timf

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is likely to file suit: https://www.uschamber.com/finance/antitrust/chamber-comments...

I do a similar thing [1]. One of the great advantages to formally namespaced IDs is including a systematic conversion into strong types in your code. It's harder to accidentally mix things up when coding; function parameters and return tuples are more 'self documented' (and enforced by compiler where applicable).

[1] - https://www.peakscale.com/strongly-typed-ids/

I don't see how it isn't based on time. They use GPS and atomic clocks to establish the time, establish an uncertainty window, and in Spanner's case will have transactions wait out that uncertainty to guarantee an ordering (globally).

Agree, and the timestamp comparisons you can make when the windows do not overlap are the basis of the ordering guarantees (across machines, even globally).

Could be an alias, I have a limited set of aliases for each type of system. But I keep a repository of hundreds of personal shell scripts and it fit better there.

> The main reason we can not use system clocks is that system clocks across servers are not guaranteed to be synchronized.

Data center/cloud system clocks can be tightly synchronized now in practice. Still never perfect and race conditions abound.

But that doesn't mean you can't rely on a clock to determine ordering, Google popularized a different approach with TrueTime/Spanner: https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...

Since I'm bouncing between OSX and Linux a lot, I have a shell script with the same name on each that boils down to:

  if [ `uname` == "Darwin" ]; then
    pbcopy
  else
    xsel --clipboard
  fi

I want to make a FOSS reader that we can run on our own machines. It would poll on demand and be really good at archiving sites/posts. A combination of feed reader and scraping/archiving from residential IPs (at a low rate) where it will almost always be successful.

I want to pair that with an (opt-in) service for syncing feed subscriptions and handing off a stream of things worth archiving (it's often not urgent that this happens, you just want to make sure it happens soon so the content is not lost in a few years). That service could be a very low cost monthly subscription thing plus a FOSS option that you could run on a cheap VPS, etc.

24/7 services are also essential for generating notifications when something in a filter is spotted, being able to have an email gateway, doing things like POSTing items to other sites automatically, etc.

Making that "full" service FOSS is not in the near term plans, though. This is a distributed system that has run 100s of millions of jobs already, has a very specific security and monitoring setup, uses a number of queues and databases, etc. From my past experience, it's really hard to support people with on-premises distributed systems software like this (FOSS or not). I couldn't do this part alone (bootstrapping and can't afford to hire anyone yet).

The author is pointing out that someone who clicks an RSS/Atom link and gets a page of gibberish is not going to understand all that XML, and they will likely just go back to the site confused.

Instead, you can have a readable page with a message like the one in the post: "This is an RSS feed. Subscribe by copying the URL from the address bar into your newsreader. Visit About Feeds to learn more and get started. It’s free."

There are a lot of feeds now with titles and maybe a short paragraph of text, like the beginning of the article or a summary.

There is a world of difference between sites maintaining that feeds vs. nothing at all. Having a signal that an article is there with even the slightest amount of context is so much better than the alternative.

It's mildly annoying to visit a site for the full text (with your ad blocker), but signing up for newsletters etc. from each site one-by-one is really painful.

If I'm going to take 5+ minutes to really read something, it's OK to visit the site. That means something is interesting or relevant enough to invest my time in. That signal can usually be gleaned from a title and short paragraph. Compared to the number of new things published every day, it's relatively rare to find things worth those 5+ minutes.

From what I can gather, many people use RSS readers to follow 5-10 feeds, and they slowly look through and read most of the articles. It serves as a convenient way to follow their top few sites and maybe a few aggregators like HN. Other people track 100s of feeds and quickly scan what's happening, only diving into something if it's interesting or important.

I'm building a service for the second type of person (mainly because I'm that type of person, TBH). No idea what the ratio of "completionists" vs. "scanners" is. Having title-only feeds is not ideal for the latter group, but it's usually fine.

Related:

Reddit is creating an exemption to its unpopular new API pricing terms for makers of accessibility apps, which could come as a big relief for some developers worried about how to afford the potentially expensive fees and the users that rely on the apps to browse Reddit. As long as those apps are noncommercial and “address accessibility needs,” they won’t have to pay to access Reddit’s data.

“We’ve connected with select developers of non-commercial apps that address accessibility needs and offered them exemptions from our large-scale pricing terms,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt says in a statement to The Verge.

From https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/7/23752804/reddit-exempt-acc...

I don't have that mentality that this must be the case, for what it's worth. It's just what is most attractive to the end-users usually. And it's what many products do to attract them.