It is a fine project to limit 'doomscrolling', but I think the premise is wrong.
- I have created my own RSS readers, that contains 500+ sources. I do not doom scroll
- doom scrolling appears when social media algorithm feeds you data, even from a month ago
- I have various filters so I can browse whatever I want
So RSS should just have filters, categories, search extensive capabilities to solve doom scrolling, and on the other hand it will be able to provide you extensive amounts of data.
The human psychology is intriguing. The more I see "... Zig ..." the stronger the urge to learn and build something with it becomes.
In practice, though, I've found that building things with languages I am familiar with is more enjoyable for me, personally.
A severe case of mimetic desire. I suspect a lot of devs suffer from it.
The 'once a day' fetching limitation is a fascinating idea. It really captures the vibe of reading a physical newspaper in the morning rather than constantly checking for updates. I think many of us could use a tool that enforces a bit of 'digital silence' like this.
In middle school (age 11-13 in the late '90s, USA) I had a hand-me-down Palm Pilot (probably upgraded to Handspring in there). I'd leave it on my serial(?) port cradle and have it download my daily news from sites like IGN and Slashdot over 56K before I woke up. I was also the kid that regularly read the "Time Life for Kids" mags they'd pass out to us in homeroom. That's the outlet I learned about Napster from and hooked my school onto. Your comment reminded me of those days. Now I'm still desperately hooked on RSS since the early days.
ETA: When I was a late teen I ended up managing a bunch of younger teams for a free mod for an indie PC game called Blockland. I had them code up IRC and RSS capabilities into the mod from scratch in the Torque Game Engine's custom TorcueScript. I couldn't believe what those kids were capable of. They all went into programming, engineering, or founding their own companies out of highschool and college. If one of them told me something was impossible I'd just tell them that I saw that a competing mod already figured it out. Magically my dudes had a solution really quick lol. Sometimes when you have limited resources and/or experience the old and proven ways are just as good.
Was great when they had all that XML experience in a weird scripting language and I asked them to implement Jabber in-game from my Dreamhost shared-hosting plan. Crazy what a bunch of teens can do for an online Lego-like game.
Thanks for letting this older dude wax nostalgic off the rails. Hope it reminds others on HN about early hacking days like OP's project.
I've been wanting a browser plugin like this for ages. Basically tell it which sites to limit, then once loaded it won't re-load for a certain amount of time, or until the next day (not necessarily 24 hours). This way there is no reason to keep checking the news, they won't change.
I’m currently evaluating whether I’m happy with Kagi News in my RSS reader compared to separate news outlets. So far it seems to capture all the important bits.
I think its cool that more people are building what I call "calm tech". More technology should try to serve a purpose quickly and then get out of the way instead of trying to artificially stay on your screen as long as possible.
nice! yeah, i agree. calm tech is a nice way to put it. the current big platforms are highly tuned to keep people engaged and enraged to the max, rss is kind antithesis of that. that's probably why big companies try to bury and hide it. youtube and reddit still give pretty good rss support though, which is nice.
Ideally, one should pipe into $PAGER, or, if that's missing, into "pager" (it's usually symlinked to less), or, if that's missing, into "less"/"more"/"cat", or, if even those are missing, then just write to stdout.
This looks kinda scary to me considering that Zig isn't a safe language and it's being used here to parse untrusted data from the internet. Would the ReleaseSafe mode that Zig provides prevent any attempts of exploiting memory safety bugs?
first of all, i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here. for xml parsing, i'm using libexpat, one of the most widely used c xml parsers.
for networking, i'm using libcurl, the industry standard.
i have some limits in place, too. the feed size is capped at 200 kb, and there are timeouts for hanging connections. there's also a sanitization step that strips control characters that could mess with the terminal emulator, mitigating escape sequences.
that said, i'm no security expert, and the source code is public. if anyone more knowledgeable spots a security hole, i'd be happy to merge a fix.
why not? isn't mit just objectively a better license for open source? i just hope rss would make a comeback to make the internet a little saner again, and if someone wants to use hys source code as a base for their own rss reader, whether commercial or not, great!
Copyleft licences "care about the user" as in "as a user, I want you to be able to patch the code you run so I enforce it in my licence". It's a different philosophy from permissive licences that say "companies can use them in their closed, proprietary product, I just want them to mention somewhere that they use my code". Note that more often than not, those using permissive licences don't even bother to follow that simple rule.
As a user, I'm happier with copyleft. I like to take my Marshall smart speaker as an example: that thing doesn't get any updates, ever. But it connects to the Internet. The app absolutely sucks, the connectivity is passable at best (often frustrating), but the hardware itself is nice (it looks nice in my living room and the sound is good when it works).
If all the open source software running inside that thing was GPLv3, Marshall would have to provide me with a way to patch it. So at the very least I could make security updates myself. But because Marshall used permissively-licenced dependencies, they locked it down in such a way that I can't do that.
The permissive licence helped Marshall, but for me as a user, the code may as well be proprietary.
It also has an impact on contribution. In my experience with small open source projects, if I licence my library permissively, people will almost never contribute or open source anything. They will gladly ask for bugfixes and features, though.
If I use a copyleft licence (I like EUPL or MPLv2), it doesn't mean that they will open clean PRs, but at least they have to publish their changes in their own fork. It has happened to me that I could go read a fork, find a few things that were interesting and bring them back to my project.
With permissive licences, the risk is that those (typically businesses) who keep their fork open source probably don't see a lot of value in their fork, otherwise they would have made it private, "just in case".
Explain what you mean by "objectively better"? Your response makes it sound like you don't know the difference and are doing it because everybody else does it. It also makes it sounds like you don't understand the difference between open source software and free software. Both are free licenses, open source is just one part of it.
The main difference is that GPL3 is a copyleft license, whereas MIT is not. Meaning that legally there is nothing in the license preventing a company from taking your code and using it for their purposes without having to contribute to improve the code.
i know the difference. i use gpl3 in my other project lue for example. i meant objectively better for the open source community. the spread of new ideas benefits from the mit license because the ideas in the code can travel farther.
the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now. the tech isn't mainstream, and big companies are trying to squash it since it doesn't drive engagement like the infinite scroll. anything that helps rss move forward is a win, and the mit license makes that easier.
> the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now.
I don't think another client is the solution, just saying. There's about three billion of them out there (though I don't dispute that yours might have something unique).
It is a fine project to limit 'doomscrolling', but I think the premise is wrong.
- I have created my own RSS readers, that contains 500+ sources. I do not doom scroll
- doom scrolling appears when social media algorithm feeds you data, even from a month ago
- I have various filters so I can browse whatever I want
So RSS should just have filters, categories, search extensive capabilities to solve doom scrolling, and on the other hand it will be able to provide you extensive amounts of data.
The human psychology is intriguing. The more I see "... Zig ..." the stronger the urge to learn and build something with it becomes. In practice, though, I've found that building things with languages I am familiar with is more enjoyable for me, personally.
A severe case of mimetic desire. I suspect a lot of devs suffer from it.
it works like fashion in clothing.
The 'once a day' fetching limitation is a fascinating idea. It really captures the vibe of reading a physical newspaper in the morning rather than constantly checking for updates. I think many of us could use a tool that enforces a bit of 'digital silence' like this.
In middle school (age 11-13 in the late '90s, USA) I had a hand-me-down Palm Pilot (probably upgraded to Handspring in there). I'd leave it on my serial(?) port cradle and have it download my daily news from sites like IGN and Slashdot over 56K before I woke up. I was also the kid that regularly read the "Time Life for Kids" mags they'd pass out to us in homeroom. That's the outlet I learned about Napster from and hooked my school onto. Your comment reminded me of those days. Now I'm still desperately hooked on RSS since the early days.
ETA: When I was a late teen I ended up managing a bunch of younger teams for a free mod for an indie PC game called Blockland. I had them code up IRC and RSS capabilities into the mod from scratch in the Torque Game Engine's custom TorcueScript. I couldn't believe what those kids were capable of. They all went into programming, engineering, or founding their own companies out of highschool and college. If one of them told me something was impossible I'd just tell them that I saw that a competing mod already figured it out. Magically my dudes had a solution really quick lol. Sometimes when you have limited resources and/or experience the old and proven ways are just as good.
Was great when they had all that XML experience in a weird scripting language and I asked them to implement Jabber in-game from my Dreamhost shared-hosting plan. Crazy what a bunch of teens can do for an online Lego-like game.
Thanks for letting this older dude wax nostalgic off the rails. Hope it reminds others on HN about early hacking days like OP's project.
Love it. It’s funny how we are now building modern tools just to try and get back that simple 'Palm Pilot morning read' vibe.
I've been wanting a browser plugin like this for ages. Basically tell it which sites to limit, then once loaded it won't re-load for a certain amount of time, or until the next day (not necessarily 24 hours). This way there is no reason to keep checking the news, they won't change.
Kagi News does something similar, for what it's worth.
I’m currently evaluating whether I’m happy with Kagi News in my RSS reader compared to separate news outlets. So far it seems to capture all the important bits.
I think its cool that more people are building what I call "calm tech". More technology should try to serve a purpose quickly and then get out of the way instead of trying to artificially stay on your screen as long as possible.
Incidentally, I built my own calm RSS reader some time ago that has many similar ideas to yours: https://github.com/lukasknuth/briefly
https://newsboat.org/
The best RSS reader program I have been using for years
nice! yeah, i agree. calm tech is a nice way to put it. the current big platforms are highly tuned to keep people engaged and enraged to the max, rss is kind antithesis of that. that's probably why big companies try to bury and hide it. youtube and reddit still give pretty good rss support though, which is nice.
>And for the UI I just pipe everything to the system's "less" command.
I never thought of that as an option. Thanks for the tip haha.
Ideally, one should pipe into $PAGER, or, if that's missing, into "pager" (it's usually symlinked to less), or, if that's missing, into "less"/"more"/"cat", or, if even those are missing, then just write to stdout.
sometimes the simplest solution is the best! i love the unix philosophy:
Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
If anyone is interested in RSS feeds, here are mine in SQLite table:
https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-feeds
This looks kinda scary to me considering that Zig isn't a safe language and it's being used here to parse untrusted data from the internet. Would the ReleaseSafe mode that Zig provides prevent any attempts of exploiting memory safety bugs?
that's a valid concern.
first of all, i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel here. for xml parsing, i'm using libexpat, one of the most widely used c xml parsers.
for networking, i'm using libcurl, the industry standard.
i have some limits in place, too. the feed size is capped at 200 kb, and there are timeouts for hanging connections. there's also a sanitization step that strips control characters that could mess with the terminal emulator, mitigating escape sequences.
that said, i'm no security expert, and the source code is public. if anyone more knowledgeable spots a security hole, i'd be happy to merge a fix.
Nice work, I did mine in C, using Termbox2, in a very suckless fashion (config.h & make install)
I like the idea of the daily digest.
That gave me a good chuckle:
Consider having a shortcut to load a feed item's comments in the browser, if that's not already there.Why MIT and not GPL3?
why not? isn't mit just objectively a better license for open source? i just hope rss would make a comeback to make the internet a little saner again, and if someone wants to use hys source code as a base for their own rss reader, whether commercial or not, great!
Copyleft licences "care about the user" as in "as a user, I want you to be able to patch the code you run so I enforce it in my licence". It's a different philosophy from permissive licences that say "companies can use them in their closed, proprietary product, I just want them to mention somewhere that they use my code". Note that more often than not, those using permissive licences don't even bother to follow that simple rule.
As a user, I'm happier with copyleft. I like to take my Marshall smart speaker as an example: that thing doesn't get any updates, ever. But it connects to the Internet. The app absolutely sucks, the connectivity is passable at best (often frustrating), but the hardware itself is nice (it looks nice in my living room and the sound is good when it works).
If all the open source software running inside that thing was GPLv3, Marshall would have to provide me with a way to patch it. So at the very least I could make security updates myself. But because Marshall used permissively-licenced dependencies, they locked it down in such a way that I can't do that.
The permissive licence helped Marshall, but for me as a user, the code may as well be proprietary.
It also has an impact on contribution. In my experience with small open source projects, if I licence my library permissively, people will almost never contribute or open source anything. They will gladly ask for bugfixes and features, though.
If I use a copyleft licence (I like EUPL or MPLv2), it doesn't mean that they will open clean PRs, but at least they have to publish their changes in their own fork. It has happened to me that I could go read a fork, find a few things that were interesting and bring them back to my project.
With permissive licences, the risk is that those (typically businesses) who keep their fork open source probably don't see a lot of value in their fork, otherwise they would have made it private, "just in case".
Explain what you mean by "objectively better"? Your response makes it sound like you don't know the difference and are doing it because everybody else does it. It also makes it sounds like you don't understand the difference between open source software and free software. Both are free licenses, open source is just one part of it.
The main difference is that GPL3 is a copyleft license, whereas MIT is not. Meaning that legally there is nothing in the license preventing a company from taking your code and using it for their purposes without having to contribute to improve the code.
i know the difference. i use gpl3 in my other project lue for example. i meant objectively better for the open source community. the spread of new ideas benefits from the mit license because the ideas in the code can travel farther.
the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now. the tech isn't mainstream, and big companies are trying to squash it since it doesn't drive engagement like the infinite scroll. anything that helps rss move forward is a win, and the mit license makes that easier.
Ok thank you for explaining.
> the reason i picked mit is because rss is in a rough spot right now.
I don't think another client is the solution, just saying. There's about three billion of them out there (though I don't dispute that yours might have something unique).