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Comment by downer63 | Hacker News Reader

That's because the author is a tool of the global ad-tech agenda, writing articles with click-bait headlines. RSS isn't a particularly profitable utility to inject ads into, or suck personal info out of (less cookies, no pixels, makes an MBA yawn in meetings), so I guess that means it's "dead" right?

Oh noes! Markdown is dead!

Oh noes! SOAP XML is dead!

Oh noes! RESTful JSON is dead!

How the fuck would a non-coding journalist know the difference?

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Ars technica does something nice: for a very low fee (European perspective) you get the full articles in your RSS.

Plus they remove tracking and ads on the web page.

Should be win/win since we all hate tracking, ads and never click on them anyway and still actually want to reward sources we read, right?

Ars is the only news site I actually have a subscription for. I'd always appreciated their journalism, and learning about the fulltext RSS feed was the feature that got me to sub. I'd love to see more sites offering that option.

Danny Crighton has a CS degree from Stanford. I'm not entirely convinced by the article either, but your criticism would be a bit more credible if you managed to avoid being factually wrong.

You can have a CS degree and never code.

What in the article required being an active programmer?

Perspective

That said, i have encountered many a myopic active programmer...

Well Said !

I had one of those around (in a manager position of course) that told me in a meeting: "I don't see why you make it seems like it's hard and needs planning to get an app for project X. It's just some embedded html and with HTML5 you get geolocation so it'll be easy and quick. Besides our contractor already has an app so he just needs to add some javascript to it".

Certainly not in Portuguese universities, unless you got the degree with some "help", like a few of our politicians.

I'd avoid saying anything at all if the article wasn't factually wrong about RSS being a disused format.

And there's nothing factually wrong about RSS providing weaker data to ad-tech survellance. The only reason it's being pushed back onto the front burner, is because the Facebook election botch has got everyone spooked about analytics trackers, and lots of richer sources are going dark, putting RSS back on an even footing with the usual web tracker data sources, because everyone is blocking thirdparty scripts and resources.

Meanwhile, pretty sure the guy is operating as a tool for a paycheck sourced from the industry the article serves, and having qualifications only helps to support such theories, since credibility makes the opinion of a stooge all the more valuable. Maybe I should lump you in with him.

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