Global warming? No, actually we're cooling, claim scientists - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/10294082/Global-warming-No-actually-were-cooling-claim-scientists.html <comment><USER2> First it was global cooling about 40 years ago. Then it was global warming. Then it was climate change. Now it's a global warming pause.

The only thing constant is that career scientists get to make a name for themselves, agenda-pushers have something to base their claims on, and newspaper companies get to sell more newspapers.

We don't have the technology to accurately predict the future. Heck, the past has already happened and won't change, but the way we interpret new discoveries changes it changes all the time. If we keep discovering new things about the past, how is it possible that we've already discovered everything about the future?

<comment><USER3> >career scientists get to make a name for themselves

Yea, there's so much money in climate science, as opposed to say, energy extraction.

<comment><USER2> When the government creates grants for political reasons, then yes there is. Same with green energy extraction.

<comment><USER3> Drop in the bucket compared to fossil fuels.

<comment><USER2> Yes, because it's more economical and better for the environment to improve efficiency. There is a good correlation between economic efficiency and what's good for the environment. Right now it is more harmful to the environment to manufacture new electric cars and the batteries that they use. It's also more expensive. There are many other large, well-established companies besides new, small, green-initiative companies trying to improve battery efficiency and the environmental impact of said batteries because it's better for business.

Interestingly enough, nuclear power is much more efficient, cheaper, and safer than fossil fuel based power, yet the United States has not built any new nuclear power plants in about 40 years because of environmental regulations. If we built newer, safer, more efficient nuclear power plants, we would be able to retire the older, not-as-safe, less-efficient nuclear power plants - and the price of electricity would go down making it more affordable to use electric cars all while using less fossil fuels!

(Long-term storage of spent nuclear material is also incredibly safe. There are a bunch of lies floating around that it's not because they suit the other side's story. Also, economics will will encourage the development of technology to find usage for the material rather than keeping it in storage for the next X number of years.)

I'm all for having a cleaner, safer environment. But until people get over their "not in my backyard" emotions, and get rid of harmful environmental regulations, then we are forced to use the technology that those people dislike.

Why am I familiar with all of this? I'm a merchant mariner. A lot of us work in the energy sector. I'd rather lose those jobs (higher competition for my job and less money) due to self-dependance on nuclear energy while having a cleaner, safer environment.

Have you seen the YouTube videos of tests where they crash jets into walls used in nuclear facilities or trains into nuclear containers? The United States is pretty large, we can build those nuclear power plants in places were they will be safe from the environment (unlike Japan which doesn't have much space to choose from).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The Daily Telegraph is notoriously full of climate change cranks, and regularly misrepresents the views of scientists and the IPCC. A previous example regarding arctic sea ice: [http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/07/arctic...](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/07/arctic- misrepresentations/)

<comment><USER5> Can you speak to what specifically the article is wrong about regarding the apparently dramatic expansion of arctic ice?

<comment><USER3> It was at record lows, so the capacity for a record bounce-back is higher.

<comment><USER6> as in, science still pretty much has so much to learn about then environment and claims of doom and gloom should be taken with the same grain of salt as with religious prophets.

<comment><USER3> Not really, no. The earth is warming, ice receded this summer at record levels; because of that record recession, the normal winter bounceback is higher than normal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Climate change, have the numbers been fudged? [http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/11/23/climatega...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2011/11/23/climategate-2-0-new- e-mails-rock-the-global-warming-debate/)

I don't know if climate change is true or not, but if these leaked emails show anything there is a political agenda behind it and data was concealed and cherry picked to support climate change. Apparently they did not even follow the scientific method? If these emails are true and not fake of course.

But why would they fake data? To manipulate the price of fossil fuels and sell carbon credits? How come more money is spent on climate change studying instead of finding alternatives to fossil fuels? Nobody knows.

The news media is manipulated one way or another, to get ratings and page hits to sell more advertising. I fear that science has become this way as well. People will believe any report as long as it is stamped with 'peer reviewed' on it.

[http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.22784/abstrac...](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/asi.22784/abstract)

[http://people.stern.nyu.edu/wstarbuc/Writing/Prejud.htm](http://people.stern.nyu.edu/wstarbuc/Writing/Prejud.htm)

[http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/26628/...](http://www.the- scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/26628/title/Tackling-peer-review-bias/)

Oh dear, quite a bit of bias there. Ah well find some peers who will review your papers and confirm them so you can continue to get grants and funding. If anyone asks about bias, keep your mouth shut, it was a double blind study done by a neutral third party even if it was biased in some way. Any peer reviews that find problems or find your paper is wrong, conceal such information and claim it does not exist.

After all what is the worst that can happen?

<comment><USER8> > if these leaked emails show anything there is a political agenda behind it > and data was concealed and cherry picked to support climate change.

They really, really don't. You never see more than a sentence or two out of context in what you would call "the news media", because as you say it is manipulated to provide the impression of a scandal, which sells much better than "climate scientists proven honest".

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." That there's barely anything even out of context that's quot-ably dishonest in 5000 emails is if anything a testament to their integrity, given that the whole premise is that they thought they were "talking freely".

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Arctic ice melted, cooling the oceans. This was modeled and expected. Stop reducing 'global warming' to a catchphrase, its a complex system and its crashing.

</comment><comment><USER10> Good old telegraph. They try hard to beat fox for the right wing crackpot crown. This article is for their readers not the general public.</comment>


Nissan's 'Self-Cleaning' Car Prototype [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwoGsCAKsxU <comment><USER2> (Disclaimer: I had a fair share of sucker punches with self-cleaning surfaces..)

Approaches towards self cleaning surfaces have been seen in the lab since a long, long time: They range from photocatalytic concepts (e.g. TiO2/SiO2/polymer hybrid coatings for house paint) to surfaces with a mixture of -OH/-CH3/-F (hydro-/lipophilic and mostly repellent) end groups that can be produces by plasma treatment, and many more.

There is a good reason that very little of these applications have ended up in mass production: The stability and durability of the film surfaces. Once you get a surface structure damage on, say, your "lotus effect functionalized" bathtub, house wall, car body, dirt starts to accumulate on this spot. The german car industry had quite a bunch of projects with car windows without front wipers (minimum speed 20 km/h to be effective), there have been a lot of projects for self cleaning house paints using the sun - but so far there is no effective product on the market. But of course there are a lot of patents..

I have no idea if Nissan found a way to make a cost effective, self cleansing film coating that can stand the test of gravel, acid, and time. If they succeeded, then it is a true accomplishment. But for the reasons listed above, I somehow doubt that.

<comment><USER3> What if this were an option at a carwash? I use full synthetic oil because it allows me to increase time between changes. I would pay more for a car wash that lasted longer as well. If the problem is a need to re-apply, can you get a coating that could be sprayed across the entire car without a need to mask out bits like in the video?

<comment><USER2> You have a point. How often/long do you wash your car, and how much $ do you spend on this? I have to admit, I do not wash my car very often. Pity they did not report anything about the cost of deploying the "dirtophobic" car paint film. If one could make it a quickly applicable, inexpensive "spray and go" option that allows to regenerate a dirt repelling film - why not. But there must be a reason why "Nissan says it has no plans to offer the paint as standard equipment, but will consider making it an option".

I am also wondering why they neglected the windows in the video clip. Might be a problem with transparency of the film, or a difference in the nature of the film adhesion to regular paint and glass. It is a pity that they did not provide any data on mechanical stability and film degradation. Without this data, I still do believe that this is a PR thing. Alas, it is wired.com.

<comment><USER4> They are using Ultra Ever Dry.

It is not transparent.

<comment><USER5> There's good reason to have shown this on a white car because of this fact. 1. white give nice contrast for dirt but importantly 2. white nicely hides the frosty appearance of Ultra Ever Dry.

Check out the ars technica article - the UED video at the top shows work boots frosted over with the stuff. [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/the- internet-demanded...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/the-internet- demanded-partially-scientific-testing-of-ultraeverdry-in-hd/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I see this as an interesting business lesson for startups, but even more general.

First, what a great marketing angle, a self-cleaning car, how cool is that! I imagine 6 o'clock news stations across the country showing clips from this video tonight.

Second, what a great up-sell opportunity. Now every oil change service done by Nissan can include a new $50 charge (or whatever the market will bear) for re- applying the self-cleaning paint.

Third, could they even push an environmental angle? Ie. litres/gallons of water saved by not going through a car wash?

So, with one new _feature_ Nissan has gained free marketing, and an incremental revenue source for their dealers. Not bad for a mature market.

<comment><USER4> Even better, they didn't actually develop anything.

Ultra Ever Dry ([http://dry.technology/index.html](http://dry.technology/index.html)) has been around for a while now. It is pretty remarkable.

The only downside is that it needs to be reapplied (and it cannot be used on windows). It wears off at a rate depending on how much abuse it takes - anything rubbing on it will hasten its decline.

EDIT: To dvcc's point below, this sounds very negative.

It is actually positive - earned media, essentially for free. Amazing job by Nissan marketers.

<comment><USER7> > The only downside is that it needs to be reapplied (and it cannot be used on > windows).

Reapply ever 5000 miles when you rotate the tires, and use RainX on the windows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If the coating is anything like Neverwet it's not the initial application and demonstration where the issue lies, but in the long term use and breakdown (aka will it still work after being in Arizona heat and Alaskan winters?)

</comment><comment><USER9> RIP car washes! Wow and that self cleaning paint action, I just had to see it. At this point I just think a ban on wired.com is called for on HN. Whatever nice discussions we've had from wired is probably not offset by the constant shit from this domain. I know I've sung this tune before.

<comment><USER10> I'm tempted to agree, bu maybe your "tune" would be more persuasive if it weren't coming from a throwaway account?

<comment><USER9> It's not a throwaway account, per se. It's an anonymous account.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> OK I've seen a dozens of different products like this. First time 8 years ago. Why are they not in production yet? Why can't I buy it in shop? Is it highly toxic or just works for a year? #confused

<comment><USER12> There has been some concerns about carbon nanotubes could have asbestos-like properties [1] if not handled properly.

Maybe that could be part of the reason?

[1] [http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news- articles/0113/130115-chemistr...](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news- articles/0113/130115-chemistry-resolves-toxic-concerns-about-carbon-nanotubes)

<comment><USER13> Wouldn't carbon be easier to decompose than a mineral fiber?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's not technically "self-cleaning" because it doesn't really clean itself but more dirt-repellant. Self-cleaning does look a lot better marketing wise though.

</comment><comment><USER15> Blogspam for [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwoGsCAKsxU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwoGsCAKsxU)

<comment><USER16> Yes. We changed the url from [1]. Wired is one of those sites that produces some solid articles and a lot of spammy fluff. We're not ready to lightweight it [2], but we're close.

1\. [http://www.wired.com/2014/04/self-washing- car](http://www.wired.com/2014/04/self-washing-car)

2\. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7658520](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7658520)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> That's great until it breaks down (and it does). You can't get a basic detail, since the supporting products also won't work with it.

Once it does start breaking down, you have issues getting basic stuff like soap bubbles to work as needed to help clean the spots that are broken down.

If it can't be layered, without adverse effects to the color of the paint, trouble.

If it can't be removed for repainting, etc. trouble.

Probably usable for some cases, but not going to get traction in the broader market until someone can fix long-term cost of ownership issues.

Have some car zen. Watch Ammo NYC videos on youtube [https://www.youtube.com/user/AMMONYCdotcom](https://www.youtube.com/user/AMMONYCdotcom)

</comment><comment><USER18> Can we just use this on our cars? [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPM8OR6W6WE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPM8OR6W6WE)

</comment><comment><USER19> I like it a lot - but I don't think it'll ever make car washes completely obsolete. There are quite a few places that can still get dirty, e.g. tires, rims, wheel arches, lights, grilles, windshield wipers, mirrors, and ofcourse not to forget the big elephant in the room; the interior.

If this really catches on and becomes commonplace in most cars, I think this in the end will complement the car wash industry just fine.

<comment><USER20> The hydrophobic/oleophobic coating bay could be another option at the car wash.

That's a great idea.

<comment><USER19> And as someone else pointed out - most likely it'll have a limited lifetime. There you go, repeat customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ars Technica experimented with the stuff last year. It looks like a lot of fun :) [http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/the-internet- demanded...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/the-internet-demanded- partially-scientific-testing-of-ultraeverdry-in-hd/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I remember a similar German technology from way back here on HN, and found it: [http://en.dienanoexperten.de/produkte.htm](http://en.dienanoexperten.de/produkte.htm)

But in the end it looks like they didn't expand at all. I would be curious to know what is the problem.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm assuming this is made with nanotechnology similar to Neverwet. I haven't looked properly into it but I remember reading that there is suspicion that nanotubes might be dangerous like asbestos. Imagine cars with this coating crashing, sending dust of that stuff into the air..

</comment><comment><USER24> This is another link bait situation from Wired, which seems to be happening often nowadays.

This is just some "stuff-resistant" paint that works better than the paint on cars now. It would be nice if all cars had this, but I'm sure that's just a matter of time / manufacturer.

</comment><comment><USER25> The product used appears to be Ultra-Ever Dry and is sold and marketed by Florida-based Ultratech International [http://www.spillcontainment.com/everdry](http://www.spillcontainment.com/everdry)

</comment><comment><USER26> Some guy put this on his 4x4 over a year ago [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRlQAhlwb2E](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRlQAhlwb2E)

</comment><comment><USER27> Looks like it's using something like [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEH6tDLKcVU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEH6tDLKcVU)

</comment><comment><USER28> Look at that headlight on the treated side of the car. The cloudiness these types of applications add makes it look like the headlight of a decade old car.

<comment><USER29> But they masked the headlights in the treatment process. Which also raises the issue, you'll still need to wash your headlights and number plate.

<comment><USER28> I don't think they did for the vehicle they took the picture of at the top of the Wired article. There's a clear difference between the clarity of the headlights.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cars...meh. One word: Dinner plates.

<comment><USER31> While that would be nice from a cleaning perspective, from an eating perspective that might make certain meals awkward to eat and prepare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> So pretty much just a hydrophobic coating, which is the same as properly sealed and waxed paint.

</comment><comment><USER33> I find it interesting that they're marketing this as a self-cleaning paint.

</comment><comment><USER34> So they just coated the car in Never Wet? Got it.

</comment><comment><USER35> In practice it would probably mean that while almost nothing sticks, whatever does will be a total bitch to take off :)

Just like antibiotics and superbugs. Survival of the nastiest.

</comment><comment><USER36> That's really cool.</comment>


TV is the most common way for Americans to get local news, but fewer watch - <AUTHOR> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/06/tv-is-still-the-most-common-way-for-americans-to-get-local-news-but-fewer-people-are-watching/ <comment><USER2> As I've gotten older, I started watching the local news before I go to bed.</comment>


What Startups Want from Mentors - <AUTHOR> http://startupmanagement.org/2013/07/31/what-startups-want-from-mentors/

<comment><USER2> The most useful advices are those of the crowd spelling crowdsourcing.</comment>


When in doubt: UPS avoids left turns - <AUTHOR> http://compass.ups.com/UPS-driver-avoid-left-turns/

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently this saved about 10,000,000 gallons of petrol. Such a simple thing to do, although algorithm complexity must have gone through the roof.

1 in 10 turns are now left turns.</comment>


The Best Way to Help Programmers - <AUTHOR> https://c9.io/site/blog/2012/11/the-best-way-to-help-programmers/

<comment><USER2> I think they've done a very excellent job with Cloud9 and I've signed up to play around with it some more.

However, the problem to me seems that in order to reap the benefits of Cloud9 one has to give up the benefits of their current IDE. It will undoubtedly be the same situation for LightTable when they release.

I want collaborative editing in my IDE. If I'm using Visual Studio and my colleague is using SublimeText, I want to be able to work collaboratively with him/her. I've wondered if some sort of protocol could be created by which other developers could create plugins for popular IDEs that might allow cross- IDE collaboration.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow...I'm impressed. I just spent a few minutes setting up an account and I was blown away by your execution on the editor alone. I haven't even tried using the other features yet. The screenshots made it look very similar to SublimeText2 and I wondered how smooth it would be. Vim mode, zen mode, even the find options were very similar. I was able to do everything I expected to do, even down to getting the theme just right.

It's the first time I thought I could use a web-based editor. That's a big deal. Well done!

<comment><USER4> Thanks for the kind words! We try really hard to make the concept of an online IDE move beyond just editing and saving files in a browser.

Best of all, unlike ST2, we're open source: <https://github.com/ajaxorg/cloud9>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is very slick. I especially love how the themes (View > Themes) update as you hover over them! It's a great way to preview your the color settings for your editor. I wish more UIs had this sort of live preview.

</comment><comment><USER6> _"In the year 2000… you will be able to instantly replicate your colleague's dev environment on your own computer."_

Non issue, most companies use VMs for their dev environments for this reason among others.

<comment><USER7> That's a novel approach, but where does the IDE live, within the VM? Seems like performance would really suck with that setup, but perhaps I don't understand what all you have on the VM and what you have on the host OS.

At my company, we give developers several days (up to a week at times) to get everything downloaded, installed, setup, configured, etc. It's a huge drain but then again, you should've seen it 2-3 years ago, at which point the only avoidance of duplicated efforts was by virtue of having a single portable HD which held all of our databases [for use in testing]. The data was 5 years old at the time...

<comment><USER6> To just set everything up, several days to a week sounds extreme to me. The VM should hold the code, framework, db, etc.. It's basically a clone of the production environment that lives inside a VM on my host machine. It has a shared folder with my host machine which holds the code. I use an IDE on my local machine to edit this code, which the VM runs. No reason to put the IDE into the VM. This achieves perfect separation and has a total of a few hours setup time for most projects. Literally no duplication of efforts (except setting up the VM its self).</comment></comment></comment>


GitHub is suffering major downtime again - <AUTHOR> https://status.github.com/ <comment><USER2> Funny, I went to their status page before coming here, and it definitely was "all systems go."

<comment><USER3> Here are the most recent few status updates from [https://status.github.com/messages](https://status.github.com/messages) as of this time

> June 05, 2017 21:00 CEST Minor service outage.

> June 05, 2017 21:10 CEST Major service outage.

> June 05, 2017 21:21 CEST GitHub.com is recovering, we are continuing to > monitor.

> June 05, 2017 21:31 CEST Everything operating normally.

> June 06, 2017 00:00 CEST All systems reporting at 100%

> June 07, 2017 01:19 CEST Major service outage.

Like you said, they went from 100% to major service outage.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review my MVP web app Hello Hype - <AUTHOR>

I recently launched my new web app Hello Hype. With Hello Hype you can recommend books, music and movies and follow your friends recommendation. There are no fancy recommendation algorithms, it is just organic friend based discovery.
I've been using it with a bunch of my friends and has been a great success with them so far. The app is currently at minimum viable product stage. There are heaps of things I would like to do to it, but I thought I'd share it with Hacker News and get some more thoughts.
I'll also get to see how my server handles the extra load... hopefully it doesn't die.
Check it out at: http://hellohype.com/ <comment><USER2> Very nice, simplistic, usable design, and within a few minutes of just messing around, I was already able to find something cool to check out - <http://hellohype.com/nicholasgross/391/>

Good work so far and have fun building it out!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Glad you like it. I've been enjoying getting people's recommendations.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable: <http://hellohype.com/></comment>


Question about how Instagram shows date when uploaded to Facebook - <AUTHOR>

When an Instragram photo is shared on facebook is the date shown the date the picture was taken or shared? <comment><USER2> if facebook is using the oembed it may be the shared date.

instagrams oembed endpoint doesn't contain created_time data like the media endpoints (and i never understood why not)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info thats really helpful ;-)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Sorry and Instragram photo</comment>


Ask HN: What happened to Facebook graph search? - <AUTHOR> I recall a few years ago being able to create really meanifull and helpfull queries on facebook like:
Friends of friends who like mountain biking and live in New Zealand
However it seems that facebook's search has been dumbed down. Were the searches too computationally intensive or abused in some form?
Any FB employees care to chime in as to what happened? <comment><USER2> I've done a reasonable amount of work (and even more investigation into) Graph search.

I believe the story is that they shipped it, and then found that the people who were using the most powerful parts the most weren't exactly the kind of customers they wanted.

Since then they have been modifying the API so less and less of it works. It is very difficult to work out exactly what and what doesn't work because it depends on the the account you are using and that account's relationships with the people and groups you are searching, as well as the rights each of those gives. The FB default permission schemes have changed significantly over time (to be less open) too.

Also, there seem to be bugs, and it is difficult to know what is intentional, what is because of permissions and what is a bug.

For example, it seems impossible to read posts made by other users to a page via the graph API even when that same account can read them when logged in interactively. This doesn't seem to be documented anywhere, and there are plenty of online sources showing code that seemed to have worked previously. So is it a bug or deliberate? Most seem to assume it is deliberate, but who really knows?

To be clear: I have no internal FB sources on this.

<comment><USER3> Off topic: is there a way to extract the email addresses (or phone numbers) of the friends?

I have disabled my FB but would like to extract the contact information of the people I am friends with.

<comment><USER4> Emails? No way, unless if you create an app and get each of them to follow that link, etc. Phone number is available if they chose to make it public to you as a friend/acquaintance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Facebook is already battling pretty large privacy concerns with a lot of media scrutiny. There's a lot of danger in having a tool like the graph search available to people with malicious intent. The EFF had a good post on the subject from back when it was active [1].

When you're part of a network as big as Facebook's, at a certain point your own privacy settings don't matter very much, because the people you're connected to can generally fill in the gaps about whatever you may want to keep private.

[1] [https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/facebook-graph- search-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/facebook-graph-search- privacy-control-you-still-dont-have)

<comment><USER6> It's imortant to keep in mind that metadata alone says a lot about a person. Combine that with more precise data from a few people in the same set and you can end up with very accurate data about everybody.

<comment><USER7> Accurate enough to kill people, according to James Clapper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interestingly, your query - "Friends of friends who like mountain biking and live in New Zealand" \- still works for me and indeed, I see two friends of friends from New Zealand that like biking.

<comment><USER9> Works great for me, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It got merged into the regular search bar - but the advanced features are only supported if your locale is set to US-English

<comment><USER11> Wow...and for _years_ I thought I was in some annoying holdback pool... I had UK-English set just for the readable timestamps.

Just changed to US-English and Graph-esque searches work fine. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> It possibly might have been scaled back along with the rest of their cuts to permissions in their Graph API in 2015: [https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut- down/](https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/28/facebook-api-shut-down/)

You could check how that changed over time: [https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog)

Not sure if they are the same, but it might be along the same lines of "We don't want to give everyone access to everything".

</comment><comment><USER13> My source tells me people did not use graph search. Only engineers or programmers used it. The wide population is not used to searching in a structural format. The cost benefit ratio did not work out

<comment><USER14> Who besides programmers did they envision using the API? Did they expect my mom to bust out curl and start looking for new friends?

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Half of the answers are something like: "It would be super evil of Facebook to allow this kind of search".

The other half are like: "It does work".

Hmmmm...

</comment><comment><USER16> Privacy, I would guess.

For exemple, you could see that your Tinder match was from X town and liked A, B, F, G, K pages.

You could then go in FB Graph and write "Girls from X who likes A, B, F, G, K pages". This returns two results and you find the girl. Even easier if you knew her first name, you could go "People named Z who likes ... in ... city."

<comment><USER17> I'll admit to doing this, along with reverse google image searches of profile pictures.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> URL/search experiments from 2015, which don't seem to work now: [http://booleanblackbelt.com/2015/02/important-facebook- graph...](http://booleanblackbelt.com/2015/02/important-facebook-graph-search- developments/)

<comment><USER19> What do you mean by "doesn't seem to work"? The searches in that article either work for me, or return zero results.

I was a part of the graph search beta, way back when, and live in the US, which is mentioned in another comment as possibly giving me more access.

<comment><USER18> This one came back with zero results: [https://www.facebook.com/search/str/accountants%2Bwho%2Bwork...](https://www.facebook.com/search/str/accountants%2Bwho%2Bwork%2Bfor%2Bkpmg%2Bwho%2Blive%2Bnear%2Bnew%2Byork/keywords_users)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The graph search was partially powered by Bing in the back end. So when the Microsoft/Facebook partnership ended, most of the search capability you're talking about had to be removed.

See (for example): [https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/13/facebook-dumps-bing- will-i...](https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/13/facebook-dumps-bing-will- introduce-its-own-search-tool/)

<comment><USER21> I worked at Bing until 2012 and did some work on the FB integration. While I didn't work on the graph search itself, IIRC that was also provided by MS. I didn't know that the partnership had since ended, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Normal people didn't care for that functionality so it was deemphasized in favor of different types of search. A lot of it still works, though.

</comment><comment><USER23> I miss this as well, but only used it for location based searches to get complete lists while traveling.

My guess is that the infrastructure required wasn't worth it.

</comment><comment><USER24> A little OT but reminds me of the design implications of Graph Search: the Friendship pages which were introduced in 2010 [0]

From what I remember, these were introduced but after awhile, seemed to be a feature that fell into obscurity. As in, you pretty much had to manually enter the URL. The feature still exists and it's highly welcome, IMO, when FB does the occasional "You and John Doe have been friends for 8 years. See your memories" type reminders.

But to manually see your friendship with a friend, at least on the Desktop version, you have to click the "..." menubox, in which other lesser used features (such as "Poke") are buried. And it's possible to view the mutual content between any two users by filling out this URL manually: facebook.com/friendship/friend1/friend2

But I'm guessing the latter functionality was never given prominent exposure due to how easily it could be used for stalking a current or ex-love interest? Sure, you could scour your targets' walls individually and make a note of all public photos/messages in which they mutually appear. But the Friendship view streamlined that process as much as the original News Feed streamlined old- fashioned profile browsing.

I'm having a hard time imagining that it was a feature that would be popular for innocent reasons -- I'm already inundated with news items about friends' activity on my newsfeed, why would I want to view a highly scoped newsfeed about two people who are not-me for innocent reasons, even if I were extremely bored and Facebook were the only site on the Internet?

[0] [http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/friendship-pages-mutual- co...](http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/friendship-pages-mutual- content/250559?red=if)

</comment><comment><USER25> FB's Graph API is not a stable API, there are frequent changes as to what information is accessible and what isn't. Looks like there are similar issue with user facing features like graph search.

</comment><comment><USER26> This happened:

[http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com](http://actualfacebookgraphsearches.tumblr.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> Not an answer, but a bit of context: [https://www.facebook.com/graphsearcher/](https://www.facebook.com/graphsearcher/) The link on that page is just broken, not even a "we've removed this content for reasons".

</comment><comment><USER28> Anyone knows how to get a dump of facebook's peoples directory? I would like to do name analysis for India and get for unique baby names.

</comment><comment><USER29> Great

</comment><comment><USER30> sarika talam

</comment><comment><USER31> It still works. You just need to use the GET API for reliable results.

E.g.

Friends of friends

[https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/friends/friends](https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/friends/friends)

Mutual friends of two people

[https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/friends/<id2>/friends/...](https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/friends/<id2>/friends/intersect)

Photos where both people are tagged

[https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos- tagged/<id2>/ph...](https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos- tagged/<id2>/photos-tagged/intersect) or

[https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos- of/<id2>/photos...](https://www.facebook.com/search/<id1>/photos- of/<id2>/photos-of/intersect)

Photos recommended for a person

[https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-recommended- for](https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-recommended-for)

Photos liked by a person

[https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos- liked](https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-liked)

Photos commented on by a person

[https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos- commented](https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/photos-commented)

Stories or posts liked by a person

[https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/stories- liked](https://www.facebook.com/search/<id>/stories-liked)

There's plenty of other words operators and entities

IDs are numerical

Should get you started

<comment><USER32> How likely is it for Facebook to block you for attempting to use these APIs rather than the public Graph API?

<comment><USER31> This is public.

But assuming it wasn't... How likely? How can one answer such a question?

It presumes their use is counter to FB interests

On that I disagree. Yet assume that is instead true.

Even then I feel there are far many more interests that weigh on the side of using these than on blocking them. So I predict they will remain open

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm pretty sure they were abused in the way that child neglect is abuse: nobody except a minority of people like us ever used it.

I remember using it quite often, although results were mixed.

It seemed that the true potential wasn't possible without compromising privacy completely – i. e. I'd love to run queries of "people working at the White House who have attended events with (me|Osama bin Laden)" but I wouldn't want to show up in searches if other people used it.</comment>


RSS Is Dying, and You Should Be Very Worried - <AUTHOR> http://camendesign.com/blog/rss_is_dying <comment><USER2> I have used RSS for years now. I check google reader about as often as I check hacker news. I start my morning off with a cup of coffee while I read my feeds using Reeder on the iphone or ipad.

Not once have I used any of the RSS features of a browser. I really don't see the point. I guess google doesn't either.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, some blogs have begun to rely on RSS functionality in the browser, and don't place an RSS link visibly on the page. That makes it rather difficult to subscribe.

<comment><USER4> Most of the time you can copy the site's URL into Google Reader and it will try to find the proper RSS feed. It works for blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress, at least; not sure how it does it.

<comment><USER5> "not sure how it does it."

The same way that some browsers do it. There is a meta-tag in the page, which describes which feed formats are available, and where to find them.

<comment><USER4> I think it's a bit more than that. It's worked on sites that Safari can't find a feed for, and I presume Safari looks for the meta-tag.

<comment><USER6> I guess Google Reader uses a database of feeds that other people subscribed to.

For one thing, it shows you the whole history of the feed -- even when the XML itself contains just the few most recent items.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> RSS isn't dying because browsers are deciding not to build native readers into their UIs. It's dying because it's not terribly easy to understand for most users. The article readily points this out.

And even for technical users like me, it isn't solving the main problem I have which is discovering new and interesting content. Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS feed into a reader. But really, bookmarking is pretty good too. Yes there are clear benefits to RSS over naked bookmarks, but the discoverability problem is still paramount.

Anyway this is kind of inconsequential to the point of whether native RSS functionality should be included in a browser. Mozilla is right to kill this "feature." RSS is an application-level protocol on top of HTTP, itself an application-level protocol. Browsers are built to perform HTTP requests. In my opinion they shouldn't do much else. A feature that displays and helps you manage RSS content falls into the category of bloat.

<comment><USER8> > _Sure, once I've found some new source of content it's nice to put its RSS > feed into a reader_

This is why most linkblogs are now twitter feeds. Even Andy Baio's is still a subset of what he twitters.

My problem in RSS feeds is importance, some sort of metric of popularity would be good. A lot of times I'll remove a feed for curatorial purposes to have that site drop some major project that goes viral, and I then find out several weeks later.

The entire concept of RSS is somewhat flawed for what happens in the real world. It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance.

<comment><USER9> "It would be a lot better to create some XML encapsulation of what the front page of the NYT does in terms of curatorial importance."

RSS would be a critical tool for anyone trying to solve that problem.

A lot of the complaints here are that RSS isn't what RSS isn't. OK, that's great, but those are more "entrepreneurial opportunities" than problems with RSS. Toss out RSS (and I assume by extension Atom and all similar friends) and those opportunities recede, they recede a _lot_ , they don't get better. It is what it is and it has always been designed from day one to be a foundational infrastructure on top of which to build more things, not the Final Answer To All Problems.

<comment><USER8> RSS is strictly linear, largely chronological.

The NYT front page, while changing day-to-day still has a layout that embodies importance. There needs to be some sort of semantic interpretation of how important something is other than h1's. How do we replicate the 144pt super- important headings while removing presentation from content?

The web was built for rationalist minds and papers, and the separation of html elements furthers this goal, yet hampers any sort of human-ness of communication.

RSS is great for a blog, but bad for newspapers. Check out NYT's RSS feed. Every article ticks in at an equal level of importance and requires the viewer's mental acuity to discern what's #1. Not so with their web-front or printed sheet.

Syndication, while essential, needs to be extended.

<comment><USER9> It also has to be some sort of project that uses RSS, not something built into an RSS-replacement. It requires some sort of third-party interaction with your input to determine "importance". Leave it to the New York Times and at _best_ their decisions about importance merely won't match yours; at worse they'll simply label everything "important", sort of like the way my HR department seems to reflexively tick that box in Outlook regardless of whether open enrollment is about to close or somebody's parking job is a bit off and could they please correct it?

<comment><USER8> You bring up a good point, importance is a human attribution to information, and a lot of people are either stupid or self-important. Impartial judgement is important, but NPR's music segments demonstrate that trending topics are middling and not truly important.

If the curator is strictly online popularity, news sites invariably turn into people magazine. You need some high-and-mighty news nerd to determine what's truly important. Sure, the curator's occasionally wrong or late, but it's a lot better than pointless water-cooler talk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I can't imagine that browser button pursuading anyone who doesn't already understand and appreciate RSS to start using it. Anyone tech-savvy enough to see it, and start googling to find out how to use it properly has certainly already heard of RSS.

And on the other side, anyone who does use RSS, and anyone in the future who learns to use it, won't be put off using it by the loss of that button.

The worse statement in this article (other than the french man smoking) is:

      Mozilla's mistake here is to associate low usage with user dis-interest.

Ummm... they're correct. He claims that, just because only 3-7% use it, it must be kept in because "what regular user wouldn't want this feature!?" Clearly the answer to that question is "93-97% of regular users". Touché?

<comment><USER11> 3%-7% that use the button are most likely power users. It would be unwise to disenfranchise them as they are the ones who normally advocate your software to their friends (regular users).

<comment><USER12> In chrome at least you can install a plugin to add an RSS icon to the URL bar. Easy enough for power users.

<comment><USER13> That seems like it's the best option, actually. For power-users, a 3rd-party built extension is more likely to be updated / have the options you want than the button built into every version of the browser.

<comment><USER14> Actually, it is a plugin made by Google, so they must know there's a need... [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhn...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nlbjncdgjeocebhnmkbbbdekmmmcbfjd)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> RSS is not dying.

There are very few individual users of it but there are literally millions of web sites that use it. Almost everyone on the Internet uses a portal site of some kind and the only way to be included on one of those sites is RSS/Atom feeds.

So as long as people want to use RSS for a personal reader it will be there to do it. And there will always be RSS readers because every programming environment I can think of has a pre-built library for feed reading meaning a programmer could whip a reader up in under an hour.

As far as the button disappearing from browsers that just makes UI sense. Chrome Browser taught the rest of the industry that most people hate clutter in their browser. So buttons that 93% of the users don't use are being taken out. But they can be added back with a simple browser extension/plug- in/whatever. So even here the people who want to use an RSS reader aren't losing anything

(and even without an extension/plug-in/whatever any user savvy enough to be using a reader will know how to cut and paste a url)

</comment><comment><USER16> The implementation of RSS in Firefox was always an "ultra-lite" version that I doubt will be missed by any serious RSS enthusiasts. A full-featured RSS reader feels a lot like a mailing list, so I think it's appropriate to keep RSS in Thunderbird rather than Firefox.

In some respects, a web-app RSS reader (like Bloglines or Google Reader) is better. You can access your feeds from any computer, the read/unread status is kept synchronized between PCs, and the centralized web-app arrangement makes more efficient use of network resources. Better to have Google Reader poll a site every 30 minutes than to have 10,000 Firefox installs each polling it every few hours.

The only browsers I know of that ever had good in-browser RSS readers were Opera and Seamonkey. But even in those cases, RSS was included as part of the mail client, not shoehorned into the browsing paradigm.

<comment><USER17> Agreed.

I once wrote a Python script that would parse RSS feeds and write emails in a maildir (or whatever is supported by Python); one was then able to read news from an MUA which was comfortable (Mutt by then). I lost that script when I did a 'dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda' before quitting my last job and realizing 2 minutes later that I forgot to backup many useful scripts I wrote over the course of my year and half in that NGO.

Being a smoking Frenchman, I'm tempted to be gratuitously insulting to the author but there's one interesting problem that could come from RSS' disappearance from browsers: the lack of visibility may very well "destroy" the format in the long term. Also, as the web is increasingly publicized, the incentive to remove a format that generates traffic but may hardly generate revenue might be high.

<comment><USER18> The canonical one is called "rss2email"

<comment><USER19> I'm the maintainer of the project and it's homepage is <http://www.allthingsrss.com/rss2email/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> From the user flow, RSS doesn't make much sense. Clicking an RSS button shows you the same thing you just looked at, except without the site design and only partial content (Safari). Currently, in Chrome, I just see a dense block of text.

RSS is an amazing tool, but maybe we just haven't found the right UI for it yet. Exposing it in the browser doesn't work very well and treating RSS as an Inbox (like Google Reader) where every item needs to be marked as read is too overwhelming. Personally, I think a social approach to RSS that puts content and personal preferences at the fore-front would solve a lot of this.

</comment><comment><USER21> _RSS saves me from having to load up 100 different sites several times a day just to check what's 'new'._

Everything wrong with RSS in a nutshell: this is a problem real people don't have.

<comment><USER22> I fully appreciate the sentiment, I hate when people build stuff people don't need.

But I want to dig a little at this. I think the fact that most people only have access to CNN or Time or Fox News or Cosmopolitan or Maxim or whatever... that there is not an easy way for people to get news aggregated from 100's of their peers and thought leaders in their affinity groups.... I think that IS a problem people have. It may not be a problem they are aware of, but I think the social cost of consolidated media is very high.

I think RSS, and technologies like it (Twitter, Facebook) are an important part of the solution to that problem. RSS is obviously not very user friendly, and I'm not sure if it will have a place at the table 10 years from now.

But the problem it solves (a standard interchange format for syndication) is absolutely real, and it's not going away.

<comment><USER23> Your comment reminds me of this Calvin and Hobbes strip: [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RbiRIw_w4rU/SNkssvl3KeI/AAAAAAAAAC...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_RbiRIw_w4rU/SNkssvl3KeI/AAAAAAAAACQ/whLxzvwCU9k/s1600-h/calvinandhobbes.png)

<comment><USER22> Maybe it's too late, but I don't quite see the connection. Regardless, I consider Calvin to be "good company".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> RSS readers may be dying (I admit that I once was a Google Reader fanatic and now only log in time to time), but RSS/ATOM as a format for communicating between websites is still pretty decent. I often setup an ATOM feed for the data on whatever webapp I'm building, and usually end up using that feed to integrate with other webapps. (And as a bonus, I can hand it out to techie users).

I don't know, do you think that RSS readers dying will mean websites will stop producing RSS feeds? The output seems to be built in to many systems these days already.

</comment><comment><USER25> It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid. As a user though I also don't like it anymore and I'll share why...

This isn't 1970 anymore where I want to read "What's New" from a small list of new sources. I prefer to go each day to a list of curated aggregators like HN or what the people I follow on Twitter or saying. This is vastly superior to RSS and this is why at least one technical user no longer uses it.

<comment><USER7> "It is pretty clear why Google doesn't like RSS, it stops you from browsing the web and that is how they get paid."

But they built and are actively maintaining Google reader. I don't think Google dislikes RSS, rather they are hesitant to build a browser feature for something that should really be a separate application.

<comment><USER26> Robert Scoble says he was told (ostensibly by someone at Google) that the Google Reader team has been largely disbanded, and that the project is no longer maintained. He's mentioned this a couple of times on Quora, on Buzz, and on his blog.

<comment><USER7> Well I'll go one step further then and point out that Google is the creator of PubSubHubbub (<http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/>). My point is that I don't think Google hates users aggregating content and having it pushed to them rather than browsing for it.

<comment><USER15> I don't disagree but in fairness it was created by 3 people one of which worked at SixApart

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the info. Before posting my comment I did some quick Googling and couldn't find much about the history of PubSubHubbub. I did want to be sure that I wasn't wrong about Google's involvement. Using the word "creator" with respect to Google itself was probably a little strong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> RSS isn't dying, it's become so pervasive that it's now invisible infrastructure.

</comment><comment><USER28> I'm glad my browser doesn't support RSS natively when other apps offer a far greater experience. Have you tried the safari rss reader? It's awful.

As a chrome user I'm happy that it does one thing well and that's displaying web pages. Now I'm free to use any online RSS reader I want and be able to access my RSS feeds from anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER29> It's hard to take the author's concern seriously, when I can't even find the RSS link on his/her page.

<comment><USER30> _because the browser is supposed to provide the button_.

Why do you think I'm worried? I don't want to have to clutter my site with a button to an XML feed that nobody understands. I want the browser auto- discovery to do the right thing and present the right interface to make RSS worthwhile.

Turning the key in a car shouldn't present you a diagram on how to connect the battery. Browsers shouldn't sit there dumbfounded when presented a piece of RSS.

<comment><USER31> _Why do you think I'm worried?_

Because auto-discovery isn't working on his site either? (At least in Safari)

<comment><USER32> It is working. Safari changed the way it displays RSS feeds. You have to click and hold on the "Reader" button to display any RSS feeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > Mozilla outright refuse to listen (33 bloody votes!)

Wow, 33 votes. They're really ignoring the masses on that one.

<comment><USER34> For a bug in Mozilla's Bugzilla installation, that's high.

Of course all the high-vote bugs are special-interest-advocacy stuff like "bring back MNG support" and "bring back gopher support" and "bring back the RSS button"... So high vote count is actually a reliable indicator that the bug should be wontfixed, more often than not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Curious why none of the comments, nor the original article, mentions Internet Explorer. They've continued to add new features in this area ever since IE7. The icon is hidden now in IE9 (as are most of the icons... less browser chrome is fashionable) but I believe they still consider this a first-class feature.

They are still the world's most popular browser... and presumably their users are _less_ technical, so presumably it's usage is _less_ than what Mozilla reports, but it remains.

<comment><USER13> > _They are still the world's most popular browser_

Because of their _history_. Because users aren't technical. Because IE is _bundled with Windows_. And look how quickly they've been falling in use. Methinks they won't be the most popular for much longer, which is an _incredible_ mark against their design decisions because of how fast and how far they've fallen from such complete domination.

<comment><USER35> The story is about RSS dying, and the author is upset that Mozilla is removing RSS features and Chrome never had any. Are you also arguing that IE is failing because they still have those features (possibly a bad design decision)?

In which case, what is it we're complaining about? Browsers that have RSS readers are bad and browsers that don't have RSS readers are bad?

<comment><USER13> Not at all. I'm arguing that taking your design decisions from IE based on IE's popularity is illogical when looked at in context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> This. "Every website should not look like a NASCAR advert for every sharing service in existence."

<comment><USER37> That's one reason I've always thought bookmarklets were better for sharing, not the least of which is because you don't need to wait/hope the website operator adds support for the sharing site you are using.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> The replacement for RSS isn't Facebook and Twitter...it's email. People don't understand RSS but they understand: "Enter your email address to subscribe to updates." Hence the reason that CPM rates for email are so much higher...

</comment><comment><USER39> Users shouldn't need to know what RSS is to use it just as they don't need to know what HTTP is to read a website or what SMTP is to send email.

The interface to using RSS has always been flawed, that is where the problem is.

</comment><comment><USER13> > _IF RSS DIES, WE LOSE THE ABILITY TO READ IN PRIVATE_

Based on what causal chain? At best, it's an _incredible_ stretch of a slippery slope fallacy.

<comment><USER40> Disagree. The author clearly refers to corporations like Facebook and Twitter tracking your reading behavior.

<comment><USER13> So run NoScript. Run in private mode. Block their cookies. Block their address in your hosts file. You can use wget, curl, or any other cookieless downloading tools, none of which will expose you reading The Times to Facebook. RSS doesn't even prevent against this; it can be behind a login, it can require cookies or not serve up info, and it can send info to Facebook denoting you viewed article X. All of which is determined by the _server_ it's running on, not the format of data it serves up.

Browsers are unnecessary for RSS _or tracking_ , and it's a very poor match for browsing behaviors anyway.

<comment><USER40> Why should I have to do all that if RSS already exists? There's no reason to accept letting this working technology die.

I agree that browsers are unnecessary for RSS though.

<comment><USER13> Because if you're that worried about Facebook tracking your browsing habits, accessing information via RSS will only prevent _some_ tracking. The Like button is damn near everywhere, not just on news sites. The only way to prevent it is to prevent your browsing tools from communicating with Facebook _at all_ , and hope the servers you're accessing aren't doing it behind the scenes. And/or anonymize your connection (TOR), so even that doesn't give them anything.

The point is that paranoia (valid or not) is _not_ a reason to keep a technology alive when that technology does not solve the problem, especially when solutions _do_ exist. If you want a solution, _use a solution_ , not a crippled, bundled-in-your-browser partial solution that only works under certain circumstances / assumptions.

<comment><USER40> Are you trying to pitch RSS against privacy enhancing technologies such as NoScript, TOR, etc.? The point is rather that more privacy is a neat side effect of RSS, not its primary purpose.

The primary purpose of RSS - aggregation of content -- works very well, irrespective of bad UI decisions which have nothing to do with RSS itself. And when you pull a full text RSS feed, you're probably far away from "Like" buttons and the like while reading content.

<comment><USER13> RSS is an exchange format, nothing more. Don't conflate it with _some_ historical transmission methods, nor ignore cases where it's behind a paywall, nor embedded tracking images (since nearly any reader will allow images).

Privacy has _nothing_ to do with RSS. Some feeds I subscribe to have JavaScript _and_ Flash - where's the privacy there? Some are behind paywalls - I'm identified by logging in, and even more so by providing payment info to be _able_ to log in.

Thus, by losing RSS, we would lose _zero_ ability to read privately. It's only viewed as being without all the privacy-sniffing bells and whistles because _most_ providers don't do so. RSS can lose all its currently-common privacy attributes while still being RSS. We should be worried about the loss of _privacy_ online, which is rampant, not the loss of RSS (if it does die). And RSS is a particularly bad flagpole to gather around; anyone up in arms about it is much more likely to be up in arms about privacy than the reverse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> RSS is dying because browser vendors do not want to implement or maintain integrated RSS readers? That does not sound very convincing.

<comment><USER30> RSS aggregators are used by the elite few. When websites start deciding to use Twitter and Facebook instead of RSS because it's faster and gives them better features, and regular users understand it better, then there will be complaints.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> RSS is really cheap to set up compared to the cost of an entire site, and for news sites, it makes economic sense to add a feed on the off-chance that you might get 0.1% more readers.

The technology that is the RSS reader is not the driver of RSS. The feed is what drives it. NYT is putting up a feed even if is has zero browser support, I'll bet.

Until it's not worth the practically-zero cost of setting up a feed, there will be piles of feeds out there. Publishers will use anything they can to get more eyeballs, and feeds like RSS fit perfectly into that strategy.

I use RSS all the time. That's how I got to this article. And I'm not worried about it one bit.

</comment><comment><USER43> RSS is not dying. It's just not based in the browser, and I'm fine with that. I use an RSS aggregation program, and if I really wanted to, there is open source software available to build and host my own RSS portal.

</comment><comment><USER44> "It gives less of a shite than a French man smoking a cigarette in public"

Um...what?

<comment><USER7> Really HN? We're upvoting this? No offense to the commenter, but we can do better.

<comment><USER45> I don't think so, actually. I'd be hard put to make that comment's point any more elegantly.

In person, the right response to the original sentence would be a polite cough, followed by a brief but significant silence, followed by a slight but detectable face-saving change of subject. We can't do those things on the web, but in this case "um... what?" is an artful alternative.

<comment><USER7> I question the comment's usefulness to this discussion, not the elegance with which it was made (although I think I disagree on that as well).

The comment, to me, is a distraction. Not purposeful I'm sure, but it's had that effect. The fact that the community would vote it up to the point where it might be the first comment someone reads when seeing this thread is disappointing.

<comment><USER44> > The comment, to me, is a distraction

Perhaps a little reflection is in order, you were originally unhappy that the comment I made might have distracted from, or derailed, any possible discussion. Then, rather than turning the other cheek, you opted to kick off a discussion which has ironically created a genuine distraction.

update: This reply was a little bit cheeky and I subsequently sent stanleydrew an email to apologise.

<comment><USER7> The irony is not lost on me, certainly. I think this is the first time I've ever called out a comment as inappropriate in my nearly two years of active HN participation. Usually I read comments like this, downvote and flag, and then move on.

My intention was not to start a discussion. My intention was to make people think before upvoting, and to make people think before they consider posting a similar comment in the future. Hopefully, despite derailing the larger thread a bit, I achieved that goal.

I'm happy to take this discussion offline though, in order to prevent further derailment. My email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> just b/c rss is dying, thank god too, doesn't mean syndication is dying. already ideas like pubsubhubbub have provided realtime syndication in a more compact format.

The web is just moving to realtime and ingesting a big long text file and determining deltas sucked. For that matter, XML as a data transport vehicle should end in favor of more compact and type friendly solutions like JSON.

Don't be so alarmist that a crappy tech is being phased out. Now, where's my Tandy 1000.

</comment><comment><USER47> What would an RSS reader good enough for Kroc's grandmother and 419,999,999 other Firefox users look like? I would be genuinely interested in his designs for one. Of the many different RSS reader add-ons I've tried for Firefox, for example, there haven't been any that made me say "we've gotta put this in Firefox, let's delay $otherwork instead". If we had an energetic contributor like Kroc, though, it's quite possible that we could end up in a great place. I'm not trying to say "patches talk, chump", though of course they _do_ speak quite compellingly. I'm trying to indicate that via open projects like Mozilla technical people can have agency beyond voting in bugzilla (!) or a letter- writing campaign.

It'll be interesting to test Kroc's thesis, though: if he's right that RSS will be harmed a lot by Firefox removing the RSS icon, then hits to the RSS stream from Firefox UAs should change trend-line between 3.6.x and 4. I look forward to such a follow-up, it would be interesting data!

<comment><USER48> I think it'd look like it looks for many of us.

I go to a web site and see a little orange button that I can click and it will add this web site flipbook.

Yay, now I can read the web site like a magazine with consistent and readable formatting and not have to remember what that site was I wanted to go back and look at the next time they posted something.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think it is plain and simply facebook and twitter which are killing RSS. Most normal people have heard about twitter and facebook and have no clue about the cryptic acronym RSS. Which, by-the-way requires a technical degree to understand, and to use (should it rather be v1 v2 or atom? does my pc support the best option?). Is it really a bookmark? Or an inbox? Or a notification? Now one should go through hidden features and install new apps. No sane person would set this up as opposed to a single click in a browser to a twitter feed or the push of a like button.

Like webmail displaced most "normal" people's imap/smtp (with all the firewall misery). Google groups/forums displaced NNTP.

I also feel sad, because RSS was free, while twitter and facebook are careless computing.

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2010/dec/14/chrome- os-richard-stallman-warning?INTCMP=SRCH)

</comment><comment><USER50> Okay, I haven't really used RSS before. I'm diving in. In Safari Version 5.0.3 (6533.19.4), I view all of the RSS Feeds by choosing the following (buried) menu item:

Bookmarks > Bookmarks Bar > View All RSS Articles

I can't find a "View All RSS Articles" button. By default, I hide the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar (because I want as much vertical screen real estate as I can get.) The "View All RSS Articles" item does not appear in the "Bookmarks Bar" toolbar when I make this toolbar visible.

I am looking into the NetNewsWire app for Mac. <http://netnewswireapp.com/mac/>

No RSS feed for Wikipedia portal:Current events? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events>

Hacker News RSS is broken? <http://news.ycombinator.com/rss>

<comment><USER51> Try this improved full text HN feed:

[http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your- read...](http://preona.net/2010/12/hackernews-full-feed-for-your-reading- pleasure/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Lack of a browser button doesn't put me off using RSS, as many have pointed out. There are browser extensions and GreaseMonkey scripts for me to add feeds to Google Reader.

I'd be more concerned that RSS is dying because many content providers--from big media to bloggers--seem to prefer to only show me a short excerpt, or even a title in their RSS feeds. I don't want to leave Google Reader to read your articles! When I have to open every single RSS item's link (in a new tab) from Reader, that either discourages me from visiting your site... or discourages me from using RSS, as it adds little to no value, and indeed just introduces frustration.

The other reason I avoid RSS is for sites like HN and Reddit, where the order of links, their scores, and their ages are important. Maybe RSS should be updatable (which may be what PubSubHubbub is designed for?).

</comment><comment><USER53> RSS is not dying! One of the traditional applications for RSS (a browser-based RSS feed-reader) is becoming obsoleted because most browsers aren't particularly good at managing feeds.

I can understand why the benefits of RSS aren't more widely understood by the general public; the technology makes use of an abbreviation (an abbreviation that isn't actually much more comprehensible when its spelt out).

RSS is a service, used by applications to make content portable. It's not a final solution, it's a tool that can be integrated into a number of different applications. It's quite likely that many of the applications it could be used for haven't been created yet.

A slightly ridiculous article.

</comment><comment><USER54> I frankly never got into RSS until I started using RockMelt about a month ago. Now I use it all the time to tell me when there are new Hacker News post, etc. But unfortunately the only clickable link for the Hacker News RSS takes me to the story, which is often an external link. If I want to see the "discuss" of the story I have to manually go the website and find the post and click the discuss link. Perhaps RSS needs a more robust protocol that wouldn't require others to make their own API. Then I think browsers like Rock Melt might bring this new kind of RSS to the masses.

<comment><USER55> The reader I use, newsbeuter, always shows two links: the article link, and the discussions link.

<http://www.newsbeuter.org>

You might also be interested in trying these alternate HN feeds:

      http://andrewtrusty.appspot.com/readability/feed?url=http://news.ycombinator.com/rss

<http://feeds.feedburner.com/HackerNewsFullFeed>

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Change the RSS button for a 'Follow' button.

</comment><comment><USER57> RSS is the pipe, its not a solution. Your average joe doesn't "know" what TCP/IP is and frankly its the same for RSS. Something needs to sit at either end and actually make use of the RSS "pipe".

</comment><comment><USER58> RSS brings me 90% of my outside information. And by doing it with programs like Reeder that use Google Reader to sync the feeds and what's been read allow me to do it on 3 computers, an iphone, and an ipad without ever seeing the same junk twice

But, it does require some computer savvy to setup and operate. You need programs, you need to sometimes figure out your feed URL's. Good reader has a really weird and lousy interface.

As a computer guy I don't care, but I rarely recommend it to even medium tech savvy friends because I don't see them dealing.

</comment><comment><USER59> RSS is a tool for technologists. The average user will not find it attractive enough, so RSS will always be used by the minority. This does not necessarily make it a dying technology however.

</comment><comment><USER60> An interesting point of this post is that Twitter is effectively about to replace RSS, and that in order to use Twitter one has to have an account with it and "follow" such and such.

But is this really true? Wouldn't it be possible to build an (authorized) interface to Twitter that would serve search results according to topics/keywords without actually creating an account with Twitter?

Something along the lines of

        twitfeed.com/topics?q=topic1+topic2+topic3

I'm sure this already exists somehow?

<comment><USER61> Kind of: [http://twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%...](http://twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%20from:hackernewsbot)

This searches all posts that contain "node.js", are from reddit, or are from hackernewsbot. You can even get an RSS feed for it, at [http://search.twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddi...](http://search.twitter.com/search?q=node.js%20OR%20from:reddit%20OR%20from:hackernewsbot&format=rss)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I use Google Reader, because I want to know when there's new stuff on certain sites without visiting them all, but I don't like it that much. I prefer to read the stories on the web site, with its "native" formatting and whatnot. Is there a tool in any of the common browsers that will highlight a bookmark (or something like that) when there's new content on the site? I think I'd greatly prefer that to the whole business of using a feed reader. Am I the only one?

</comment><comment><USER63> Recently Flipboard added a Google Reader section. I've started using this and never turned back. It solves perfectly pretty much every problem with RSS via attractive presentation, quick access to full content, social connectivity, and getting rid of the "inbox feel".

Like a few others here, I look at RSS in the morning. As it turns out, what I really wanted was a sort of newspaper/magazine format. Flipboard delivers that perfectly.

</comment><comment><USER64> RSS is primarily used by aggregation widgets and sites as a server-to-server protocol for retrieving lists of links from blogs and news sites, and I see no evidence offered that anything is changing in that regard.

As far as people actually using their "RSS" buttons to read websites, I've actually never heard of anyone doing that. The author appears to misunderstand the primary rationale of modern RSS.

</comment><comment><USER65> Can't we just use Google reader and be done with it?

</comment><comment><USER66> I won't miss the RSS browser button: I hardly ever use it! While I read many RSS feeds I almost never subscribe to them (which is what I've used the button for). The average number of times I've subscribed to a feed I read is extremely close to 1, and the average number of times I've subscribed to each existing feed in the world is extremely close to 0.

</comment><comment><USER67> I'd be interested to know the number of people using Google Reader as their primary tool to read stuff from the web. I'm sure the numbers would skew heavily towards the tech/geek crowd. But I have no idea how popular it is.

</comment><comment><USER68> RSS is dying only if Bloggers don't support it anymore. But I can't see that.

</comment><comment><USER69> This is ridiculous. First of all what about the ATOM format? I don't think it's dying.

Anyway, why not simply have an RSS plugin / extension as some have suggested? You can do this in all the browsers.

</comment><comment><USER70> Most of what I need to read shows up on HN or Reddit or Twitter. I know that sounds incredibly lazy, but I don't have time to mark 233 Lifehacker posts as read every week.

</comment><comment><USER71> I only indirectly depend on browser based RSS feeds as I use Google Reader. Which does precisely what I want it to and is available without regard to browser.

</comment><comment><USER72> The only problem with Kroc's rant is that RSS auto discovery and UI wasn't removed from Firefox. It was moved from the addressbar to the Bookmarks menu.

</comment><comment><USER73> I find myself more & more use blekko to replace my RSS feeds, maybe this is the future of feeds.

But then again maybe blekko doesn't have a future....

</comment><comment><USER74> I want to read my RSS feeds like a newspaper. I think formatting is really the issue. I don't necessarily want a list of links.

</comment><comment><USER75> Why should this particular <link> incantation receive special treatment over others?

<comment><USER17> How are other <link> elements not specially treated?

        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://ycombinator.com/news.css">
        <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://ycombinator.com/favicon.ico">

Also, this will make a good reading: <http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/links.html#h-12.3>

_"Although LINK has no content, it conveys relationship information that may be rendered by user agents in a variety of ways (e.g., a tool-bar with a drop- down menu of links)."_

<comment><USER30> Well put; what I believe in is that user agents should do their absolute best to make the most sense of what information is available to it in the context of the UI paradigm of the user agent. i.e. there is not enough screen space on phones for every website to fit an RSS icon; the browser should do the best thing that befits its UI and help minimise the efforts of the user to get the information they want. RSS can massively help with that.

Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything.

There is infinite possibility here for browser vendors to make browsing quicker, easier and more intelligent and RSS is a key part of that. The browser vendors are not interested in exploring this avenue and as such everybody is stuck doing the same stupid routine every single day. This is dumb! Our computers should be smarter than this!

<comment><USER17> _Imagine for example that on the Chrome home page, where sites you visit often appear, Chrome also was following the RSS of these sites in the background, and listing new news items for those sites on the home page, all without you having to do anything._

That's a hell of a good idea actually. Having a count of items that popped on a website since your last visit would be a really useful information.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> I have -- without giving it much thought -- stopped using RSS. Many friends have done the same. Now browsers seem to be dropping support. Maybe this is proof that RSS/Atom wasn't the panacea we thought it was. Maybe it is actually time for RSS to die?

</comment><comment><USER77> RSS never really caught on beyond a geek crowd. I've never used it.

<comment><USER48> I had a lot of TiVo conversations like this ten or eleven years ago. Lots of people who never used the technology would tell me why it didn't make sense to them.

<comment><USER77> Is TiVo still big in the US? (It doesn't exist in the UK). We have various hard disk based recorders, and sky plus etc

<comment><USER48> TiVo itself isn't huge, but pretty much everyone has a DVR these days.

I just use that as an example because 10-11 years ago nobody knew what it was, but they knew they didn't need it... until they tried it.

<comment><USER77> But RSS is like 10-15 years old. How long until it takes off?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> Cobol's been dying too and I'm not concerned about that either.

</comment><comment><USER79> I think Dave Winer, basically inventor of RSS, would disagree.

<comment><USER80> Dave Winer did not invent RSS. You might want to know your history before spouting such nonsense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> many users use webkit and write a program that evaluates, stores the content effectively building a personal rss.

moreover.com has many precompiled rss feeds for various subjects.

</comment><comment><USER82> If there was really enough demand for RSS, it wouldn't die.

<comment><USER30> How can there be demand if nobody is making it easy to use?

<comment><USER82> It seems like the incentive is missing. Browser developers have to prioritize what users use and what they know how to use. The author made the point that very few people even know what RSS is, and I think it's the content deliverers' responsibility to make users aware of that feature; there's only so much a browser can do to help with that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I just want you to know years ago I vowed to use RSS in all of my websites for the rest of my life. I would hate an Internet without RSS feeds (and Google Reader!)

</comment><comment><USER84> am probably contributing late, but i have recently worked on something that might solve this "rss hunger" or at least provide a better alternative eventually. am calling my creation "razor" and it runs right in the brwser, is totally free, doesn't sacrifice privacy to corporations, is customizable by the user (only knowledge of regular expressions required - in case one wants to craft their own feeds)

i've developed my solution as a firefox addon, and you can download it from here -- <http://fixx.yolasite.com/razor>

i'd never used rss feeds before (probably wouldn't have invented razor then?), but razor is different and to me is more powerful!

i use razor to check newest stuff from hacker_news using the following saved razor-expression:

[http://news.ycombinator.com/newest)))<a](http://news.ycombinator.com/newest\)\)\)<a) href=".+">. _< /a>%%%>[^<]_<%%%[^>]. _[^ <]((([0-9]+._ago---[0-9]+. _point---\s_ by\s _\---^[0-9]_ \\.$---^\s _\\(._ \\)\s _$---^[0-9]+[ ]comment._ \s _$---^\w_ $---^\s _[\|\\[]\s_ $---^Feature Requests$---^Y Combinator$---^Hacker News$---^(News\s _)_ $

It might look "geeky" and intimidating, but check the above razor link (it has docs too) and you'll see why this solution is promising.

nice feeds hacking!

<comment><USER9> Thank you for demonstrating so clearly why we need RSS.

If you don't get it yet, check back in two years. You'll be able to tell us all about why that doesn't scale and can't work and RSS is a lot better. You may not believe me yet, but I can wait.

<comment><USER84> well help by clarifying why. as i said, this might not be the best, but probably the difference between this and RSS is that razor isn't solely meant to create information feeds, it is a quicker and more succinct way of scraping the web for arbitrary information.

it solves the problem of having to build a new scraper tool every time you have some site you want to programatically pick something from.

maybe i didn't clarify its purpose well, or i gave the wrong examples? imagine using it to track malformed tags in web pages of your choice in real-time, this is another way it could be used.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER85> If Mozilla is getting rid of it and if Chrome doesn't have it, than that's just proof enough that big companies are conspiring against RSS. My fingers crossed for the Adblocker.</comment>


Hacking suspect Lauri Love wins appeal against extradition to US - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/feb/05/hacking-suspect-lauri-love-wins-appeal-against-extradition-to-us <comment><USER2> Here's a link to the full decision: [https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp- content/uploads/2018/02/laur...](https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp- content/uploads/2018/02/lauri-love-v-usa.pdf)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The 83A of the Extradition Act 20013. It allows judges to block extradition to the US and other countries if a crime was committed in the UK and if it is in the accused's interests to stand trial in the UK. Src: wired [0]

[0] - [http://www.wired.co.uk/article/lauri-love-appeal-decision- ex...](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/lauri-love-appeal-decision-extradition- court-uk)

</comment><comment><USER3> Could they use these arguments to get MalwareTech back from the States?

<comment><USER2> Not an option unless he ends up in prison, in which case I guess he maybe could get to finish his sentence in the UK if he is very lucky.

[https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...](https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/292519/FCO_Transfers_Home_0314web.pdf)</comment></comment>


It's a Fact: Opinions Are Not Facts - <AUTHOR> http://thomaslarock.com/2013/02/its-a-fact-opinions-are-not-facts/ <comment><USER2> The author missed a golden opportunity to point out that _most facts aren't facts either_.

Example fact: the word "literally" means consistent with reality, not exaggerated or fanciful. Is that what "literally" means -- yes or no? Let's resolve this by looking up a dictionary definition:

<http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally>

Definition 1 : in a literal sense or manner : actually <took the remark literally> <was literally insane>

Definition 2: in effect : virtually <will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice — Norman Cousins>

Take you pick -- "literally" either means according to reality, or according to the speaker's fancy.

Another example fact (something many people believe): "After a long losing streak while gambling, statistics says my luck should improve." True or false? It's false -- the above is called the "Gamber's Fallacy".

More here: <http://arachnoid.com/wrong/> ("Everything you know is Wrong")

<comment><USER3> And yet that second definition came about due to incorrect usage of the term. Or exaggerated usage of the term that others started using the term only as an exaggeration.

So is "literally" as a virtual thing incorrect? Or new?

In my opinion, it's both.

<comment><USER2> > And yet that second definition came about due to incorrect usage of the > term.

But there are no "incorrect" usages of words. Dictionaries are supposed to record how people use words, without judgment or rancor. Encyclopedias strive for correctness, but dictionaries are only meant to find out, and report, how people choose to use words.

In the old days of lexicography, scholars would find ten new uses of an existing word, or of a new word, and that was the criterion, the threshold for acceptance -- that new word, or that redefinition, was duly recorded. I think that's still the standard by which words are discovered or redefined.

The tl;dr: Encylopedias prescribe, dictionaries describe.

> So is "literally" as a virtual thing incorrect?

Wrong question. I think the only fair question is -- does this usage cause confusion? Well, yes, but since people use the word that way, what are you going to do? People are in charge of language, not scholars in an ivory tower.</comment></comment></comment>