Top all-time · #8031
Oli Warner
Personal blog · thepcspy.com/readprogrammingweb
Oli Warner's personal blog at thepcspy.com covers programming and web. Since 2007, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 26 times, most often “What Happened to RSS?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-07-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Oli Warner's KittenAuth post, a cat-picture CAPTCHA idea, and his post on what slows Windows down. The comments are mostly bare links or praise the idea rather than the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Father of three, seasoned web developer (Django, Vue, Astro, etc), Ubuntu Member, photographer and woodworker. This is my blog, covering a raft of topics, mostly technical.
Most-linked posts?
- What Happened to RSS?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-06-11
What Hacker News says?
The ones I've seen don't ask you to identify one single puppy. They ask you to identify all the puppies, making it rather harder to brute force: http://thepcspy.com/read/the_cutest_humantest_kittenauth/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/asir...
Comment linking /read/the_cutest_humantest_kittenauth/
on “How not to design a CAPTCHA”Submitted Hey Paypal, why do you need access to my microphone, camera and photos? as a story · 124 points
HN discussionChina already ignores safety and radio regulations. Sure, add more. They'll keep flooding Amazon and eBay with cheap crap and people will keep buying it. Good IoT will just become even more expensive. The only way to avoid a botnet apocalypse is to secure home routers. Outbound traffic should not be an automatic right. People should have to authorise each device for each type of traffic. I argued this long-hand when…
Comment linking /read/when-did-we-stop-caring-network-security/
on “Schneier: It's Time to Regulate IoT to Improve Cyber-Security”Submitted What Happened to RSS? as a story · 83 points
HN discussionI agree but still use Bootstrap. There's too much well-thought out stuff to ignore or attempt to reinvent. I don't include bootstrap.min.css though. I wrote a custom LESS (I'm still using v3) stylesheet to replace bootstrap.less, which pulls in just the bits I want. I also use this to customise and theme the whole thing. I also don't use Bootstrap's classes in my HTML. These are replaced in my custom version by sema…
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on “Bootstrap 4's mobile-first flexbox grid system, now used by default”Submitted Is FreeRice.com making $150K a day? as a story · 8 points
HN discussionAlso an ex-smoker. I don't think the psychology or physiological methods of breaking addiction are that clear or consistent for populations. Feeling like you were getting less might have been the progress you needed, irrespective of your actual blood-nicotine levels. Conversely, I dicked around with various NRTs, various actual doses but nicotine cravings and the fear of even worse cravings kept me returning to ciga…
Comment linking /read/breaking-the-habit/
on “How Australia is stubbing out smoking”Submitted IoT security is a distraction, we need to make basic networking secure first as a story · 4 points
HN discussionHaving a browser that gives you the choice is an essential first step. Without XSLT, Firefox displays an ugly XML view and offers no suggestion that the URL might serve any useful purpose. With XSLT (see mine below), you can make it much healthier, but you're then still the person trying to explain how to use RSS. Browsers used to form part of this protocol handling element. https://thepcspy.com/feeds/full.xml
Comment linking /feeds/full.xml
on “Google Chrome is getting an RSS feed reader on desktop”Submitted It's time we buried Internet Explorer 8 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRendering KittenAuth obsolete http://thepcspy.com/kittenauth/ http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/04/6554-2/
Comment linking /kittenauth/
on “Face detection for cats in JavaScript”Submitted Our doctors are striking for patients, not money as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://www.thepcspy.com/read/what_really_slows_windows_down/... Aparently not.
Comment linking /read/what_really_slows_windows_down/5
on “Evidence suggests first zombie Mac botnet is active”Submitted Python isn't always slower than C as a story · 2 points
HN discussion11ty to GitHub then Cloudflare Pages. This setup replaced my old Django on VPS setup. It's faster for more people, will never have scaling issues (not that Django did). Costs nothing. And I could switch to other services (even self host on a toaster) in a heartbeat. Static site generators are great for blogs. No interest in a platform. I'd lose autonomy, my gut history, gain a lot of page weight... All for what? An…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Where do you post your writing?”Submitted Please be careful with my daughter's biometrics as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThanks. This was a great shove in the right direction. The markup on my main site is pretty simple so it was super easy to replicate through XLST. https://thepcspy.com/feeds/full.xml https://thepcspy.com/static/feed.xlst
Comment linking /static/feed.xlst
on “Ask HN: How to promote RSS subscriptions in 2022?”Submitted Putting the Secure in SSH; tips to harden your shell server against most attacks as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI've personally no problem in consuming RSS. It's more about the visitors to my websites. It used to be enough to embed a feed and people would subscribe. These days there's so little in-browser glue that you either have to know what to do with it, or... or what? The point here is to try to work out how people stay up to date with individual websites. I wrote this after posting here, might explain better than this l…
Comment linking /read/what-happened-to-rss/
on “Ask HN: How to promote RSS subscriptions in 2022?”Submitted Migrating Django's database as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWhoops, forgot the link 1: https://thepcspy.com/read/whats-happened/
Comment linking /read/whats-happened/
on “Zuckerberg encouraged growth over child safety, ex-Meta executive testifies”This has been true of Windows for a long, long time. I did a few benchmarks back in 2006 and installing 1000 fonts had a comparable effect on boot time to Norton Internet Security. This carried into GDI starts but caching made that painful to benchmark. Reliably. Does make you wonder how much Windows 95 code or even just idioms are still clanging around inside Windows 10. https://thepcspy.com/read/what-slows-windows…
Comment linking /read/what-slows-windows-down/
on “Too Many Fonts in Windows 10 Can Cause Slow Application Starts”I find this truly bizarre that people are still writing about this. Look at where you adverts were supposed to be, check the height. If they're zero, something has probably stopped that ad loading. You don't need a third party script to manage this. I wrote this over 9 years ago: https://thepcspy.com/read/how_to_block_adblock/ and it's somehow still cutting edge. Publishers need to realise that static spatial ads ar…
Comment linking /read/how_to_block_adblock/
on “Block Ad-Blocker?”As a developer and blogger I still use RSS quite a lot, but I suspect I'm on the very edge of edge cases these days. - I use Feedly multiple times a day to see what's happening in the world. My account is subscribed to many different sites and a few aggregate sources (like Hacker News, various subreddits, planets, etc) - I publish a RSS feed [on my blog]( https://thepcspy.com ). While the site traffic has held fairl…
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on “Does people still use RSS?”More importantly, why hasn't http://www.thepcspy.com/kittenauth taken off? This is more practical (and cuter) than using brand-logos.. Pictures of kittens and other animals are easy to find, whereas getting a wide enough range of companies willing to let you use their logos will be far more difficult.. It would be like having a captcha where there are only 5 possible strings to enter..
Comment linking /kittenauth
on “Ask HN: Why Didn't Captcha Advertising Take Off?”
