Top all-time · #3997
Kevin Cox
Personal blog · kevincox.ca · on HN as kevincoxprogrammingweb
Kevin Cox's personal blog at kevincox.ca covers programming and web. Since 2020, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 85 times, most often “RSS Feed Best Practices”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Kevin Cox's RSS Feed Best Practices article and his feed. Comments concern feed discovery in readers and subscribing to the site's Atom feed.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Software developer and all around nerd. I am webscale.
Most-linked posts?
- RSS Feed Best Practices4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-05-07
- Maybe Passwords Are the Future3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-08
- You Don't Want Atomic Deploys (2021)2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-18
- Wrong by Default2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-14
- I Don't Like Imports2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-08-24
What Hacker News says?
> but how much of it is RSS-as-such Almost all of it. RSS is just a much more specific term than "feed" as many people talk about their Twitter or Facebook "feed". I have yet to see a reader that couldn't handle both RSS and Atom and you will see a mix of formats being produced. I wrote a bit more detail about this in the past: https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/#form...
Comment linking /2022/05/06/rss-feed-best-practices/
on “I ditched the algorithm for RSS”Submitted RSS Feed Best Practices as a story · 220 points
HN discussionhttps://kevincox.ca Definitely minimal. The goal was to share content and contact info. JS is used, but not critical. Trackers exist, but aren't loaded if you set Do-Not-Track. (or if you have JS disabled, but that is just a static site limitation)
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share your personal site”Submitted Wrong by Default as a story · 105 points
HN discussionI also share this opinion. I think we are in a local maximum with tabs. But getting out of it request a lot of coordination between browsers and each desktop environment so it is unlikely to ever happen. Maybe less portable browsers like GNOME Web or Safari that only "need" to deal with one desktop environment can manage it at some point. https://kevincox.ca/2021/01/11/tabs-were-a-mistake/
Comment linking /2021/01/11/tabs-were-a-mistake/
on “Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out”Submitted CORS Is Stupid as a story · 92 points
HN discussionNixOS is leauges above Ansible and similar. They are barely even playing the same game. The TL;DR is that Ansible is given a description for some part of the system, then squints at that part and trys to make it match the description. This means that it doesn't unify anything that you haven't described and if you stop describing something it doesn't go away (unless you explicitly tell Ansible to remove it). This mea…
Comment linking /2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/
on “Ubuntu 20.04 LTS’ snap obsession has snapped me off of it”Submitted RSS Feed Best Practices (2022) as a story · 74 points
HN discussionThis is true. But unless you are sure that current and future inputs will always be small I find it is better to start with the algorithm that scales better. Then you can add a special case for small sizes if it turns up in a hot path. This is because performance is typically less important for the fast/small case and it is generally acceptable for processing twice as much to be twice (or slightly more than twice) a…
Comment linking /2023/05/09/less-than-quadratic/
on “How we decreased GitLab repo backup times from 48 hours to 41 minutes”Submitted Typed Config Languages as a story · 74 points
HN discussionThis is the essence of the problem! Yaml and templates are just distractions. It just boils down to the fact that "string" is a very general type and we use it lazily. My personal rule: Every time a value is inserted into a string it must be properly encoded. I wrote a full blog post around this a while back https://kevincox.ca/2022/02/08/escape-everything/ . But the TL;DR is that every string has a format which nee…
Comment linking /2022/02/08/escape-everything/
on “Why are we templating YAML? (2019)”Submitted Ice Golf as a story · 68 points
HN discussionI agree! The problem is that most browsers have awful defaults. I'm not sure why this is but it does mean that people end up wanting to change them. However my browser uses beautiful fonts by default and if you specify just serif, sans-serif or monospace. I wish this would be the common case so that we can just respect users font settings instead of picking what we think is the best. I write an article on this a whi…
Comment linking /2021/06/23/respect-user-fonts/
on “GDPR penalty for passing on of IP address to Google by using Google Fonts”Submitted Git Bisect-Find as a story · 50 points
HN discussionI use NixOS on my laptop as well and like it. This is where the lack of polish hurts a little because desktop environments require a lot of polish to be wired up smoothly. That being said I use GNOME and the basics just work. But on the server is where I think Nix really shines today. The biggest thing for me is that every deploy is "clean" and can be rolled back. Systems like Ansible (and basically every other conf…
Comment linking /2020/09/06/switching-to-desktop-nixos/
on “Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit”Submitted Dictionary Compression as a story · 44 points
HN discussionIn general Nix is a huge step above Ansible for config management. They aren't even playing the same game. Ansible is an awkward syntax to generate a shell script, NixOps is a declarative deployment tool. (I wrote more about this in [1] if you are interested). However one place that NixOps doesn't handle well is state. So for example if you want to run state mutating commands such as boot read-only, kill replication…
Comment linking /2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/
on “NixOS 21.05”Submitted Private Internet as a story · 31 points
HN discussionI agree. It puts the system administrator in control of a lot of these things. Sometimes that can be annoying (the developer knows that systems calls they need) but often it is a huge benefit. I think socket-passing especially is a huge win, it shifts a huge amount of complexity out of each application and gives huge benefits as the administrator can configure the sockets however they want without needing each appli…
Comment linking /2021/04/15/my-ideal-service/
on “Avoiding Complexity with Systemd”Submitted Maybe Passwords Are the Future as a story · 30 points
HN discussionI larelt agree. I wrote a while back about how to make good names[1] Choosing whimsical names is a pretty good way to satisfy my two most important requirements. They are often unique and don't mislead people. Of course my ideal name would also give some hint about what it does (I think Google's BigTable may be one of the best named products) but I think this is far less important than the other two requirements. [1…
Comment linking /2021/03/23/good-names/
on “Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic”Submitted Per-User Rate Limiting as a story · 21 points
HN discussionI also made my own tweaks https://kevincox.ca/2021/06/03/firefox-proton-tweaks/ - I changed the "button" to be a simple rectangle the entire height of the tab-bar. - I removed extra space between the pinned tabs and the regular tabs.
Comment linking /2021/06/03/firefox-proton-tweaks/
on “Firefox 89 Tab Appearance”Submitted I Don't Like Imports as a story · 13 points
HN discussionI recently switched as well and am very happy. I don't think that re-configuring takes much longer that the average distro would especially because a lot of services you can just say `services.foobar.enable = true` and get a decent default config. You only need to spend your time configuring the things that you are picky about. And yes, the fact that I can configure all of my systems with a shared set of configs and…
Comment linking /2020/09/06/switching-to-desktop-nixos/
on “Nix × IPFS – Milestone 1”Submitted Maybe Passwords Are the Future as a story · 13 points
HN discussionNetNewsWire seems to have a problem discovering the feed from index pages (e.g. https://kevincox.ca/2022/05/ ).
Comment linking /2022/05/
on “RSS Feed Best Practices”Submitted Wrong by Default as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI want to follow your website's feed (at https://kevincox.ca/feed.atom ). Good article!
Comment linking /feed.atom
on “RSS Feed Best Practices”Submitted RSS/Atom feed best practise as a story · 10 points
HN discussion
