Top all-time · #987
Sam Ruby
Personal blog · intertwingly.net/blogprogrammingweb
Sam Ruby is a personal blog at intertwingly.net about programming and web. Since 2007, 67 different Hacker News readers have linked it 117 times, most often “Pencils Down, Notation Up”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 37 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Sam Ruby's intertwingly.net mainly for its RSS 2.0 versus Atom 1.0 comparison page, and for posts on feed aggregation, Atom, web standards and JavaScript tooling.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Called the RSS vs Atom comparison 'a good article' and 'an oldie but a goodie', with 'interesting items' in it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 37 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2013-03-16
- /blog/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-02-18
- Pencils Down, Notation Up3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2026-09-26
- /blog/2007/01/03/OpenID-for-non-SuperUsers2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2007-12-17
- /blog/2010/11/25/Hobgoblin-of-Little-Minds2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-12-18
- Spinel on Rails2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-06-27
- Rails and Snowmen2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-07-29
- Brief History of the ASF Board Agenda Tool2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-18
- /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-04
- /code/venus/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-04-27
What Hacker News says?
Hot take: we should revive ATOM instead. RSS and ATOM are both nearly always machine generated and machine read so this may seem trivial to argue, but for those who are interesting in seeing the difference, this is a good article http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared -------- When I wrote a forum software a while back, it was trivial to not only add a feed for new threads but also for new comme…
Comment linking /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
on “It's time to head back to RSS?”Submitted Sam Ruby, Brendan Eich, and Jeremy Ashkenas on CoffeeScript and "JS-next" as a story · 65 points
HN discussionIf anyone is looking for a quick comparison of Atom and RSS formats: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#... I would also encourage Atom over RSS, the specification is simpler and less ambiguous.
Comment linking /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
on “Please Add RSS Support to Your Site”Submitted Sam Ruby converts to Vue.js as a story · 28 points
HN discussionIt seems that RSS just caught on as the name everyone remembers. Atom is indeed better [0]. [0]: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
Comment linking /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
on “Winds 2.0: It’s Time to Revive RSS”Submitted A dive into Google Wave as a story · 18 points
HN discussionI supplied the right link. I suppose we're reading the page differently. If you don't think that page is evidence enough that CoffeeScript inspired much of ES6 then I suppose we experienced the times differently. Here's a nice article showing that CoffeeScript was on Brendan's mind when he was working on Harmony (ES6): https://brendaneich.com/2010/11/paren-free/ He calls Ruby/Python/CoffeeScript "unsyntax" and he do…
Comment linking /blog/2010/11/25/Hobgoblin-of-Little-Minds
on “Announcing TypeScript 3.0”Submitted Sam Ruby: Life after Bug Tracking Systems as a story · 18 points
HN discussionThis is from Ian Hickson in 2006, regarding the emergence of HTML5: "Regarding your original suggestion: based on the arguments presented by the various people taking part in this discussion, I’ve now updated the specification to allow “/” characters at the end of void elements." To which Sam Ruby responded: "This is big. PHP’s nl2br function is now HTML5 compliant. WordPress won’t have to completely convert to HTML…
Comment linking /blog/2009/04/08/HTML-Reunification
on “To close or not to close – Void HTML elements”Submitted Sam Ruby: Keeping Up With Rails as a story · 15 points
HN discussionMaybe this is just changing fashion, but a lot of developers keep blogs for this reason, and 10 years ago everyone would have simply called this idea a "blog". Among the ones I read: http://intertwingly.net/blog/ https://burningbird.net/ https://kottke.org/ https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ I keep my own blog entirely for my own benefit, and the tech section is simply things I've read recently, or things I've learned r…
Comment linking /blog/
on “The software engineering notebook”Submitted Pencils Down, Notation Up as a story · 12 points
HN discussionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_(software) https://web.archive.org/web/20051029095046/http://www.planet... https://intertwingly.net/code/venus/docs/index.html https://github.com/kgaughan/mercury
Comment linking /code/venus/docs/index.html
on “Escape the walled garden and algorithm black boxes with RSS feeds”Submitted Pencils Down, Notation Up as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI agree. If nothing else, CoffeeScript will be a success if some of its ideas find their way into a future version of JavaScript. It's been very gratifying to see folks like Crockford and Eich giving it a serious look: * http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/11/25/Hobgoblin-of-Little-... * http://brendaneich.com/2010/11/paren-free/ * http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/video.php?v=crockonjs...
Comment linking /blog/2010/11/25/Hobgoblin-of-Little-Minds
on “CoffeeScript hits 1.0 -- Happy Holidays, HN”Submitted Pencils Down, Notation Up as a story · 5 points
HN discussionSome of these problems are inherent to PHP, but the WordPress team has decided to work with PHP, therefore the problems of PHP are also legitimate issues to raise with the WordPress team. That is to say, in accepting PHP as their language, the WordPress team must take responsibility for that choice, and that includes confronting the security risks that arise from the choice of language. Sam Ruby made this same point…
Comment linking /blog/2007/07/17/Popular-Sovereignty
on “Free Wordpress themes coming with a price”Submitted Sam Ruby: Ruby Client for Google Wave as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is FUD. Rails actually does have UTF-8 support, and it's on by default, to the point of fixing bugs in IE to make sure everything is UTF-8: http://intertwingly.net/blog/2010/07/29/Rails-and-Snowmen
Comment linking /blog/2010/07/29/Rails-and-Snowmen
on “Rails is omakase”Submitted Realtime Updates of Web Content Using WebSockets as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI would argue that ATOM is better: http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared#... Sure, they're both automatically generated / automatically read, but ATOM seems like an improvement syntactically ... http://nullprogram.com/blog/2013/09/23/
Comment linking /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
on “Why Podcasting Still Needs RSS”Submitted Rust is the answer to the wrong question as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAtom, in my opinion; it cleaned up some problems with RSS. http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
Comment linking /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
on “The real responsive design challenge is RSS”Submitted Bringing CGI Back from the Dead as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAtom: see http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared for details but it basically boils down to RSS having gaps and inconsistencies which are compounded by the spec being essentially fossilized and David Winer being famously difficult to deal with.
Comment linking /wiki/pie/Rss20AndAtom10Compared
on “Google Kills Its RSS Subscription Browser Extension Too”Submitted Pegurl.js as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI read this discussion when it showed up a few days ago, but at my work, fsf.org is accessible. Today, though, I was reading this article on Reacreational SVG ( http://intertwingly.net/blog/2007/02/16/Recreational-SVG ) and find that the linked Open Solutions Alliance page ( http://www.opensolutionsalliance.org/ ) is blocked by my employer's filtering (BlueCoat), so I'm somewhat distressed. I gather OSA is a benevol…
Comment linking /blog/2007/02/16/Recreational-SVG
on “Dear Microsoft: fsf.org is not a "gambling site" ”Submitted Microdata in HTML5 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYou have never seen HTML used to build something that a human might look at? What are you looking at right now? Aren't you looking at a web page? Aren't you human? Aren't you using your eyes to see what I've written? Unless you "View Source" on every page you visit, you are looking at the GUI, not the structured information. If you think HTML can be used to send structured information, I would urge to read the essay…
Comment linking /blog/2009/07/19/Humpty-Dumpty
on “80 front-end job applications – nearly no one had basic HTML/CSS/A11y skills”Submitted REST + SOAP as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
