Hacker News: 8organicbits

New comment by 8organicbits in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

8organicbits — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:48:54 +0000

Idk, Google seems worse there too. I tried "my left hip is hurting".

Google shows an AI overview and "people also ask" with zero search results above the fold. If I page down I see a single search result for clevelandclinic.org, followed by youtube videos and image search results. The next page has a single search result from rush.edu and then "discussions and forums" which has Mayo Clinic and Quora.

DDG also starts with the AI overview (although I disable that) and has two results from webmd.com with deep links to multiple pages on the site, all above the fold. Then the same clevelandclinic.org result as Google but again, adding deep links to other related pages.

I can't comment on the quality of webmd, clevelandclinic, or rush, but Google pushing the user to youtube and quora for medical advise seems worrying.

New comment by 8organicbits in "As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing"

8organicbits — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:05:25 +0000

Interesting, I've seen much better results on DDG. Most recently was the search: `site:feeds.bbci.co.uk inurl:rss.xml` which works on DDG but gives zero results on Google. As far as I can tell, Google just decided not to index these.

New comment by 8organicbits in "What Happened to HackerOne?"

8organicbits — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:15:46 +0000

The link shows the first six months of 2026 for "all items" as: 2.4%, 2.4%, 3.3%, 3.8%, 4.2%, 3.5%. Gasoline ranged from -7.5% to 40.5% over the same range, which I've definitely noticed.

My newsletter is your email client, too

8organicbits — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:48:01 +0000

Article URL: https://en.andros.dev/blog/685eb16f/my-newsletter-is-your-email-client-too/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49167294

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by 8organicbits in "How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)"

8organicbits — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 21:55:53 +0000

I use RSS specifically because the people who publish via RSS are not trying to monetize their content.

New comment by 8organicbits in "A directory of people who love RSS"

8organicbits — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:55:28 +0000

I don't think this is helpful. The last statistic I saw put RSS at 77% of the web feed market share, higher than Atom. In the web feed market it isn't a protocol on the way out, its the dominant protocol.

While RSS is tricky to parse in practice, many of the challenges are due to invalid feeds, which Atom is not invulnerable to. Its very likely that there is a well-tested feed parser for your favorite programming language, so most developers using feed programmatically don't need to handle those challenges themselves.

For concerns like title encoding or summary vs full text description, you can handle those using namespaces. If you don't like any of the existing namespaces that do that you can create your own.

New comment by 8organicbits in "A directory of people who love RSS"

8organicbits — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 18:27:41 +0000

What do you like about JSON Feed?

One of the downsides I saw when evaluating JSON Feed was that it doesn't use GUIDs, which can cause problems when the same post is present in multiple feeds (I.E. syndication).

When I last looked I found that every feed reader supporting JSON feeds also supported RSS/Atom and every website with a JSON feed also had an RSS or Atom feed, so it seems easiest to ignore the JSON Feed format.

New comment by 8organicbits in "A directory of people who love RSS"

8organicbits — Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:59:03 +0000

It's great to see someone else using FeedLand. While it has some quirks, is has some clever ideas, like that blogroll feature.

My favorite part of FeedLand is that you can see who subscribes to a blog and where else they subscribe. This makes RSS feel social, without the algorithmic tricks of traditional social media. Here's the listing for my blog, for example: https://feedland.com/?feedurl=https%3A%2F%2Falexsci.com%2Fbl...

New comment by 8organicbits in "Ask HN: My domain registrar (Hover) rug-pulled me for $3000"

8organicbits — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 17:17:57 +0000

> It’s Hovers problem what the price behind the door is.

This feels key to me. If .sexy is changing fees with very short notice, and Hover doesn't have enough time to inform their customers before renewal, then Hover should stop offering .sexy domain names. None of that is a problem for the customer.

New comment by 8organicbits in "Substack writers, you need a website"

8organicbits — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 17:53:13 +0000

The linked article "What I learned from one year of Substack" [1] perfectly sums up my experience. I can't read the article because I only see a coercive demand to subscribe first. Perhaps that's the joke.

[1] https://elizabethtai.com/2023/10/22/what-i-learned-from-one-...

New comment by 8organicbits in "Modern email can be built from borrowed parts"

8organicbits — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:06:52 +0000

When I checked in 2024 (https://alexsci.com/blog/is-email-confidential-in-transit-ye...), Cloudflare had more domains using DANE than Microsoft. But you're right, DANE is not widely adopted. Lack of support by Google is most notable due to the large number of domains using their service.

New comment by 8organicbits in "Modern email can be built from borrowed parts"

8organicbits — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:47:25 +0000

Typically you don't want to require authenticated encryption for all outgoing email as many mail servers use certificates that are self-signed or otherwise appear invalid. It isn't as simple as it seems and isn't generally recommended.

What concerns do you have with MTA-STS?

New comment by 8organicbits in "Modern email can be built from borrowed parts"

8organicbits — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 20:13:26 +0000

Email currently uses an HTTP request to https://mta-sts./.well-known/mta-sts.txt, per RFC 8461. Depending on HTTPS/TLS instead of DNSSEC is one major reason you see this approach gaining popularity.

New comment by 8organicbits in "Modern email can be built from borrowed parts"

8organicbits — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 12:01:02 +0000

I think the network effects make email hard to replace, virtually everyone online has an email address. If this could include a migration path, with backwards compatibility with SMTP, I think it would have a better shot of getting adoption.

Modern email already depends on HTTP, with protocols like MTA-STS (https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8461/) using HTTPS/TLS to improve transit encryption, or Web Key Directory (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-koch-openpgp-webkey-s...) which uses HTTP for public key distribution. Personally I think these incremental improvements of SMTP are more promising than replacements, but we deserve better email however we can build it.

New comment by 8organicbits in "DeepSeek pause fundraise after comments on compute gap to US leaked (transcript) [pdf]"

8organicbits — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:43:11 +0000

I think that statement is vacuous true for all magical thinking.

Forer Effect

8organicbits — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 01:27:29 +0000

Article URL: https://www.skepdic.com/forer.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49053674

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

New comment by 8organicbits in "Codeberg Divides"

8organicbits — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 19:27:41 +0000

The low hanging fruit are claude.md, commits co-authored by Copilot, etc.

New comment by 8organicbits in "Alphabet's cash burn raises alarm for Big Tech as AI spending climbs"

8organicbits — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 13:46:22 +0000

> wasn't until late December of last year that AI models started to demonstrate particularly interesting capabilities

What are you referring to here?

WordPress – Polls for ActivityPub

8organicbits — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 22:11:13 +0000

Article URL: https://wordpress.org/plugins/polls-for-activitypub/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48952775

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by 8organicbits in "Vancouver PD website features Quick Escape button that wipes itself from history"

8organicbits — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 15:21:47 +0000

Does this actually remove from history? The feature says escape, but the back button and history still show the page (Firefox on Android).