Google discloses its diversity record, and it's not good - <AUTHOR> http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce-diversity-data-good/#.U4ZeWexaIgw.twitter <comment><USER2> Not good based on what criteria exactly? They seem to say Google is doing poorly in comparison to other tech companies but they fail to provide a concrete comparison to support that point. They could be saying Google's diversity is "not good" as a sign of the greater cultural issues, but they single Google out too much for that.

Only 17% of Google's tech jobs go to women. Given that roughly 20% of comp sci degrees go to women that seems roughly reasonable [1]. For non-tech jobs the split is 52/48 which again seems roughly reasonable.

The numbers for non-Asian minorities are pretty grim. They appear to be much further off from national averages for relevant degrees. Would need much more detailed information before making an assessment.

[1] [http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_349.asp) [2] [http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s3.htm](http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind12/c2/c2s3.htm)

<comment><USER3> As an Asian American minority, does it really matter? I don't see that many Asian Americans in hollywood, modeling for fashion companies, doing standup comedy, starring in televisions shows, playing in professional sports leagues, or playing in live bands compared to whites or other minorities. Should I feel enraged?

<comment><USER4> Of cause! Pretending to feel oppressed seems to be the thing of the moment. We need to staff every industry, company, college course based on a race/gender/etc quota!

<comment><USER5> Except for the ones that are already disproportionately filled with an approved racial or gender minority. We'll just quietly ignore those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've made this point before, but... having done a ton of interviews for senior and principal software engineers, the candidate mix is already incredibly non- diverse by the time it gets to me.

I mean, maybe my management and hr is filled with racists and sexists, but my gut reaction is they seem like pretty progressive folks. I think the pipeline is messed up much, much earlier.

<comment><USER7> I really want to know the opposite question of this -- how many percent of qualified {hispanics, blacks, women, trans people, etc} are employed and receive {compensation, perks} relative to their peers?

This is a tricky question for senior/principle software people, but perhaps as a proxy, we could look at the number of new grads at the Bachelor's, Master's and PhD levels that are employed {six months prior, one month prior, one month after, six months after} graduation, as broken down by gender and ethnicity.

For example, if 95% of women are hired by one month before graduation day, that would suggest that we need to be looking at an earlier point in the pipeline (educating parents, additional funding at the elementary or high school level, teaching boys how to not sexually harass girls in middle school, etc.). On the other hand, if 20% of women are hired by six months after graduation day, then maybe that means there's something funny going on during the hiring process.

<comment><USER8> That is an excellent idea. It would also be worthwhile to know the general field of employment; in particular, is it one to which the qualifications of interest are relevant.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This closely jives with the " _Degrees conferred by sex and race_ " stats from U.S. Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences National Center for Education Statistics.

ps. Interesting side note, is that while looking this up, I wanted to see if H1B visas skewed the stats. I found a page that lists "10 of the largest and hottest US Companies that hire skilled immigrants for H1B visas" [2]. What's interesting is that these numbers are _far_ lower than I thought they would be, as in, I thought H1B visas were the life blood of these companies. But these numbers are probably not even a fraction of their total employee base.

      Amazon      333 visas
      Apple       520 visas
      Facebook    173 visas
      Google      685 visas
      Microsoft 2,125 visas
      ...

[1] [http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72](http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=72)

[2] [http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/H1Bvisa10topH1BsponsorsRevie...](http://www.h1base.com/visa/work/H1Bvisa10topH1BsponsorsReview/ref/1691/)

<comment><USER10> The H1Bs aren't being hired by A-list companies. They're getting hired by old, slow, cheap, mostly non-tech corporations who won't compete on either quality of work or wages.

<comment><USER11> > The H1Bs aren't being hired by A-list companies.

H1B is a type of visa, it cannot be hired.

> They're getting hired by old, slow, cheap, mostly non-tech corporations who > won't compete on either quality of work or wages.

Foreigner = Evil. On the other hand, you get an H1B if you are shown to be more qualified than u.s. citizens who applied to the job. If anything, it's a great way to bring in skilled laborers and keep them in check (since, if you get fired, you get deported too).

<comment><USER10> Qualified isn't the problem. _Willing_ isn't the problem. When some old non- tech company needs a network engineer to work in some crusty old industrial town in the middle of nowhere for 2/3 what a qualified person would make in actual civilization, they _cannot_ get one. Even if they paid market rates, which they find appalling, they couldn't get anyone to move into the boonies in an environment with little opportunity for professional advancement.

So they import someone on an H1B visa, work them for a few years, and send them home. They've solved the kind of labor shortage that causes immigration, without actually giving them the chance to become Americans.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I can't help but feel that this really isn't Google's fault. A simple heuristic to make recruiting grads simpler is to restrict yourself to the top universities (most companies do this) - but I bet that the CS programs for most of those universities have similar statistics.

As one datapoint, the program I'm on has a 8:1 male-female ratio, and of the 80 or so students on it, I believe that there is one black student.

It's a problem with all of CS - and Google have decent initiatives to help turn it around, but it's going to take time - more CS education in schools, more access programs to help those from deprived backgrounds get programming - and that'll sadly happen slowly.

Perhaps it's different in America (where one need not choose CS before university starts).

<comment><USER13> > Perhaps it's different in America (where one need not choose CS before > university starts).

Not really related to the original article, but this stood out to me as not quite accurate.

Even within the US, this actually varies from school to school. My university required you to declare a major before you started, but the average student changed majors at least once in their college career (I changed twice, landing in CS). Other schools require you to start undeclared and declare at some point, as your comment implies.

<comment><USER12> Ah, ok. I guess I meant that you didn't have to choose the major you'd graduate with. To give a comparison (for the sake of where I was coming from) I'm in the UK, where you apply for a specific course, you take no minors, and once you arrive, at most universities it's impossible to change course beyond that without massive special dispensation (and usually a requirement of starting the degree again).

<comment><USER14> Not true for me. I did two majors and changed to another minor in a proper UK university not those polyversities;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > "We're not where we want to be when it comes to diversity," Laszlo Bock, > Google's senior vice president of "people operations," told the NewsHour in > a statement prior to a broadcast interview Wednesday. "It is hard to address > these kinds of challenges if you're not prepared to discuss them openly, and > with the facts. All our diversity efforts, including going public with these > numbers, are designed to ensure Google recruits and retain many more women > and minorities in the future."

I don't agree with diversity for the sake of diversity. Hire the most qualified candidate regardless of race/gender.

And also, Asians are a minority group, at least in California as of today.

<comment><USER16> > I don't agree with diversity for the sake of diversity. Hire the most > qualified candidate regardless of race/gender.

Google will hire ALL the qualified candidates, not just the "most qualified" one. We are always looking to hire more people (headcount is easily the most precious and scarce resource at Google).

Nobody is missing out here. We're just trying to decrease the gender and race imbalance at the company.

<comment><USER15> In order to change the demographics, you have to hire more of one group and less of another.

Somebody must be turned away based on race/gender to accomplish this.

<comment><USER16> No, not less. If you hire equally from all demographics eventually the balance will be restored.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> _> 'Google and other major tech companies have been the target of increasing pressure to hire more women and minorities...'_

Time for me to add a profile pic on LinkedIn?

Seriously now...

I'm not sure what, if anything, to make of this. I expected the numbers to be low, but not that low. I've personally felt discriminated against throughout life and at times witnessed direct evidence of it.

Thing is, the objective requirements for candidates to build and run bleeding edge infrastructure in a highly competitive market is quite a bit different from say renting an apartment.

This leads me to imagine that the applicable pool will be much smaller and Google will not be inclined to pass on qualified candidates.

That said, 'Google' doesn't hire people, people do and unless the process has changed - any single person can exclude any candidate. It would be interesting to know what proportion of minority candidates who come on-site are hired versus the field - not conclusive, but certainly interesting.

If I had guess I'd think that discrimination is producing this, but it's not happening at Google - it's happening all over. A million small slights and denied opportunities (in this generation or those prior) that see people who might otherwise have the capacity never gain the necessary experience, exposure, relationships or plain confidence that could surface them to the top.

Personally, I had never entertained the possibility that I could work for them until they called me - it was eye-opening that someone could see a possibility in me that I'd refused to see myself. Interestingly, both times I've been contacted by SV companies (Google included) the recruiters were minorities themselves.

We'll see.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is PBS implying that Google is discriminating during the hiring process, or that the talent pool lacks diversity? If it's the latter, hard to blame Google for that one.

<comment><USER19> My company tries to hire women hard, but there are not many of them in the first place.

<comment><USER18> Isn't 'trying' to hire women just as illegal as trying not to? I'd be pretty bummed as an applicant if I discovered that I lost out on a job because of my Y chromosome and not my qualifications.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The greatest disadvantage you can have in the Western world is to be born a black woman.

Unfortunately I don't feel this is due to Google's hiring policies, the disadvantages and lack of privilege kick in a lot earlier and apply to every action in a lifetime... by the time that has compounded the person isn't even a candidate for Google.

<comment><USER21> I understand the point you're trying to make, but you may want to caveat this with "in the US" rather than "in the world", since being born in the developed world at all is a huge advantage compared to being born in developing nations with longstanding human rights problems.

<comment><USER20> Changed to Western world, certainly applies to most of Europe too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm not surprised and doubt anyone else is either.

I'm a white male and Google wouldn't hire me. Because I don't have all the qualities I would need to work there. Probably neither do most of the people they aren't hiring. Probably not a conspiracy. Why do we look at people as groups instead of individuals so much? What if someone is half Asian and 1/4 African American? Or what if they are "Hispanic" but half their ancestors came from Lebanon three generations ago? Where do these go on the numbers chart? There are only going to be more of these types of individuals around as time goes on. Maybe the group view is sometimes misleading and becoming more bogus every generation?

</comment><comment><USER23> Getting diversity in a company means changes to standard practices. ie its ok to work from home,flexible part-time working, a good environment for disabled and on-site creches for parents, prayer rooms for religious peeps and being careful not to create a presenteeism long-hours culture. This may be expensive to invest in for companies upfront but the benefits in having a diverse workforce are well documented. Perhaps if even Einstein himself had been a single-parent father in our time, he would have found it difficult to work in tech too..

</comment><comment><USER24> This isn't really that surprising if you look at the talent pool in Silicon Valley, which probably breaks down along the same diversity lines. I live in SF and I would like to see that chart against the actual qualified candidates who live here. Most of the people that I meet at Meet Ups, social events, Commonwealth Club, VC meetings, and see in my building are White and Asian so I don't see how this is "not good." I'm Black, and I'm usually the only technical Black guy at whatever company I work for.

</comment><comment><USER25> I think "we" look at the diversity issue from the wrong angle. The question we should be asking is: Why should a smart, hard working, and not particularly nerdy woman want to join the software industry?

If you are smart enough, and hard working enough, to get a good job at Google then you can do well in accounting, medicine, law, banking, sales, engineering etc.

Outside of a few tech hubs like Silicon Valley software development doesn't pay as well, or have as good of a career progression, as other top professions. It is also significantly riskier.

On risk: In a startup your job is much less secure and to adjust for this your compensation should be roughly 1.5-2.5x higher than at a more stable firm. Startups _don 't_ usually pay this much higher which is why, outside of a few select areas, startups struggle to find talent. In SV though most of the risk disappears because the market is so hot. In SV it is easier to change companies than it is to change teams.

So already you are saying: If you want to do well you have to give up your existing friendships/family/lifestyle etc and move. Other sectors/fields that require the same sacrifices typically compensate you much better e.g. Go to NYC for finance and realistically if you are good your total comp can be > $1million/year.

And that is not even getting into lack of time for l&d, the small half-life of knowledge, working in a heavily male environment, etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> It would be nice to be able to compare these numbers with other large computer technology companies.

</comment><comment><USER27> The 'slice of pie' type of analysis only tells half of the issue. Better would be the ratio of applicants to hires. If in a pool of 100, 70 are white, 30 are asian, and 1 is hispanic, then that could point to a lack of diversity in the talent pool.

On the other hand, if 100 hispanics applied, and only 1 was hired. Or if only 2 hispanics actually get to the application process, then that is an actual story.

</comment><comment><USER28> do these figures mean anything without knowing the racial and ethnic data of the entire industry?

<comment><USER29> No. And even then, you'd only be interested in the data among the top end of the industry population, i.e. people likely to be productive as Google employees.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> So let's say a hiring decision comes down to 2 people, both identical in skill/experience/attitude. One is a white male, another is a black female.

These studies imply the black female should be hired because of her gender and/or race to boost diversity numbers. Is this not sexist / racist?

<comment><USER31> Google doesn't hire people that way. You interview for a job at Google in general, not for a specific position. The hiring decision is yes/no for you as an individual. If your hypothetical black woman and white man both interviewed and both got a "yes", they would both get an offer. At no point would they be compared to each other. What's more, the interviewers don't make the hiring decision; they only write a report about the interview. Later, a hiring committee goes through the stack of reports and makes a decision; they never meet the candidate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Google should be careful here. I have been part of teams where managers go ahead and make 'diverse' hires just to fudge the numbers despite getting an explicit 'no' from the engineers who interviewed them. These hires were always terrible and bring productivity down big time.

I see no difference between this and caste based reservation in countries like India ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reservation_in_India)). In states like Tamil nadu (India) only 30% of seats are available to brahmins. Note that 30% is open quota - everyone competes for those 30%. Even the people for whom things seats were reserved for already.

Diversifying the work force should never be a goal by itself.

</comment><comment><USER33> Google is in the profit business they don't discriminate by race. Just like any other capitalist entity, they discriminate against individuals based on perceived profitability.

They hire the people they think will make them the most money because these are the best people they can find for the job.

Seriously, if you don't like this, go to Cuba or North Korea or back in time to the USSR. There is no other agenda.

My forebears (and most likely yours) came to this country because of this; (honest) capitalism means the most talented and qualified people/entities/products succeed.

Why do people care about this?

<comment><USER34> > Seriously, if you don't like this, go to Cuba or North Korea or back in time > to the USSR.

If you read the Google blog post about this, _Google_ doesn't like the state of their workforce diversity, and is actively taking steps to change it (by working to correct the external social factors that they see as the cause.)

> Why do people care about this?

Because some people aren't just narrowly self-interested capitalists. For which, I suppose, you would like to send the entirety of Google's management to Pyongyang.

<comment><USER33> Google "doesn't like" bad publicity from people who make a stink about non- issues like this. That't my take away from such a post.

I don't want to anyone to Pyongyang or anywhere else.

Those who think that that hiring is the business of an irrelevant third party or that job candidacy based on any factor other than pure merit is a good thing, should examine how this practice is paralleled by practices of those regimes.

<comment><USER34> > Google "doesn't like" bad publicity from people who make a stink about non- > issues like this.

But the stink is entirely a result of Google voluntarily releasing the numbers _and_ saying that they were disappointed with them and working to fix them, _and_ pointing to things they were doing to fix them _long before_ the released the numbers. If Google were really only concerned about the stink, they could have just _not_ released the numbers, and would have no reason to have been working on corrective actions when they weren't releasing the numebrs.

It really seems like you started from the conclusion that Google doesn't really care about diversity, and are desperately trying to twist the facts into that preconceived mental model.

<comment><USER33> The article implies strongly against your argument. Google didn't want or care to do it, just that people who care about this silliness got in their face...

"But public campaigns have stepped up the pressure — just this spring, Jesse Jackson visited Google's shareholder meetings in Silicon Valley. Google officials told the NewsHour that the company had been "working toward disclosing this for the better part of the year" and said Google invited Jackson to its meeting last month where the company promised for the first time to release the numbers."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> "Totals and % do not include unknown, null, or 'decline-to-state' fields."

Without that information, it's pretty hard to tell how much of an effect it has on those numbers.

<comment><USER36> it is very easy - any googler i've met personally or what i see commuting in the morning (MV near Rengstorff) is usually a white and sometimes an Asian guy.

Similarly to Jobs's "A-people hire A-people" \- top college kids doing well in CS algorithms (which would usually be white or Asian guys) would hire the same, ie. top college kids doing well in CS algorithms.

<comment><USER35> With all due respect, your few data points are hardly a representative sample of Google's workforce.

I fully accept that women aren't represented in CS degree courses, and this may be a good argument for the under-representation of women in Google's workforce. For foreigners and people of a different race, it's more difficult. Tuition fees for foreigners is higher, so I'd be willing to believe the are fewer foreign students studying CS than domestic students. For domestic students of a particular race? It's still not entirely clear to me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It seems to correlate to the Bay Area Demographics:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Demograp...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area#Demographics)

I don't see anything out of the ordinary or wrong, as far as men versus women, I think it's not a surprise to me that more men are in technology.

</comment><comment><USER38> If you look at NBA/NFL diversity record, it is much worse.

</comment><comment><USER39> Time to hire people just because they were born women/part of an ethnic group/race! Who cares about merits....

</comment><comment><USER40> This topic is something that I feel strongly about as a minority that has worked in tech/new media.

I don't think any reasonable people at this point would disagree that affirmative action/hiring for the sake of racial quotas is the equivalent of passing up qualified candidates based on race. That is to say it's a destructive practice that creates resentment and unnecessary racial tension.

The main problem with this line of thinking is that it ignores the tremendous societal forces in place that lead to a predominantly white executive work force instead focusing only on the outcome and attempting to change that with affirmative action and minority hires for the sake of diversity. This is so narrow minded and results-oriented that I have a hard time believing intelligent people signed off on it and it was actually legally mandated at one point.

What we should be doing is examining the processes and infrastructure that leads to a predominantly white male executive workforce to determine where discrimination occurs and attempt to curb it there. This discussion is not the one we're having, instead focusing on sensationalist headlines and click-bait articles that do more harm than good to racial relations in America. Top that off with clowns like Jesse Jackson who just the other day showed up at the facebook shareholders meeting "advocating for hiring more minorities at technology companies, especially into board seats." and you get the sad state of affairs we find ourselves in today.

Louis CK tells a joke in which the general idea is "You know you really trust someone when you reveal to them your inner most racist thoughts". It's funny because it's true, but the prevailing air of secrecy and shame about ones prejudices is a big part of what's preventing us from having honest dialogue about race in this country.

Just the other week Mark Cuban was lambasted by a desperate journalist/blogger who took quotes out of context and misrepresented his remarks to paint him as racist. With an atmosphere like that it's no wonder white people are afraid to discuss race relations. It's the same reason this thread is full of people getting defensive about "Google isn't racist!"

Now I'm going to lose a lot of you on this next part, but based ONLY on my subjective experiences in the corporate workforce whenever we had new hires, the white males always seemed to be treated as "potential leadership material" not based on merit but simply because they looked the part. Being tall and easy on the eyes helps too. Meanwhile minority hires, even in the same position as their white male counterparts were seen as foot soldiers and worker bees. This perception was prevalent in the last 2 companies I've worked for. Take from that what you will, that's been my experience.

<comment><USER41> I don't think anyone can realistically argue that physical appearances do not modify how others will judge or interact with you.

Going out a bit on a whim here, but if we accept that a) beauty has a substantial subjective element b) standards of beauty are modifiable/learned c) that people can derive an advantage through their status of being beautiful (ie, that all things being equal, in a choice between two identical candidates except that one is judged more beautiful than the other, that the more beautiful one will tend to be favored) and d) that North American and European norms of beauty are still rooted deeply in being white (which is fairly reasonable, and not their fault), then you can see where problems kick in.

It's honestly really shitty. I could rant on about your example re: looking the part of leadership material. But I won't cause... it'll be rambling and awkward. Suffice to say that we're in this really awkward in between phase, trapped between a history of clear white majority, and a future of clear heterogenerality - and worse, it's a transition taking place unevenly in nearly every respect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> if you notice, there is a higher level of asians in tech (compare to non-tech) and ratio of women to men in non-tech is almost 50-50. If might suggest that men (mostly white and asians) are more likely brain damaged in certain ways which let them succeed (or survive) in such unnatural environment.

<comment><USER36> >If might suggest that men (mostly white and asians) are more likely brain damaged in certain ways which let them succeed (or survive) in such unnatural environment.

my wife's IQ is 30+ points higher than my :) I do pretty well - a senior engineer (and among "the best programmers", etc... according to many people i worked with). My wife just can't stand the tech environment, nor the people, nor the work. Primitive, plain, boring, single-sided, ... - some adjectives used by her.

<comment><USER42> Just curious, what is not primitive, plain, boring ? Math/Physics/DNA sequencing ?

<comment><USER43> A Techie here - I think, for example, literature is none of these. Every time I read Graham Greene, there are these terse sentences which leave me with admiration for his observation into human nature, and his masterly sardonic sarcasm - e.g. "I am easily moved to anger by cruelties not mine own" [ A Sort of Life ], or when describing how assurance in youth ends in doubts later "even our handwriting begins young and takes on the tired arabesques of time" [ The End of the Affair ], the sentences stay in your memory long after you've read them, and you see that pithy phrases can carry a world of experience behind them. Another great sentence - "We live as we dream - alone" [Conrad, Heart of Darkness]

Literature may be considered boring because it takes patience to appreciate, but I think it is neither primitive nor plain. If some programming reaches the level of art, as in a clever hack, maybe we can tell others about the beauty of the solution. (G. H. Hardy says that "Archimedes will be remembered when Aeschylus is forgotten, because languages die and mathematical ideas do not". At least history has not borne this out - people do find literature easily more beautiful than they do theorems and programs.)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Boo – Dating powered by psychology - <AUTHOR> http://boo.dating <comment><USER2> Some serious issues with the messaging.

1) very sparse amount of info on the front page not enticing me to click download.

2) on the app page the info text in the screenshots are white on light blue making the text near impossible to read.

3) 0 followers on the Twitter account. If you can't even follow your own product then why would I?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the great feedback! Will be working on these soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The keyboard hides your action buttons during signup. I'm running an iPhone X on 13.3.1.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for letting us know! We'll look into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> How do you plan to launch?</comment>


Linguistic Cracking of Passphrases Using Markov Chains [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.simovits.com/sites/default/files/files/PederSparell_Linguistic_Cracking_of_Passphrases_using_Markov_Chains.pdf <comment><USER2> I thought passphrase was supposed to be a series of random words. If you use natural sentences you limit the choice of words.

<comment><USER3> Nothing on Earth is safe and uncrackable, given enough time and compute power. We are living in paranoid. Password and passphrase are theoretically no different. You can generate a password like the one below and you can considered that as a passphrase. "Password" and "Passphrase" are just labels/names. I have passwords which are probably more secured than a passphrase because of length, more use of upper case/lower case/number/special characters.

Passphrase (which is supposed to replace the concept of password), should be long and hard to guess, but easier to memorize. Is "bravo multiple Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis mixture chemistry Gordon Ramsay" a better passphrase? Oh sure. But who the hell would come up with this passphrase? Unique but this is something I made up and I expect myself not able to memorize it even if I know how to spell each word right.

Passphrase and password generation by a human is always limited to her own knowledge of things. I just finished playing Battlefield 4 and the random words I am thinking right now are bravo, delta, charlie, because these words are constantly ringing in my ears. I just finished watching Hell Kitchen so Ramsay is on my mind. So there are other channels you can gather what a passphrase is likely to be for a particular user.

My point is, advise user what is a good passphrase/password, but don't make them choose totally random words. Reject ones you know are totally weak. It is hard enough to memorize password, so don't sell passphrase like a huge savior while making it look like a password. You ain't helping. That's the conclusion/advise given by the authors. Security hardness all comes down to the strength of the policy. If you allow a plain English passphrase you are weaker, but a requirement to mix upper/lowercase/special char/number? Back to the traditional password.

Oh and the greatest insult to password/passphrase security? We don't change passwords/passphrase on every site we register. So you are basically screwed from the beginning. This ain't "update OpenSSL and you mitigate X attack."

<comment><USER4> > But who the hell would come up with this passphrase?

Computers could, except for ...

> Unique but this is something I made up and I expect myself not able to > memorize it even if I know how to spell each word right

That's why a wordlist of _common_ words is generally used as a source.

> Passphrase and password generation by a human is always limited to her own > knowledge of things.

That's why passwords should not be generated by a human, but a computer.

> My point is, advise user what is a good passphrase/password, but don't make > them choose totally random words

Don't make them choose words at all. Give them tools that generate the passwords for them.

<comment><USER3> If you have a word list you are no better than choosing a phrase you invented. If you are searching for random word on the Internet, you are also likely to suffer from common words appearing on the Internet. Password generation means memorizing something very hard and a lot of push to use passphrase is to get rid of the traditional password generation and different password requirement policy. You are better off generating a SHA256 hash of some random source (from /dev/urandom or /dev/random) if we were to generate random password.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://github.com/sparell/phraser](https://github.com/sparell/phraser)

</comment><comment><USER6> Texas nitrogen snail purple penut.

Every word from a different domain, complete with a word I often misspell, and at least one word not in the top 10,000 most common words. I think you're going to need a bigger Markov Chain.

<comment><USER7> No, unless you obtained these words using a crypto-rated PRNG. Otherwise your passphrase is vulnerable to semantic network analysis (somewhat more complicated than Markov chains, but still trivial).

Sorry, humans can't generate secure passwords and passphrases anymore. (You still can memorize secure passwords, but it becomes increasingly harder).

<comment><USER8> Yes, this. If you want a password that is secure against a bruteforce attack, I would strongly advice against making it up yourself. You will never know the entropy of your password and it could be anything.

I personally just generate 10 passphrases from a wordlist and take the one the I like the most. This way you get both – predictable entropy and good chances of getting something you can remember. Even though I could never quite figure out which effect the "pick one of ten" method exactly has on the entropy :). If anybody has any good input on that, I would be very happy to hear it.

If you have a wordlist that contains information on the type of word, you can generate grammatically valid sentences without loosing too much entropy. I wrote a tool to this in my native language (german) and I get sentences like "schleimendes Hervorbringen transportiert krampflösend". This (very) roughly translates to "slimy production transports anticonvulsantly". The german sentence has an entropy of 52 bit.

<comment><USER9> > which effect the "pick one of ten" method exactly has on the entropy

Probably impossible to say exactly without knowing what your brain is doing when it picks one. But let's be pessimistic and suppose it picks the "nicest" in some global sense and that "nicest" is the same for everyone (or, at least, that an attacker knows what you consider "nicest".

Then the question is this. Generate _m_ samples uniformly from {1,...,N} (with replacement? without? That depends on exactly what you do if you happen to get two passphrases the same, but the probability of this is small enough that it likely doesn't matter) and take the smallest; what's the entropy of the resulting probability distribution?

That seems like a difficult combinatorial question, so let's consider a continuous approximation. If we pick numbers uniformly on [0,1] and take the min of m of them, the CDF is 1-(1-t)^m because the probability the min is >= t equals the probability all m numbers are >= t, so the pdf is m(1-t)^(m-1). We can compute the continuous entropy of this distribution (if both Wolfram Alpha and I have done our parts right, the answer is - log m + 1 - 1/m) and of the uniform distribution (zero). Continuous entropies are kinda meaningless but in the limit their differences equal those of the corresponding discrete distributions -- and for large N we are close to that limit.

So I think what this means is that by picking the "nicest" of m choices, you lose log(m) - 1 + 1/m nats of entropy. (Divide by log 2 for the number of bits.)

Crappy simple approximation to those: you lose log(m) nats of entropy (log2(m) bits), which is just the same as if you divided the number of possible passphrases by m. In reality the amount you lose is a little less.

So, e.g., if m=10 you lose about 1.4 nats or 2 bits. (The crappy approximation says 2.3 bits.)

<comment><USER8> Thanks a lot for this clear analysis. I had gotten till the "difficult combinatorial question" and was stuck. Didn't think of just going into continuous space.

The "crappy approximation" is actually what I used up until now and it's good to see that I wasn't wrong in assuming it would overestimate the loss.

You made one small mistake at the end: The approximation says you loose 2.3 nats = 3.32 bits, so they actually differ by over a bit.

Btw: What did you ask wolfram alpha to get the -log m + 1 - 1/m? It was out of computation time when I asked :) [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-+int_0^1+%28m*%281-x%2...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=-+int_0^1+%28m*%281-x%29^%28m-1%29%29+*+log%28%28m*%281-x%29^%28m-1%29%29%29++dx) Or do you have a subscription?

<comment><USER9> > You made one small mistake at the end

Oh yes, so I did. Sorry about that.

> What did you ask wolfram alpha to get the -log m + 1 - 1/m?

This, I think: [http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Integrate[m+t^%28m-1%29...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Integrate\[m+t^%28m-1%29+Log\[m+t^%28m-1%29\],{t,0,1})]

I get a message about computation time exceeded, but I also get the answer (both the indefinite integral and the definite).

I don't have a subscription.

<comment><USER8> Fascinating ^^. Removing the minus before the integral and changing 1-x to x is the difference that matters. I would have though that wa is so quick with those transformations that it doesn't make a difference. Well, I was wrong :).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> XKCD got it right. Just pick 3 random words from a dictionary and the resulting nonsense will still be easy to remember.

I wrote a script that even estimates the entropy for you based on the available dictionary size:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12646318/tools-for- genera...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12646318/tools-for-generating- strong-passphrases/12646320#12646320)</comment>


Esrille New Keyboard − NISSE - <AUTHOR> http://www.esrille.com/keyboard/

<comment><USER2> You'd think for $500 it might come with a USB cable.</comment>


TechAMA - <AUTHOR> https://techama.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> The site has lots of other channels too.</comment>


Close Look at Recent EmDrive Paper - <AUTHOR> http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36890 <comment><USER2> Something I'm confused about, and I do RF/microwave engineering work... There's a lot of debate about whether the "thrust" produced is real or is an artifact of the test environment.

But they're only testing at relatively low power levels like 40W, 60W, 80W. There are lots of commercially available sources for Klystron and TWT type amplifiers rated up to 3000W (used for C, Ku and Ka-band satellite earth station Tx applications). If the question is whether it's real, would it not make sense to build a HUGE FUCKING HIGH POWERED test rig with >1500W input?

If we're measuring possible "thurst" in micronewtons, and the claim of the original research is that the thrust will scale somewhat proportionally with the power level applied, does it not make sense to develop an unambiguous result by building a very high powered test rig?

In a theoretical scenario where a high powered test rig produces real measurable thrust that is far too great to be a measurement error, it would be an amount in millinewtons that is far too great to be explained by a non- thrust variable such as thermal expansion/contraction in the power cables, etc.

If the claim is 260 micronewtons at 60W, use COTS klystron and/or TWTA technology to build a 3000W test rig. Question answered.

here are some examples of high powered units for satcom purposes: [http://www.cpii.com/product.cfm/4/13](http://www.cpii.com/product.cfm/4/13)

edit: The thing is described as a "resonant cavity" and operates at 1.9 GHz: [http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120](http://arc.aiaa.org/doi/10.2514/1.B36120)

Looks damn near identical to a weird feed horn to me. The test article looks like a cone or horn antenna with a feed horn stuck onto the back of it. High power capable waveguides and feed horns for big-ass satellite telecom things (like an 11 meter sized C-band Tx/Rx earth station) are a well known science. You can buy them from a myriad of COTS sources.

<comment><USER3> From following EmDrive work a little, my impression is that nobody has the budget to do a high power setup right. Budget was a major limitation in the published NASA work. Also, some artifact sources (e.g. power lead/B field artifacts) would scale up along with power.

<comment><USER4> Yet there are a couple of separate plans to send it into space for testing. I would of thought more terrestrial testing would be much cheaper than sending something to space.

<comment><USER5> Actually cube sats can be pretty damn cheap. A cube sat test rig with off the shelf components could be cheaper than a custom ground experiment.

<comment><USER2> Sufficient watt hours per day to prove this are not available from the PV cells you can mount on a cubesat.

<comment><USER6> Plus you have to pay for launch, even if you piggyback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> All quite interesting but the important bit is in the conclusion: "In addition to mechanical and related considerations, the authors' methods of analysis of sensor data to derive thrusts rests on untenable grounds... Therefore, until more control tests are performed allowing a more accurate method for estimation of thrusts, no faith can be placed in the thrust magnitudes reported in the paper."

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm still curious to know if it could be rectified DC currents in the cavity as I posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13249730)

One of the comments in this threads story, was to place the apparatus is a faraday cage. That does not shield against static magnetic fields. For that you need chambers of multiple layers of high permeability materials, separated by air.

<comment><USER9> Doesnt a vac chamber already make for a reasonable faraday cage?

<comment><USER8> Yes, though not up to standards of a room for RF testing. Though, classic faraday cage does not shield static magnetic fields, like the Earths field.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286160](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13286160)

</comment><comment><USER11> Article summary - the science and the experiment behind the EmDrive claims are flawed.

My take - the people pushing this are charlatans and should be ignored completely.

<comment><USER12> I don't see why they should be ignored. Right now what we have is an unexpected and unexplained effect. The scientific thing to do is to understand what is happening. The fact that the initial claims may be from charlatans is irrelevant.

"We don't understand it and the explanation is likely boring, so let's ignore it" might be a decent engineering tradeoff, but it comes from a goal of cost savings, not from a goal of improving our knowledge of physics. Science is about improving our knowledge and understanding.

<comment><USER11> > Right now what we have is an unexpected and unexplained effect.

It's expected that the people working on this for 15 years would claim to find an effect, since they clearly have an agenda that they want to be seen as right. It's explained by this very article how there are many reasons other than "propulsion-less thrust" that would cause the reported results.

<comment><USER5> Except that the recent work is by new people who were skeptics trying to refute the idea and failed. That's why people are so interested now while no one cared 15 years ago.

<comment><USER6> > new people who were skeptics trying to refute the idea and failed

Jelly beans cause acne. But if you investigate further, only green ones. Unless you keep pouring money down the drain with it, in which case it's only the green ones of a certain weight.

[https://xkcd.com/882/](https://xkcd.com/882/)

<comment><USER5> That has zero relevance to the current situation.

<comment><USER6> No. The relevance is that you aren't going to read of the cases in which someone built the thing and didn't find any effect at all.

<comment><USER5> Except I have. There have been multiple groups working on this, and they have shared their results. Some published, some on blogs. Some have been unsuccessful in getting their noise floor low enough to detect the effect. Those who have (multiple groups now), have found _something_. That's why this is interesting.

This sort of experiment requires a very expensive, delicate laboratory. No one is going to run a replication of this and then not publish in some form, even on a blog or a conference poster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can somebody just put one of these in space already? We're seeing a post every week refuting the previous week's posts.

[http://i.imgur.com/W6CyRnB.gif](http://i.imgur.com/W6CyRnB.gif)

<comment><USER14> That'd just add _more_ uncontrolled variables. What they need to do is stop assuming they can disassociate effects from a superposition with a trend fitted by eye.

<comment><USER15> Not really. You put it in space, turn on the engine, and see if it STAYS in space.

If it crashes to earth after a year, then it clearly doesn't work.

If it steadily starts to escape earth's orbit, then it DOES work.

<comment><USER16> The forces they are claiming are not sufficient to stay in space. Also, some sources of error would provide actual boosts in orbit without being useful as spacecraft engines.

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't an 'actual boost in orbit' be useful in and of itself?

<comment><USER18> Not if it's as inefficient as is claimed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why 0! = 1 - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/dani_akash_/status/1223296729753145351 <comment><USER2> There are more reasons, and it goes a lot deeper, than just following this one pattern. The entire binomial theorem relies on 0! being 1, unless you start putting in huge numbers of exceptions and special cases.

Here's a better answer: [https://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/57128.html](https://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/57128.html)

If you prefer video: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfk_L4Nx2ZI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfk_L4Nx2ZI)

</comment><comment><USER3> The title should be "Why 0! = 1!".

<comment><AUTHOR> had a typo. My intended title was 0! = 1</comment></comment>


There Is No Ctrl-Z in Life - <AUTHOR> http://statspotting.com/there-is-no-ctrl-z-in-life/ <comment><USER2> Suspending it so it can be resumed later? Sure there is.</comment>


3M, Under Attack from White House, Pushes Back - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/3m-under-attack-from-white-house-pushes-back-11585922687 <comment><USER2> De-paywalled: [https://archive.is/pinkQ](https://archive.is/pinkQ)</comment>


The big chill of the censor - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2006/apr/03/mediaguardian1.comment

<comment><USER2> > "At a recent business conference, I heard CEOs tell FCC chairman Kevin > Martin to ... get America to broadband parity with Korea and even France. > Instead, I told him, he was wasting his time, fining farts. And bullshit."

I wasn't able to find the On the Media interview referenced in the article, but this week's is all about free speech post Hebdo: [http://www.onthemedia.org/story/on-the- media-2015-01-09/?utm...](http://www.onthemedia.org/story/on-the- media-2015-01-09/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=%24%7Bfeed%7D&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+%24%7Botm%7D+%28%24%7BOn+the+Media%7D%29)</comment>


Ask HN: Is RSS dead? - <AUTHOR> Or is there a hope for new clients on web and mobile . <comment><USER3> I think a lot of people think RSS is dead because they never see it promoted anywhere. Pretty much every web site has a row of social media icons, but hardly ever is there an RSS icon in the row, even if the web site supports it.

Frankly, I don't think most people who run web sites even know that the framework/CMS/rolfburger they're using automatically publishes RSS feeds for them.

Yesterday I stumbled across an app called Fraidy Cat, which is supposed to be a privacy-focused news ingester. I haven't done much with it yet, but I was surprised when I pasted in the URLs of several newspapers that I read, the program showed RSS feeds for all of them. None of the paper web sites have any mention of RSS at all.

Edit: Even the New York Times has RSS:

Latest: [https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml](https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml)

New York: [https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion](https://www.nytimes.com/section/nyregion)

Technology: [https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology](https://www.nytimes.com/section/technology)

Science: [https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://w...](https://www.nytimes.com/svc/collections/v1/publish/https://www.nytimes.com/section/science/rss.xml)

<comment><USER4> I think it's Wordpress that enables /rss on a ton of websites.

I've recently needed to get RSS feeds and a good number of times I can find it via /rss or view the source of the site and search for xml.

<comment><USER5> Ooh, i stumbled across this one site that I wanted to add to my feed reader, didn't find <link rel="alternative"> tags in the header, but a <link rel="[https://api.w.org/">](https://api.w.org/">) tag. I'm not sure it is their intention to open up the WordPress back-end, but I found how to get the list of articles from it, so added support for it to my own feed-reader: [https://github.com/stijnsanders/feeder#feeder](https://github.com/stijnsanders/feeder#feeder)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Opened this post using RSS in Inoreader. All my news comes via RSS. I use it for news sites, I use it for Medium and I also use it for Reddit. The nice thing about it, is that everything stays in one place, categorized and I can see unread counts. Especially useful while checking reddit feeds. There's no infinite scroll and I can clearly see/mark what's been read and what's not. I can come back later and continue from where I left or review my favorites. If the site does not have RSS, or I can't make it appear in Inoreader - <USER2> likely I won't be visiting it again, or at least not scrolling daily. RSS gives you freedom and saves you _a lot_ of time.

<comment><USER7> I use it for eBay and Kijiji. Great for sniping.

<comment><USER8> I use Inoreader too, care to explain how do you use it for ebay? I've tried to add sub from ebay url to no avail..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> By asking the question using the word "dead"[0] which has such offensive connotations, it will spur some to say "it's not dead" \-- which isn't really going to be productive for what I think you're _really_ asking.

First, in one sense (but doesn't really answer your question) ... the old protocols like RSS (feeds), NNTP (news), IRC (chat), etc are never going to be "dead" because _somebody_ somewhere will always be providing it and somebody somewhere will always be consuming it. Just like horse & buggies are not truly "dead" because a few are being run for tourists and the Amish communities, there are some old dialup BBS's serving callers with old modems even though the internet+web has supplanted it.

I think the longer form of your question for productive discussion is this: Is RSS usage _decline_ possible to reverse with new clients on the web & mobile?

The answer is no. RSS/NNTP/IRC don't have the incentives (both economic and social) that allow them to experience a renaissance. E.g. StackOverflow may someday be supplanted by another Q&A site but it won't be supplanted by NNTP news forums. Same with RSS. Typical mass consumers use Facebook as their "rss" reader. It won't matter what kind of new RSS reader you develop, the typical web surfers don't want to manage RSS feeds.

[0] to the replies below about why "dead" often triggers unproductive arguments:

In observing decades of debates on USENET,BBSs,web, etc... the word "dead" has _2 very different meanings_ which needlessly causes participants to talk right past each other.

meaning #1: "dead" is _harmless_ synonym for "decline", "losing popularity", "no longer supported", "no longer in mainstream use", etc.

meaning #2: "dead" is _provocative_ synonym for "no longer worth learning", "useless", "stopped working forever", "nobody intelligent is using it", etc.

The amazing phenomenon that happens with asking _" Is X Dead?"_ is that the question _asker_ is almost always _innocently using meaning #1_ but the most enthusiastic _answerers are using meaning #2_. This is why "dead" triggers unproductive threads because both sides are talking past each other with different semantics of "dead".

<comment><USER10> RSS does play a growing role in a few places: podcasts [1] and virtual assistant apps (e.g. Alexa [2], Google Home[3], etc.) Although in both cases consumers do not tend to have direct access to it.

1\. [https://itunespartner.apple.com/podcasts/articles/creating-y...](https://itunespartner.apple.com/podcasts/articles/creating- your-show_requirements)

2\. [https://developer.amazon.com/en- US/docs/alexa/flashbriefing/...](https://developer.amazon.com/en- US/docs/alexa/flashbriefing/flash-briefing-skill-api-feed-reference.html)

3\. [https://developers.google.com/news/assistant/newsbriefings/t...](https://developers.google.com/news/assistant/newsbriefings/technical- requirements)

<comment><USER11> I remember a time before RSS in the late 1990s.

Now, for the past 6 years, I use RSS as my primary method of downloading podcast episodes and webcomic issues. I'm currently subscribed to about 60.

Dead? No. Declining? I can't say that for myself let alone writ large.

<comment><USER12> If some site chirps 'listen to our podcast', I'll have a look for acceptable (e.g. no password) feed URLs. If they don't make one obvious, they've lost their chance. Generally, IME those worth downloading offer RSS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> See [http://isrssdead.com](http://isrssdead.com)

For my part I'm currently building and updating a feedreader / feedparser kit that lets you build a newsfeed in minutes [1] or use a ready-made client such as rubynews [2]

[1]: [https://github.com/feedreader/news.rb](https://github.com/feedreader/news.rb) [2]: [https://github.com/planetruby/planet/tree/master/rubynews](https://github.com/planetruby/planet/tree/master/rubynews)

PS: The stats on Planet Ruby for RSS vs ATOM are:

Q: What feed formats are in use? Formats (n=51)

      atom        (52%) | ******************************* 27

      rss 2.0     (47%) | **************************** 24

</comment><comment><USER14> RSS the protocol, or RSS the experience? The Protocol is alive and kicking, as far as being available, but it's been more or less killed by publishers not promoting it out of the box. AFAIK ad revenue is basically the reason.

The replacement set of broadcast tools is still Facebook, Twitter, Direct, and Newsletters. Newsletters are really the new feed.

<comment><USER15> I have yet to find a website that I feel should have an RSS feed that doesn't have one.

<comment><USER7> The Globe & Mail shut down their RSS feed a while ago. They're dead to me now.

<comment> 52-6F-62 Whoa they did? I haven't been using RSS as much lately but I've been reading less news.

I wonder if it's because they hardened their paywall.

That's disappointing. For a while they were the most forward Canadian paper, digitally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Is RSS Dead

Have you heard of podcasts? They're _booming_ and they rely on RSS. The way they're subscribed to and the way they're submitted to large platforms is via their RSS feeds.

<comment><USER17> The podcast industry might be booming, but the days of nearly every podcast being freely available with an RSS feed is certainly over. Granted this is mostly a business decision rather than a technical decision. Companies like Spotify want you to listen to their podcasts on their platform. This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.

<comment><USER18> > This allows them to better track ad statistics and push other revenue > streams compared to podcasts served over traditional RSS feeds.

It's not just better ad statistics -- with apps like Stitcher/Spotify, the app contains both discovery and download, and also the player. When you listen to podcasts on their apps, they're able to report useful, interesting metrics to podcast producers like skip rate, bounce rate, etc. They're valuable metrics.

As far as I know, podcasts that are distributed by RSS and consumed by the apple podcasts app / any other app don't gather these metrics. There's no reason they _couldn 't_ though, because RSS / Atom have plenty of flexibility to add a field for a metric reporting callback/webhook. We could have an open convention for what goes over that webhook, maybe even some competition in providing podcast playback metrics as a service.

(... does this all exist already and I'm just behind the times?)

<comment><USER19> There are plenty of 'open' standards[0] for webhooking and reporting ads, however there isn't much client support. As far as listening metrics go, Apple has implemented non intrusive podcast analytics already[1].

Podcasts work really well as is. They don't need fixing. Barrier to entries are low, and like the early days of youtube, you can have a successful podcast with a relatively low production value. They are published openly, monetizing gets easier with some traction. There is so much cross promotion that discoverability isn't a challenge either. I just hope the 'open podcast ecosystem' can resist attempts to be destroyed by Spotify/Luminary etc. This happy medium doesn't need personalized targeted advertising.

[0]: [https://rad.npr.org/dotorg/about-rad/](https://rad.npr.org/dotorg/about- rad/) [1]: [https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/501/](https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2018/501/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'd say it's on the decline, yes.

I have quite a few websites in my RSS Reader (I love TinyTinyRSS) and over the last 2-3 years I've seen probably ~10 sites get "makeovers" and every time, the RSS feed I was using for those sites has gone away/broken. Each time I've emailed them to ask "Oh hey are you going to bring back RSS" and of the ~4 that replied, 1 bought it back ~3 months later, the other 3 said "Nope, no one uses it" and the others didn't even reply.

So yes, it's on a steep decline I'd say. I love the "But Podcasts use it" argument! There's what, ~100 major podcast sites people use? Yes, RSS is the backend workhorse that makes it work, but the podcast(content) producers aren't using RSS, they'll be uploading their content to a website. RSS is just the backend magic that makes the podcast clients work.

RSS at most sites seems to suffer bitrot. Sometimes the RSS URL is still http when the site has moved to https etc etc.

It's sad to see the decline of it, because an RSS Reader really is a beautiful thing. But yes, RSS as a way to exposing content to people is dying and used by only a very few hardcore "oldschool" people these days I'd suggest.

</comment><comment><USER21> According to my httpd logs, between 50 and 100 people[1] are fetching my (not particularly popular) blog via RSS daily. That's enough people for it to be (personally) worth ensuring that RSS continues to function.

Whether that meets the standard of being "alive" is probably a community judgement.

[1]: The exact number is hard to get, since a lot of feed hits are for RSS services and not all of them announce their subscriber count in their user agent.

</comment><comment><USER22> No. Podcast is booming. And podcasts are distributed via rss. Every podcast player is basically a rss client.

<comment><USER23> The industry's seeming loss of interest in RSS as a technology does have me wondering, is there a replacement for podcasts? Are podcasts migrating away from RSS as their primary distribution concern? If there is a replacement, is it platform-independent like RSS or does it hinge on a single company like Apple?

<comment><USER24> I think podcasters generally only care about RSS because it's how to get into the Apple Podcasts app.

There are many hosting companies that will create friction and pain if a consumption platform attempts to vertically integrate and eliminate the idea that you can publish a podcast on any web server, but we're already in a world where some of the consumption platforms have distinct flavors of RSS published especially for them.

Not hard to imagine one of them offering better support if you use a more custom integration, which it's not impossible to imagine major hosting providers building.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Newsblur is my Internet's start page. We use MS Teams at work and I have noticed that coworkers have setup RSS subscription channels to follow businesses, etc.

I use hidden RSS feeds on many websites (/feed on Wordpress for example), it is a shame they are not visible.

<comment><USER26> Thanks for mentioning this. I dug up my old NewsBlur account and it's pretty slick. I had a lot of issues with Feedly and other aggregators. I was pleasantly surprised to find that a lot of the sites I visit have RSS feeds still.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I use TinyTinyRSS every day and it's my primary way to access the internet. I can say that in my bubble it's not dead.

<comment><USER28> I literally just discovered and installed tt-rss last week, and it's revolutionized my daily online reading (and listening)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Firstly - call out to Dave Winer - his work on outliners and RSS have both proven incredible useful, influential and long lasting.

Is RSS dead? No not by a long shot. Is it as visible as it was in bloggings early days nearly 20 years ago when the spec had been written (2002) and the orange logo was displayed on websites - certainly not.

I think the question needs context - Are you aiming to use it to syndicate content and expect an audience boost because your using RSS- then unlikely - but thats more to do with the state of blogging and syndication in general versus alternative publishing platforms such as facebook and medium.

Are you looking to use it for a syndication standard to base an implementation on for an app or tooling? If the later then you will find RSS has proven itself a rather nice spec that is utterly boring and stable - which is exactly what you want. It is not sexy, nor is it fashionable but it can be foundational - you can build on it and it does what the spec says. No one is likely to applaud your choice - its an old format but a goodie and if you coose to build on it for what its designed for then your likely to get the job done. If you dont like XML and prefer JSON - Manton Reece and Brent Simmons' JSONFeed also does a great job.

</comment><comment><USER30> Literally used rss to see this question lol

<comment><USER31> Lol, same here

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> This seems to be a question regularly popping up. My answer: it's not dead. I, and I think many other people, still use RSS.

My reply to a similar question on HN: [https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/12/do-you-still-use- rss/](https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2019/12/do-you-still-use-rss/)

<comment><USER33> I got to this article via RSS. Using Start.me to organize a lovely page full of feeds.

<comment><USER34> Thanks for start.me. I just registered. I forgot these kind of portals still exist. I used to have netvibes.com but for some reason I stopped using it. I will give another try with Start.me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> No, i use RSS every day to read HN, among 163 other things.

<comment><USER36> Same here. Found this HN item via RSS.

Recently switched to FreshRSS (from tt-rss), running on my own system. I very much prefer sites that provide an RSS feed, or that can be made to have one with something like RSS-Bridge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> To the average consumer: yes. Why? Almost all news sites, blogs, journalists, etc. use Facebook pages and other social media as "RSS feeds" for their own websites. When people "like" a Facebook page or "follow" a Twitter account, they are basically adding that outlet to their RSS feed. And when they scroll through Facebook or Twitter, they are consuming that feed.

Social media has replaced RSS feeds for the vast majority of people. They tailor their feed by choosing who to follow and which pages to like, and the writers / media producers ensure that new content is automatically cross posted to their social media accounts so that it appears in people's feeds.

For tech people / people that read more niche sites, RSS is useful, but RSS will never become mainstream or widely adopted given the already widespread adoption of other Internet feeds such as social media platforms.

</comment><comment><USER38> We're working full time on [https://feeder.co](https://feeder.co) and growing MRR every month. Does the average consumer know what RSS is? No. Will it become the next Twitter anytime soon? Probably not. Is there a need for managing news outside of your e-mail inbox, our usage data definitely shows yes. Is the market ultra saturated? You betcha!

That said we're eager to help grow the space. Would love to know if HN has any ideas or feedback on this.

</comment><comment><USER39> I love RSS, using IFTTT tools, I can automate and share different feeds to other different sites, populating and share information from static portals. I can even make RSS feeds from sites that dont offer native RSS.

Many different sites offer RSS feeds, many people dont even know they exist unless they are webmasters or advanced users.

Podcasts are based around RSS feeds, even youtube offers RSS feeds. This really is a powerful tool that is all over that you can use to build core infrastructure for social media and knowledge bases. You would be surprised how many backends of websites uses RSS to spread links around the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER40> Nobody saw anything wrong in RSS until Google Reader came along, then everyone started using the reader, then content creators realized that GR is stealing thunder and started dropping RSS, and then GR died and we ended up with no Reader and no RSS.

It's certainly not dead, but it's not as popular as it used to be.

</comment><comment><USER41> I used Live Bookmarks (powered by RSS) to get to this post. I hope not!

I have a pet pipe dream that once symmetric upload/download is a thing vs. ADSL (whether FTTH or 5G effects this, I dare not speculate) in 10-20 years, mesh networks and fediverse style stuff will have their greatest opportunity in years to leverage open protocols like RSS, Delta.Chat's chatting over autocrypt-encrypted emails, chat-over-Wifi-SSID and more to split open the walled gardens that people are in mainly because of their network effects and lack of a convenient alternative.

</comment><comment> undefined-1 I think there is hope. Ask sites for RSS feeds (especially podcasts, which often forget to link to the RSS feeds). Build interesting new things with it that inspire other people to build things with it. Convince browsers to make RSS friendlier. Mozilla should have Firefox at least tell people what do with RSS when they click the button instead of downloading a raw XML file: "you clicked an RSS feed -- would you like to download this extension to read it?"

</comment><comment><USER42> I wrote a rss/atom reader just a few months ago. I use it every day. Fully open sourced and written in Golang.

[https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss](https://github.com/Lallassu/gorss)

</comment><comment><USER43> I have used RSS daily for longer than I can accurately say. Since at least when Opera had a built in RSS client. When Google Reader died I switched to [https://g2reader.com](https://g2reader.com) and have been using that daily since.

I don't know how younger people do it but I can't see any other way to get my preferred news in one organized headline only in an outline-like place. Maybe I am just old school but I really like RSS as I am able to get through headlines from tech, finance, etc on daily basis and go through them quickly. Anything that pikes my interest I click on the headline and it takes me to the site to read whole article. One of my favorite things to do while winding down in bed.

RSS though is like a foreign language to the under 35 crowd when I have brought it up or they have seen me using it. So it is already dead in that sense. They just prefer to get their news through Instagram/Facebook feeds or just visiting their few preferred websites directly.

<comment><USER44> I'm 30 and know 20 year olds using it. It is invaluable to them and to me. Not everyone is a social media junkie.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Google Reader literally killed all Web and Clients side RSS development. It make sense it lives on the web rather than an App. And it was one of the best RSS Reader.

I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days, but I have been using Feedly since Reader discontinued. And as long as they keep their free tier I dont see myself stop using them.

I think most people who use RSS are nerds or geeks anyway. So in terms of usage it is very small in the world where we have 4 billion Smartphone users. And I dont even look for RSS icon in website. I just search it inside Feedly to see if they have it listed. And most of the time they do.

The problem with RSS is no one has figure out a sustainable business model or UX for the majority of the market.

Is Something "Dead" in tech often means something entirely different to its literal sense. What the precise word you are / may be looking for is declining.

<comment><USER46> > I am not sure what RSS Reader people are using these days

Reeder is the best RSS application I've seen. I sync it with Feedly on macOS and iOS. Vienna RSS is another solid (open source!) option on mac, although the UI isn't as nice as Reeder.

Linux users have FeedReader, which seems pretty great.

I haven't found a client I love on Windows. There's a lot of abandoned applications that look and feel a few decades old.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> RSS powers podcasts. 110+ feeds in my feed reader come from extremely diverse sources. It isn't dead yet.

Spotify, iHeartRadio, and others want to wall off podcasts but their selection is still too limited. Frankly their apps frustrate me greatly. Trying to play things back on Xubuntu while writing is too much of a challenge compared to pairing gPodder & VLC.

I have a blog and a newsletter that doesn't duplicate the blog. Using TinyLetter forces me to shoot for long form pieces and to get them in good shape. I also end up approaching things in the newsletter that I don't on my blog.

I can't remember if the bot on Telegram is fed by RSS but that's how I spotted this anyhow...

</comment><comment><USER48> My feed reader app is my go to app when I'm bored. I will say its becoming less prominent. Half the time I want to add a site I have to guess where rss feed is generated since its less common to link to it. Apple makes the experience worse on iOS since rss link open in the News app but it doesn't support rss.

Some new sites don't have it at all, when [https://www.thefarside.com/](https://www.thefarside.com/) came to life I didn't have a way to follow it until someone made feed based on scraping.

Most sites seem to have a sitemap for search, I wish my reader app could fall back to that.

</comment><comment><USER49> I hope not, or I'll never read a single web comic, photo journal, or blog ever again, including corporate blogs.

</comment><comment><USER50> RSS/Atom still has its place and for many is still the favorite way to subscribe to content on the internet. I built my own feed reader just a few months ago. On top of it I added a simple recommendation algorithm based on statistics of my reading behavior and article topics. I prefer the simplicity and accessibility of RSS. The standard itself plays more or less a secondary role nowadays. The various feed readers building on top it are still innovating and still attract new users.

</comment><comment><USER51> It takes like 20 seconds to add an Rss feed to whatever feed generator software you've been writing. For the love of God please take those 20 seconds to help people like us!

</comment><comment><USER52> 2 weeks ago, I released a Python package (700+ stars on GitHub) that "automagically scrapes" the last news from more than 3k news sources. You just have to provide the base form of URL.

Behind the package is just a list of websites and their RSS URLs.

For example, the input is "nytimes.com" and the output is all the latest news.

So, it's quite alive.

GitHub: [https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher](https://github.com/kotartemiy/newscatcher)

</comment><comment><USER53> If the European countries want to see competition in social media they ought to require that platforms support open protocols such as RSS, XMPP, SIP, etc.

It drives me nuts that Facebook Messenger does exactly what Skype does, which does exactly what AIM did, which did exactly what ICQ did, etc.

None of these platforms get better, in fact, each one rots over time, driving people to whatever the next platform is -- people keep moving to escape the rot but they never get ahead.

</comment><comment><USER54> I've recently released a new type of reader: [https://fraidyc.at/](https://fraidyc.at/)

It's a bit much to try to explain in the comments here - but I am glad to answer questions and hear from others who are trying this kind of thing. RSS isn't dead at all - in fact, I'm introducing some extensions for it next week.

<comment><USER55> Thats very confident colour scheme you've got going on there. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I think I sort of take my internet access for granted. Because I never use RSS since at any time I can open a browser or an app and get the news.

Imo there are two uses for RSS. 1) People who still scroll through a digest of news at certain times in their day. I envy these people for their disciplined habits.

2) And having a service that syncs news to your device via RSS for when you're not online.

<comment><USER57> Or 3) People who have realized that clicking around on different sites for news is a massive waste of time compared to having the news come to you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> RSS is not dead, but it's not cool to ship RSS clients in new projects. It's consumed far and wide, both directly and indirectly from readers, leechers, and listeners; it's used inside products and projects ranging from enterprise to mom-and-pop shops.

Do I need a list? Nah. If I did, it'd be more telling about me than RSS anyways.

</comment><comment><USER59> Absolutely not! I use Reeder on the Mac to keep up with my favorite blogs, and most of them (I'd say 90%) support RSS.

</comment><comment><USER60> No. My entire business is based on RSS. And it's doing great. I'm a podcaster. All podcasts are RSS feeds.

</comment><comment><USER61> Every site that removes RSS is dead to me.

</comment><comment><USER62> No, it's just unpopular with mainstream-users, and kinda dying for newssources. As a format there seems to be not much improvment done in the last decade, as an ecosystem there are always new clients and libs, but no innovation is done IMHO, it's always the same set of features being implemented. As a longtime user of at least 15+ years now I've seen some strong dying of feeds in the last years, To the point that I'm thinking now aboubt alternative ways to scrap data from my sources. I think most existing feeds are more a case of legacy code in popular frameworks. Also, there are many new sources growing which are build without RSS for commercial reasons. So having alternative source-scrapers is a neccessary anyway.

</comment><comment><USER61> Part of the problem with RSS feeds is that they have to be found more often than not.

This is one of the few reasons I still use 'View Source' functionality in browsers.

Even with this downside, it is still way better than some website-specific account thing you have to sign up for (Hello, SmackJeeves)

</comment><comment><USER63> RSS is still alive but maybe not as a direct data source, still it can be super useful. Less than 24 hours ago it let me give access to a daily report to anyone via email (registration at the bottom here [https://nichecommerce.net/reports/daily_ecommerce_pulse/2020...](https://nichecommerce.net/reports/daily_ecommerce_pulse/2020/03/05/#emailsub) RSS: [https://nichecommerce.net/latest/feed/](https://nichecommerce.net/latest/feed/) \- MailService: mailerlite.com)

</comment><comment><USER64> Using it daily… reading 300+ titles and around 50 full articles every day of the year… Definitely not dead for me. I can't even imagine how I'd read as much /interesting/ content in as little time without RSS.

<comment><USER65> Similar, so RSS is not dead, despite google's best efforts $#%%###!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> Nope! I use newsblur and it is absolutely fantastic on web/mobile/whatever.

</comment><comment><USER67> I still read my news in my Winds RSS reader, put in quite a few commits to it as well: [https://github.com/GetStream/winds](https://github.com/GetStream/winds)

</comment><comment><USER68> I hope not! I use it rather heavily, every day.

</comment><comment><USER69> No. I read HN through RSS, as well as around 200 other sites. I would never be bothered to check them all manually, and this affords me a much higher signal to noise ratio over a much shorter period of time.

There simply is no substitute.

</comment><comment><USER70> Rss / Atom is not dead, but it has become part of B2B stacks rather than being a standalone B2C format. Considering it's XML, it was somewhat naive (in retrospect) to hope for anything different.

Btw, Podcasting is an interesting window on what an XML-powered web might have been: a multitude of different specialised clients and semantic aggregators, consuming content in agnostic formats, with no dependency on a handful of big browsers. Like a 1955 illustration of "Tomorrow World", it still looks like a nice future, even though we know it will probably never happen.

</comment><comment><USER44> No, I use it every day. There isn't an alternative to subscribe to lots of feeds of specialist things. It's a great tool for anybody who needs to supplement regular journalistic output with

As to new clients, it's hard to say. Gnome RSS just became a thing (relatively recently, emphasis on relatively) and I love it. AntennaPod is great for podcast subscriptions and I find Feeder is perfectly adequate on mobile.

It is a specialist tool though. That's the thing. It means it is as likely to get a new set of shiny clients as say, IRC. Which is to say, probably not.

</comment><comment><USER71> Every interesting blog I run across hosts an RSS feed of some kind too, with only 1 or 2 exceptions in... almost 5 years?

Not dead. Absurdly useful. Quite possibly niche, but is it a niche of valuable users? Maybe.

</comment><comment><USER72> The reason RSS is not dead is because it is relatively free. The people who don't want it on their website remove the RSS button from their list of share- buttons. They have no clue that their website still supports it.

Example: Vice wrote an article titled "The rise and demise of RSS" (you can google it). Now go to their homepage, look at the page source, and there you go:

        <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="vice" href="http..redacted..."/>

</comment><comment><USER73> I use this, works perfectly fine on daily/frequent basis (not dead): [https://feedreader.com/online](https://feedreader.com/online)

</comment><comment><USER74> I'm currently writing a new client for RSS, which is dead. Framework of choice is Rails - which is also dead.

This thread inspires me to pull in some jQuery and change the project name to Graveyard.

<comment><USER55> +1 for the name Graveyard. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> I wrote a fast feed aggregator a couple months ago. I've found I've read HN less because of it, and have read more of what I'm interested in. RSS feeds are fantastic, could still be improved though (eg pagination of feeds).

[https://www.bilbof.com/following](https://www.bilbof.com/following)

It's open source if you want to run your own: [https://github.com/bilbof/feed](https://github.com/bilbof/feed)

</comment><comment><USER76> I do use Facebook to get at news but that's a feed someone else (well, an AI) curated for me.

Which is often useful but mostly I'd like to be the one who decides about the sources to check out. Then I turn to a feed reader. I would be driven insane if this technology were not at hand, aggregating a plethora of resources into a single comprehensive UI. I use the excellent Bazqux Reader for this (which in my opinion continues the legacy of Google Reader in the best way).

</comment><comment><USER77> I am currently using Feedly with their recent "Leo" feature and it is really interesting how well it works.

It requires some setup and imho is a bit expensive (Pro+ plan required) but this announcement should give a good overview of its capabilities: [https://blog.feedly.com/leo/](https://blog.feedly.com/leo/)

Innovation in the RSS space is still happening and therefore I wouldn't call it 'dead'.

</comment><comment><USER78> RSS feeds aren't dead. On the contrary, their usage for content aggregation, media monitoring and podcasts has increased in the past few years, specially by power users (inforvores) and in the business world.

Speaking from my own experience running Feedity - [https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), a growing service that helps with custom feeds for unstructured sources like webpages.

<comment><USER79> Does feedity allow me to generate an RSS feed for sites that do not provide it?

<comment><USER78> Yes, for almost any public webpage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER80> Hey, I'm trying to revive it somewhat! You Need Feeds is my attempt to create an explainer and RSS promo page. (I admit the copy and design needs a refresh, and I still haven't done a proper Android page...) [https://www.youneedfeeds.com/](https://www.youneedfeeds.com/) Suggestions welcome...

</comment><comment><USER81> Feed reader support for JSONFeed (Brent Simmons and Manton Reece, jsonfeed.org) is quite unclear at the moment; maybe only iOS Reeder apart from NetNewsWire?

It's a pity, as Web feeds in JSON can be produced in a more ad-hoc fashion – an even more simple format with one entry per JSON feed line (admittedly with redundancy across lines) would have been great, too.

</comment><comment><USER82> It's only dead insofar as most blogs don't have a decent RSS feed to begin with. I've scoured the web looking for high quality RSS feeds that are updated regularly, and have even shared an OPML file with close friends who happen to really like RSS too. The amount of effort was astonishing gathering those RSS feeds, but it was worth it.

<comment><AUTHOR> care to list a few?!

<comment><USER82> No, but if you look around Hackernews there are plenty of blogs that have a high quality RSS feed. I'm not sharing my own personal preferences on here with others for privacy reasons. By high quality, I mean the content is exceptional and not blogspam and the content is updated regularly. Bonus points if the RSS feed is not a list of 'summaries' and includes the full content of each post. Even more bonus points if the feed doesn't have ADs and 'share this on Facebook' links :)

<comment><USER57> Privacy reasons? You created your account 3 days ago and have a couple posts. Moreover, I don't understand how mentioning blogs hurts your privacy.

<comment><USER82> Yes. Privacy reasons. Sometimes privacy is about consent, and I do not consent to sharing the blogs that I follow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> No, but I certainly don't find it as useful as it used to be. Used to be able to add newsfeeds to an RSS feeder and actually be able to _read_ the news. Now the ticker is just the headline or one-to-two sentences, with a URL to the full article. Why bother with a bloody RSS feed if I'm gonna have to open my browser anyway?

<comment><USER84> For most sites, BazQux Reader (in my opinion, the absolute best RSS reader), can pull in the entire article even if the RSS feed only provides a headline or abbreviated version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I wrote an thing a couple years back. [https://davepeck.org/2018/08/16/revisiting- rss/](https://davepeck.org/2018/08/16/revisiting-rss/) \-- for me, anyway, RSS is still a key part of my daily work and leisure.

</comment><comment><USER86> I use Feedly myself which pulls in articles via RSS. I even got into this thread with an RSS link. Frankly, it's a great resource to keep up with different blogs and sites without having them all live in your bookmarks bar.

</comment><comment><USER87> Almost everyone probably already has a rss client at work. It's called Outlook.

</comment><comment><USER88> No way! I use The Old Reader and it's a great way to kinda deal with FOMO; having feeds in one place from various outlets. It's only annoying when some news sites don't have RSS/Atom feeds.. meh

</comment><comment><USER89> At my work we considered removing the RSS functionality, a quick analysis showed it fed a whole bunch of apps both internal and external. It's definitely alive and heavily used just not as much by humans

</comment><comment><USER90> Keep in mind, the goal of RSS is and always was to serve as a sort of _shim_ between the simplest, most static of websites (the ones that live an entirely- static life, which don't run code during the rendering lifecycle, and therefore which can't call out to tell anyone about their new content) and users (who want to receive a notification or message somehow anyway.)

RSS was largely supposed to be a hidden bit of infrastructure, allowing some intermediary (like an RSS-to-email-digest gateway, or a news aggregator service) to _scrape_ the RSS feed and convert that _into_ useful notifications/events/messages in some form. The idea was that you, as an author, would _pick_ one of these services, set up an account with it, and _point_ it at your RSS feed URL; and then you'd put a link to that service on your page, which your users could then subscribe to, in place of subscribing to your site itself. Just like a regular email-notification service, but with the webhook part "turned around" so that it's the service poking your server, rather than your server poking the service.

"RSS Readers" were never meant to happen; RSS was never meant to be used as a direct link between authors and users. If you think about it, such a direct M:N link is exactly the opposite of what an author with a simple static resource-constrained blog wants—their whole user-base would now constantly be polling their (or their ISP's) dinky little server! (But it's fine in practice, since we eventually got Cloudflare and PuSH.)

If you're a content author with a full-on web-app, you _can_ call out (with webhooks, or messages in a message queue, or even API calls to a service like Sendgrid or Twilio), and so, for you, RSS is unnecessary. As we've seen higher-level PaaS-style personal web hosts like Netlify, Squarespace, and WordPress.com supplant the old-school Apache public_html/-style hosting, fewer and fewer authors have _needed_ RSS, because they've had access to other methods to deliver notifications directly.

As well, microblogging (mostly in the form of posting links to your new blog posts on either a Twitter account, Facebook page, or subreddit dedicated to your blog) _also_ take the place of notifications of new content on the blog, as well as providing the bonus feature of moving the "comments section" of your posts outside the blog itself, such that you no longer need to host or moderate it. Many people today combine a static-site-generator blog on S3/Github Pages/etc. (having no real "front page", only at most an "all posts" archive for web spiders) with an external, mostly-ephemeral social-network- microblog "index" of their blog.

RSS still exists for those authors who it serves, of course; but it's always been an author-side feature, and so, if you're seeing it less, it's because fewer authors need it.

(And, if this annoys you as a consumer-of-feeds, know that RSS is probably not the universal-notifications-infrastructure you want. Please don't write gateways that scrape pages and spit out RSS. If anything, emit emails. Mail readers are a strict superset of RSS readers, and usually do everything RSS readers do better than RSS readers do those things; but that's a topic for another post.)

</comment><comment><USER91> I'd really prefer RSS instead of marketing emails I choose to opt in to. An email feels like a todo, a stressor! An RSS feed feels like a "to read at lesiure" stream.

</comment><comment><USER92> I've given up RSS. Until the end of the year 2019 I still had a RSS.xml file which I updated by hand, but eventually I got too much work. The main reason was not that RSS is "dead" but the old and cumbersome syntax. I cannot get used to XML. Another reason is that browsers have started not to support RSS anymore. I have never used a reader, but rather read RSS in the browser than some kind of minimalist blog. It is difficult to say if RSS is dead, but I have the "subjective" feeling that less and less people implement RSS in their projects. In my opinion, RSS should be completely revised, not only in concept but also in syntax.

</comment><comment><USER93> Nope, I'm still using it.

I currently using it through my own web app that's aggregating RSS, Reddit, HN, Twitter and Youtube.

Planning for a long time to launch it as a product but never got around it.

</comment><comment><USER94> > then content creators realized that GR is stealing thunder and started > dropping RSS, and then GR died and we ended up with no Reader and no RSS.

Funny how anyone can define History.

</comment><comment><USER95> In my experience, the rss feed of so many blog sights is often so broken that it makes it challenging to use, and Soni abondon it every time I try to use it meaningfully.

</comment><comment><USER96> I don't think RSS will ever die because it takes little to no effort for a content producer to provide it. It's as simple and straight forward as it gets.

</comment><comment><USER97> I personally use RSS on my website as a way to automatically publish to various social media sites. It works great, and I don't know what I would replace it with.

</comment><comment><USER98> RSS had better not die! It's my escape plan for keeping up with the software industry once Twitter becomes too obnoxious to bear any longer.

</comment><comment><USER99> I've used RSS in some form for several years. I've lately gotten quite a bit of use from rss2email, some .forward rules, and mutt.

</comment><comment><USER100> I just got back into it in February thanks to the Reeder iPad app. It helps you grab the RSS feeds even if the site doesn't post a link.

</comment><comment><USER101> Came here from my rss feed. So I sure hope not...

</comment><comment><USER102> I got this post on HN via RSS via Reeder app.

Conclusion: not dead.

<comment><USER57> "I read this post on Mac OS 9. Conclusion: not dead"

Unless you're using a pedantic and useless definition of dead (a bad faith interpretation, I would argue), your statement doesn't make much sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> Someone asked me for my RSS feed last week. I have it, but did not promote it at all. I guess RSS is not dead yet.

</comment><comment><USER104> I came to comment on this post after receiving notification in my RSS reader. So I say this:

 _Pretty lively dead standard!_

</comment><comment><USER105> This is like when someone asked on Reddit whether Ubuntu Studio is dead.

No, it's not dead. Use it if you want to.

Here be no adverts.

</comment><comment> nikki-9696 I hope not. It's how I get most of my news and follow sites. Feedly is my friend.

</comment><comment><USER106> I still use it for all of my Youtube subscriptions. I have about 50 channels in there.

<comment><USER107> yep me too. yt's subscription page becomes really cluttered once your channel count is that high. so I prefer to check them in a rss reader

</comment></comment><comment><USER108> If anyone comes across a site witout an RSS feed, try Feed Creator - [http://createfeed.fivefilters.org](http://createfeed.fivefilters.org) \- It'll let you target a set of links or other HTML elements to be turned into a feed. (I developed this.)

</comment><comment><USER109> Also, we miss you Aaron. <3

</comment><comment><USER110> NZB and Torrent indexers often publish RSS and works great. Definitely not dead.

</comment><comment><USER111> Nope, I read HN through RSS.

</comment><comment><USER112> Do we really need a new thread about this thread every month? :)

</comment><comment><USER113> RSS is what got me to this post, so not quite dead yet I guess.

</comment><comment><USER114> Still using RSS and Feedly! Perfect to get passive information.

</comment><comment><USER115> It still exists but awareness that it exists is at an all time low with both users, web developers, and SEO specialists.

Valid reasons for continuing to invest in having this feature on your websites include better discoverability of your content by various content aggregators that still depend on this. In short, if you are running any kind of blog or news site, it probably helps you to have some RSS feeds but not not a lot.

But lets be real, a lot of RSS out there is just a side effect of many companies having used the same CMS for more than a decade. It's just something the CMS does by default. I stopped using feed readers some time after Google reader shut down. I used feedly and inoreader for a while but found myself opening that less and less over the years. I still have the bookmark but haven't looked at it in over a year and have not added any new feed in probably close to five years.

These days I depend on HN, twitter, and a few other social media accounts to discover content. I use but am increasingly unhappy with Google News; or rather what's left of it after Google's AI hipsters got their hands on it and turned into a clickbait aggregator to drive their ad revenue. Trump trump trump, more trump, did you know trump farted? etc. It's hopelessly biased to crap I definitely don't care about. All my attempts to nudge it away to more interesting stuff seem to be not working. I hope he loses the election; mainly it because it might clean up my news feed.

By chance I'm actually working on a project currently where I'm dealing with RSS feeds. A lot of feeds out there are actually shockingly bad in terms of content, usage of fields, etc. You get stupid things like brain-dead marketeers putting their company name in every title and description; people forgetting to add a timestamp. Or categories. Or an image. These things kind of matter if you want to aggregate and present content from multiple sources. Looking bad is never a good thing for any company whose primary business model is content distribution (i.e. major news papers and magazines).

</comment><comment><USER116> If RSS is dead then I am reading this from the great beyond.

</comment><comment><USER117> What purpose do RSS feeds have in a world of news feeds?

</comment><comment><USER118> RSS is one of the primary ways I read HN.

</comment><comment><USER119> it's not dead, it just smells funny

</comment><comment><USER120> still use it for podcasts, butgetting increasingly more troublesome to track down for new podcasts

</comment><comment><USER121> No. I saw this post via RSS

</comment><comment><USER122> No.

</comment><comment><USER123> no

this feels like almost "is rss dead" spam

</comment><comment><USER124> RSS was never really alive to begin with.

</comment><comment><USER125> Well, I used RSS to find this comment....

</comment><comment><USER126> No.

</comment><comment><USER127> No

</comment><comment><USER128> Deprecated.

</comment><comment><USER129> oh its that time of the year again? already?

No. RSS isnt dead. I got this link FROM RSS.</comment>


December 2017 Hacker News Hiring Trends - <AUTHOR> https://www.hntrends.com/2017/dec-react-finishes-2017-on-top.html <comment><USER2> I am sure you are tired of hearing this but probably should replace AngularJS with Angular in your default search and also offer more Angular options in the textbox than Angular 2. (best to just roll them all up to be at all comparable to React) Other than that, very nicely done!

</comment><comment><USER3> very nice analytic tool for looking at this type of data, simple summaries but plenty of opportunity for drill down :)</comment>


Interesting Salary Stats for Information Architecture (and other tech jobs) - <AUTHOR> http://www.maderalabs.com/blog/interesting-salary-stats-for-information-architecture/

<comment><USER2> If the stats were not available from previous years, doesn't that mean that a small sampling of highly paid AIs would skew the salary to a very high average?

</comment><comment><USER3> What do you study to become an Information Architect? Information Science? I noticed there's a growing trend of iSchools recently</comment>