me more amenable to python by the day! Keep up the good work!

</comment><comment><USER12> I am using Python to solve combinatorial problems, and so my code relies heavily on the itertools library.

My question is if I would still get a considerable speed-up if I rewrite some of my code in Cython, given my reliance on itertools?

<comment><USER13> it may be worth checking out cytoolz

<comment><USER14> Yup. Cytoolz. Some notes on performance of Cytoolz:

[http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2014/05/01/Introducing-C...](http://matthewrocklin.com/blog/work/2014/05/01/Introducing- CyToolz/)

<comment><USER12> great thanks both for the tip.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to make help microvideos for your website - <AUTHOR> http://www.holovaty.com/writing/microvideos/

<comment><USER2> Doxie scanner uses this to AMAZING effect for the Doxie Go: [http://www.getdoxie.com/product/doxie- go/index.html](http://www.getdoxie.com/product/doxie-go/index.html)

The huge advantage to using micro-video is that it's much, much lower commitment. Because of this, many more people will watch it and it goes from being part of product help/support to being part of marketing. Very short videos convey a ton of information without making the visitor invest a lot of attention and time.

The only thing I'd caution against is trying to host them yourself. Vimeo, ooyala, brightcove, even youtube all do an awesome job of hosting videos with minimal risk of melting your server.</comment>


File navigation application that works with TextMate, MacVim, and Carbon Emacs - <AUTHOR> http://peepcode.com/products/peepopen <comment><USER2> It looks pretty, but I'm having a hard time figuring out when this would be handy. How often do you need to work with a file but you have no idea where it is?

If it included in-text search, that would add a lot. But even then I'm not convinced that I want a whole separate application just for searching and opening files. I always _already_ have Vim and a terminal window open. I can search (using find, grep, ack, etc.) from the terminal window and then open via Vim. Having said that, I just don't find that I often need to search that way. I know where the files are: I put them there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think you're right. Since they don't have a trial, I was hoping someone here used it before and could give a mini-review.</comment></comment>


Wget Arbitrary Commands Execution - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.securiteam.com/index.php/archives/2701 <comment><USER2> I hate it when blog posts do not have any date and time somewhere on the article page. The only indicator is that it was filed into "July 2016" in the archive sidebar.

</comment><comment><USER3> Am I alone in thinking that this behaviour is expected and intuitive? To the extent that I had to verify cURL didn't have the same behaviour.

<comment><USER4> It's not a security hole and it's not a bug. Wget even prints out all the things that are happening. Everybody seems to be grasping at straws right now just to be able to make the next branded vulnerability.

<comment><USER5> The wget developers disagree, they call it a security vulnerability. I'm inclined to agree because knowing that HTTP → HTTP redirections _don 't_ have this behaviour, it's dangerous for HTTP → FTP to have it.

Whether wget prints it out is irrelevant, as it's often used in scripts.

[http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info- gnu/2016-06/msg00004....](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info- gnu/2016-06/msg00004.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Well, "good" to see a bug that wouldn't have been solved by using Rust.

I had never really thought about this attack vector though. Writing to `.bash_profile` is effectively the same as writing executable code.

Though I like the whole "everything is a file" concept (I know this isn't exactly that but...), it seems like we should be striving for something safer. For example, I guess in something like Plan9 you could have wget start playing sound out of your speakers? Crazy.

File handles shouldn't cause RCE vulnerabilities, right?

I suppose sandboxing is one way of dealing with this. Another is having to explicitly "give a file" to wget and co. for editing. None of this "oh, here you go program, write to anything in my home directory".

</comment><comment><USER7> Peppering your description with 100 uses of the word "arbitrary" and "crafted" does not cause expected behaviour to become a security vulnerability! That's not a "crafted" location header, it's a perfectly normal location header.

</comment><comment><USER8> Shouldn't we stop storing configuration files at $HOME ? Most terminal emulators also start at $HOME by default which compounds this problem.

<comment><USER9> Where else would you like to put them?

<comment><USER8> How about /etc/username ?

<comment><USER5> And then you can't install a package because its name conflicts with the name of some user?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note to securiteam: ns2.beyondsecurity.com 18.104.22.168 appears to be dead

Edit: Ignore this. I was blocking AWS.

<comment><USER11> From my network ns2.beyondsecurity.com is up and running as ec2-50-18-152-199.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com

<comment><USER10> Correct. My mistake. Only down for me. I block AWS as part of blocking mobile ads.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Catchafire – Help NGOs with your magic skills - <AUTHOR> https://www.catchafire.org/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was their lead UX/UI Designer a few years ago, and now's probably a really good time to share this incredible platform. It has a quite extensive Filtering Criteria.

Enjoy. Make a difference!

p.s. Happy to help other startups get their product into top shape.

DM me > artur @ design2dev.com</comment>


Venture Capitalist: A Rise to Riches (1981) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/06/business/venture-capitalist-a-rise-to-riches.html <comment><AUTHOR> I had never heard of Adler before reading this and thought the profile was fascinating. Also, it's amazing how much the world has changed-- the numbers in this article seem so small by modern standards.</comment>


Ask HN: When Will Unity Web Player Come To Linux? - <AUTHOR>

I've been an Ubuntu user for awhile now, and have noticed that significant steps have been taken to make Linux more gamer-friendly. Much content-creation software (e.g. Unity3D, and more recently Leadwerks Game Engine) has been brought to Ubuntu, and Steam has brought publishing to Ubuntu, but why not Unity Web Engine? Is it planned to be added in the future? <comment><USER2> "Longer term, however, we expect that the performance and feature gap between the Web Player and WebGL will become much more narrow, and we expect that browser vendors will make the Web Player obsolete by dropping support for plug-ins, at which point WebGL will become the prime solution for targeting the web with Unity." \--[http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/04/29/on-the-future-of- web-pub...](http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/04/29/on-the-future-of-web- publishing-in-unity/)

"Today's browsers are speedier, safer, and more capable than their ancestors. Meanwhile, NPAPI's 90s-era architecture has become a leading cause of hangs, crashes, security incidents, and code complexity. Because of this, Chrome will be phasing out NPAPI support over the coming year." \--[http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our- old-f...](http://blog.chromium.org/2013/09/saying-goodbye-to-our-old-friend- npapi.html)

Unity's expectation is that WebGL will replace the need for the Web Player at all, so I wouldn't expect to ever see it for Linux. Linux users will be supported via WebGL.

</comment><comment><USER3> In the meantime you could try using pipelight. There's a ppa for ubuntu folks.

I can't speak for the performance thought as i've not used Unity3D.

pipelight: [http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html](http://pipelight.net/cms/installation.html)

demos: [http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/unity3d-web-player- in-...](http://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/unity3d-web-player-in-linux- browsers-thanks-to-pipelight-.2996)</comment>


Right on but not the whole story: The browser is inside of every app... - <AUTHOR> http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1441

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a _great_ framework for discussing how computing is changing. But it does not go far enough to describe the fullness of the "web OS".

This article focuses on the presentation layer. I'd love to see more discussion about the other layers of the "web OS" stack described in this same light.</comment>


What Elixir Is about - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXcedVc2LQM

<comment><USER2> Syntax is important too. A lot of design decisions are based on aesthetics, not hard criteria.</comment>


Ask HN: How many tech conferences a year do you go to? - <AUTHOR>

Does your company pay for them?
Does your company have a limit of conference days you can take?
Do you feel that your company is good/bad when it comes to letting their employees attend conferences?
How important of a factor is it to you?
Thanks for the input :) <comment><USER2> Zero, I just skipped one yesterday, which would've been on my own time after work. It's good when a company lets their employees attend them, assuming it's not too pricey. They are of little importance to me as I think for me they are an inefficient way to learn. I'd rather read the manual or watch the podcast from the comfort of my home office.

<comment><USER3> Learning is not really the point of conferences though - meeting others is. I have met some great folks at conferences, many people I know got jobs through them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So far, local meetups have been an easy (and free) way for me to connect with like-minded professionals. I have yet to attend any big conferences, but I know that connections you might make can be priceless in the long run.

</comment><comment><USER5> One, maybe two. Self employed and self pay.</comment>


TrueCrypt 'decrypted' by FBI to nail doc-stealing sysadmin - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/04/truecrypt_decrypted_by_fbi/

<comment><USER2> TrueCrypt password 'entered' by FBI</comment>


Ask HN: Best Excel Export Module for Nodejs? - <AUTHOR> Are there some excellent modules as PHPExcel for Nodejs? <comment><USER2> Try -> [https://github.com/mgcrea/node-xlsx](https://github.com/mgcrea/node- xlsx)

Or -> [https://www.npmjs.com/browse/keyword/excel](https://www.npmjs.com/browse/keyword/excel)</comment>


Japanese CPU threatens to make Nvidia, Intel and AMD obsolete in HPC market - <AUTHOR> https://www.techradar.com/news/little-known-japanese-cpu-threatens-to-make-nvidia-intel-and-amd-obsolete-in-hpc-market <comment><USER2> The headline reminds me of 5th generation computers, which were supposed to supplant all current-generation computing of the time.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer)

</comment><comment><USER3> I read the headline and I thought it is going to be Fujitsu A64FX. And it is, but the article completely lack any detail info.

Anandtech [1] has a basic run down of features. The most important thing was SVE 512bit SIMD, which I believe was developed together with ARM. And as far as I am aware it seems to be the only commercial chip that has SVE.

Unfortunately knowing the Japanese culture and Fujitsu's intention with A64FX I dont think it will bring any competition to Intel / AMD or Nvidia.

[1] [https://www.anandtech.com/show/15169/a-success-on-arm-for- hp...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/15169/a-success-on-arm-for-hpc-we-found- a-fujitsu-a64fx-wafer)

<comment><USER4> So what did Fujitsu do to innovate here? Partner with arm on design? Who manufactured it?

After the us tries to cut off Huaweis chip supplies, can Huawei come up with something similar?

<comment><USER5> My guess would be that at minimum they were involved with the SIMD modules.

At most, they designed the entire CPU from the ground up. I'm guessing it's somewhere in between; this CPU provides equivalent extensions to what Fujitsu gave in their SPARC series. If other parts of ARM's core IP were suitable for other pieces they probably used that.

> Who manufactured it?

Based on Wikipedia, probably TSMC.

> After the us tries to cut off Huaweis chip supplies, can Huawei come up with > something similar?

(Short answer at the bottom, I went on quite the tangent here :)

Well let's talk about what that would mean right now.

HiSilicon is a fabless Semiconductor design company fully owned by Huawei. If you look at the comparison of ARMv8-A cores out there [0], thankfully both HiSilicon and Fujitsu's offerings are grouped together at the bottom (at least for me as I write this.)

That said, what benchmarks I found indicated that HiSilicon's CPU doesn't seem to compete, especially with wider workloads (Fujitsu can do 512-bit vectors, I think HiSilicon is limited to 128 on these.)

I'm assuming that their setups are being pieced together more thoughtfully; one should note HS also makes AI Processors that are tailored separately for inference and training.

As far as making a more proper 'server' GP core, if they're not playing dirty there's some catch-up to be done, but there's nothing stopping the State from stepping in and throwing more resources at the problem. While having multiple design teams working on the same parts of a CPU probably won't get an implementation done any faster, having multiple designs in parallel when you're trying to catch up to the latest tech may lead to better insight and options down the road; case in point would be Netburst vs Evolved P6 arch.

Really, China's bigger problem at the moment is Fab technology; They have HSMC which can do 7nm, but I don't know at what kind of volume, and whether it's a bulk process or something with all the fancy tech you'd need to make a server cpu at a fast clock rate.

There's a few things they're probably lacking in that area; just getting started into process tech research (in the vein of SOI, copper interconnects, etc.) but that will probably ramp up quickly.

Optics are another huge factor; I'm starting to realize that the increase in higher-quality Camera glass from China in the last few years is no coincidence. Let's look at the main Lithography EQ manufacturers out there:

\- Canon \- Nikon \- Ultratech \- ASML

You can see that two of ASMLs biggest competitors also happen to be the two biggest/best mass producers of Glass out there. Notice Samsung isn't on the list; AFAIK they still get their equipment from ASML, although my understanding is it's some level of 'partnership.' I'm guessing they trade glass, since Samsung is pretty good at that.

To wit: Samsung recently got caught with their hand in ASML's source code cookie jar. I was immediately reminded of a post on HN [1] where ASML's testing scheme is described; If someone has a spare machine and a copy of the source code, they can start playing with it, possibly introducing their own fixes to optimize yields, either for their use case or for more general cases that for reasons described in aforementioned post aren't incorporated into ASML's codebase.

Anywho, went on a tangent there, but it shows how competitive the industry is even without political pressures at play. But it also shows that it's -possible- that with the right pieces China could make incremental improvements to what they already have while they work on the next big thing.

Short Answer:

I think China wants to be caught up sometime between 2023 and 2025 for fabs, but everyone else is trying to push it back to 2025-2030.

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ARMv8-A_cores](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_ARMv8-A_cores)

[1] - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18463181](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18463181)

<comment><USER4> The comment you referenced about ASML said they have no tests? Why would tests not be possible?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Also of interest, they'll be running a specialised kernel: [https://github.com/RIKEN-SysSoft/mckernel](https://github.com/RIKEN- SysSoft/mckernel)</comment>


Python on Heroku - <AUTHOR>

You can run python on heroku with a system call from a ruby app. Just run something like:<p>@output = `echo \"#{variable}\" | python script.py`.<p>This will let you read standard out from  a python script. <comment><USER2> is this documented, or something you just stumbled upon?

<comment><USER3> most(all?) linux distros ship with atleast a minimal version of python. I guess that's the reason

<comment><USER2> yeah ok, but if they run you in a chroot environment, you get nothing. They're also under no obligation to add python to your PATH.. a ton of reasons this could not be the case

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Perf will suck. Like running a CGI process for each request if using this for python web app.</comment>


5 Marketing Tools Every Startup Should Use - <AUTHOR> http://www.instigatorblog.com/5-marketing-tools-every-startup-should-use/2008/01/02/ <comment><USER2> For web startups, I think screencasts are the best use of video. Here's one I did for a feature added to ourdoings.com in December:

<http://img.ourdoings.com/tutorial/morephotos.htm>

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess the purpose of marketing is to set your message apart from the rest, when every startup uses the same "tools", it's not really marketing anymore, is it?</comment>


Blockstack raises $4mm to build decentralized internet - <AUTHOR> https://blockstack.org/blog/funding-the-new-decentralized-internet <comment><USER2> The repeated mentions of "building a new internet" makes me suspect some delusions of grandeur. Do I need to replace my fiber connection? Why does the new internet involve "JavaScript single page apps"?

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this different than tor?</comment>


Show HN: Dumpstr.io – private Twitter for thoughts (closed beta open for a day) - <AUTHOR> https://www.dumpstr.io/hackernews

<comment><USER2> Loved the landing page design. What animation library did you use?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We used an animation library called Skrollr. [https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr](https://github.com/Prinzhorn/skrollr)

<comment><USER3> Would you be able to speed it up a little? Scrolling through it on my desktop meant the animations would crawl along (not lagging, just very slowly animated).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am getting an SSL mixed content warning on your landing page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for noticing! We are on this ASAP. some google font we're fetching with http...

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Looks nice and sleek. How is this different than evernote?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

I find evernote quite cumbersome... Like some big heavy animal :) We focus on simplicity. We have quite an extreme zero-organizing philosophy (you can read about it in our blog - [https://medium.com/@dumpstrio/why-we-built-dumpstr- io-e16b96...](https://medium.com/@dumpstrio/why-we-built-dumpstr- io-e16b96a90ebb) )

Also, clever context based search engine (try it out).

P.S No elephants were harmed during the writing of this comment

<comment><USER5> Cool, might give it a try. If this doesn't work you can consider a stand up comedy career :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> hey captain, just signed up, just making sure, am I ok inviting "outsiders"?

* liked the star in the front page :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah sure, the closed beta is open for the day. Invite anyone you want.

*click on the start again it will give you more funny stuff :)</comment></comment>