Give people something to link to
simonwillison.net
simonwillison.net
I don't know if it's really useful since I don't think I've ever needed to forward anything to any CEO, but I'm not even a customer and this page is the first thing that came to mind when reading the article.
This is designed to be forwarded to your manager rather than you personally trying to come up with a professional sounding justification.
And for the rest of the stuff, stay as boring as possible.
So many times I see dev teams get innovating the whole way down and end up losing the focus as to how they provide value.
I need to burn this slide deck into my world view!
I literally built this concept into my new project last night, because I wanted to add evidence to the story about the Google Gemini App moderating yt-dlp, by showing that the Gemini API does not. Also to enable a funnel to the project and the other business-y reasons Simon outlines.
https://topicalsource.dev/chat/84a0d6dd-f66f-4f12-af17-5e99c...
The other thing I did was use localStorage to keep a list of public chats you've visited, so that when you come back you can see the other chats you have read. Also easier lookup than trying to find wherever you may have gotten the original link from. (like scrolling back in text history)
So there's artists that just link to some social media website, not considering that accounts can be suspended, usernames can change, etc.
Similarly there's also developers that "link to"[1] dependencies without considering that repositories might disappear (together with the source code for that dependency's version if nobody backed it up), a package's version might be removed from registries, online documentation for a dependency could disappear (ugh), etc.
[1]: Just adding name+version to whatever manifest file and forgetting about it forever. Maybe adding a cache (not even a proper mirror, much less any self-sufficient way to build the dependency in case of disaster).
This doesn’t always work because many websites neglect page titles. I’ve always wanted to ask a wide range of web developers why they neglect titles. Why?
The fact that people use the HTML title attribute for everything except for including the proper title of the thing pointed to is sort of perturbing. Even for Google SERPs and here on HN, it would be useful to have access to the full thing instead of truncated titles when they appear, but neither site is an exception to the tradition of non-use.
Your idea seems fun if people can one by one describe what the page use to look like and/or crawl the web for clues. We can have our under reconstruction banners back.
Sure it would eat some bandwidth, but so do prefetch schemes and other stuff intended to speed up page renders.
I'm still not clear not how to do it though. I expected some easy option or button, and didn't find it. I admit I could have spent more effort trying to figure out how to do it, but a handy link/tutorial would have helped me keep doing it instead of pretty much ignoring GPT most of the times.
Back in 2014, my team had an internal tool to view the state of resources in our system. All resources and their states were stored in a SQL database. Yet, the web app they developed was a SPA (before the invention of routers and stuff) and it never updated its url or supported deep linking. Whenever you wanted to send someone an email or an IM about an issue with a specific resource, you had to tell them “go to X tool, search for Y, click on Z -> W -> M -> O -> K, then you’ll see the issue there”. I found that so fucking infuriating. Why can’t I just use an https://X.com/Y/Z/W/M/O/K link to share that deeply nested state? When I brought it up multiple times i was always told “it’s not a priority and it’s not that big of a deal”
One time we were given 2 weeks to work on whatever we thought needed fixing. I decided to build an alternative that supported deep linking. But I also decided that all deep links should accept an `/api/` prefix that just returned the content in JSON format. It was just a hit with everyone in the team/company that the usage of X tool almost diminished over night even though my tool was much more rudimentary and didn’t have all the features that tool had. Nonetheless, turns out most people just wanted an easy way to share links rather than a “really powerful SPA that lets you dig down and investigate things”.
A month later the team that worked on that tool X announced that they now support deep links in a huge email to the whole company. Yet they thought the simple feature of returning JSON data on `/api/` prefix is irrelevant. 5 years after, my tool’s UI became obsolete but the actual service was promoted to a “vital internal service” because so many other teams built automation around the `/api/` prefix URLs and that team had to take that code and maintain it.
Good job :) Hope you at least got some recognition out of your efforts
Think Trello (SPA) compared to Hacker News.
These days well written SPAs can use the HTML5 history API to provide proper URLs to different parts of the application, so linking and bookmarks still work.
Historically this hasn't always been the case, and even today poorly written SPAs may fail to implement proper linkable URLs.
simon is often the very first person to write up a developing story in ai that most people close to the matter know about, but he can do it fast and link to all the relevant facts quickly and make it accessible for the people further away from the story to discuss.
Indeed. Well, hyperlinks and URLs.
URLs are the cornerstone of the web. A precise, universal (hopefully), long-lasting (hopefully) way of referencing articles and other resources. It's always frustrating to see people fail to appreciate their brilliance, e.g. search this on YouTube rather than just pasting a link into a message. Giving a write-up a permanent home on the web can certainly help give it visibility, and help the author avoid writing up the same ideas again.
Related classic essay: Cool URIs don't change. [0][1]
- there's a near-infinite supply of them
- they support forward declaration
Together the practical upshot is that if you're having a conversation with someone or responding during the Q&A of a talk or whatever and you want to be able to say, "Yeah, we thought about that, and we have some information about it on our site—just visit acmeinitiative.example.com/skub," except that you haven't already written the /skub article yet, that doesn't preclude you from being able to say in the moment (i.e. live) that /skub is effective immediately now the designated handle for such an article, it's where the article will appear once you do write it, and it's how any interested party should retrieve it once it does appear—whenever that is. (The same goes for articles published by other people/organizations and other third-party resources that you want to reference—just mint a URL from your namespace on-the-fly and then whenever you get a chance, set up a redirect to whatever it is you wanted to link to.)
There are so many recordings (podcasts episodes, etc.) that I've listened to involving smart, technical people who definitely control their own domains but don't think to take advantage of this. Usually they sort of mumble some description that you might be able to use to find whatever they're talking about, or they manage to only get half the words in the title wrong when they're trying to recall it for the host, and then you and every other interested listener has to individually squander time and attention if you want to track it down. It results in a huge waste of collective energy.
AND I probably forgot a couple of issues.
You just have to make sure you have populated the content at the location you are referencing before you upload or publish your episode for your listeners.
You don't even have to do that, though. It suffices to say, "I'll wire these things up on Monday."
Transfer of ownership? Well, all those hyperlinks from other sites don't know.
> Don't eat moldy food, else you'll get sick (unless it's bleu cheese, yum)
Ok, that sounds like good advice, and easy do follow.
> Don't look in the direction of modly food, else you'll get sick
That's unreasonable. What kind of madman wrote the rules for this universe?!
When I try to imagine a better way, it usually disallows the referents of a URL-equivalent from changing after they're created--that way trust bestowed once can be reused without prompting the user a second time for the "same" thing.
For that reason, I'm not a fan of placeholder URL's like you're describing. The instability of URLs to me feels like more bug than feature.
Stability like that would severely limit the places that a malicious payload could hide, and it would enable users to compare notes about what is or is not trustworthy.
If the identifier can exist before its referent, then any such verify-the-payload-given-the-id activity becomes much more complicated because we now have to wonder if we're getting different versions of the page for the same identifier (e.g. like when airlines present different prices based on which browser you've used even though you used the same link in each. I'm trying to dream up a web where that's not possible).
Links which are displaying an ad-hoc name can show up in one color. Links which display whatever the content names itself can show up in another color. We can have different fonts for whether people you trust have flagged the content as trustworthy or whether the've flagged it as malicious. Nobody needs to see the hash itself. But none of that works if a link might resolve to different content at different times.
As far as needing to see the content before you know you can trust it... There's no harm in fetching malicious data and taking a peek at it. Just don't act on it.
If we train people to not even look at the threats then they're not going to have a feel for what threats actually look like.
But I know what you mean, it's a lot for the user to manage. I'm just looking for something drastic to change because the web as it is makes me feel like a rat in a maze. I'm trying to figure out how to leave notes on the walls for the other rats.
My chain of thought went: "QR code containing a bobby drop tables! What would a human version of this be? Viral memes, in the original sense, that cause psychic damage? Oh wait, photosensitive epilepsy is a thing."
- FB blocks many sites for sharing copywrited content (even random blogs) - reddit blocks all dot ru, may archival sites, telegram links etc. etc. - twitter blocked some blogging platforms - also many smaller sites block discord (which is justified)
Hopefully this will motivate people to leave them.
"Link in bio" culture is the reason companies like Linktree even exist! And good for them, they're providing a sadly necessary service.
But the reason they don't like external links is that If they can't easily follow, external links, they are more likely to shrug and keep scrolling, instead of doing something else. That means marginally more ad impressions shown.
1. It triggers my "AOL Keyword" yuck response immediately.
2. It completely ignores the concept of search bubbles. The results you and I get when searching the same term can be wildly different.
3. URLs and hyperlinks are right there. Instead of trying to make me do extra work you can just link me directly to a thing. That way I can see your exact reference instead of wading through a bunch of reaction videos to the video you wanted me to see.
The flaw there is that, equally, malicious actors can do the same and, often with today's obfuscated URLs, you have no idea which is which.
Quick - which of these is the video about puppies and which is a shock video?
If you're communicating with someone you trust, it's better if they send you the URL directly.
For phone calls the answer is to send a text message.
If you're communicating by audio and have no textual 'side-channel' then yes things are more awkward, unless it's a simple and memorable URL (e.g. example.com).
[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawi...
using an url shortener has the advantage that it takes you to the thing the podcast wanted to take you to instead of what a search engine chose to sell you
Do you speak this way? I notice a lot of "an" usage online which is not in line with how people speak, e.g. "an horoscope". "An url" is likewise not reflective of normal English pronunciation.
Encoding a link to a much better memorable scheme could be done through a url service which parses a web page through an LLM, generates some tags, and creates custom routing using the tags. Rails or a more modern tool like Actix-web can do that easily.
For example i asked Llama-8B to suggest tags for this HN thread using the title and the first 2 comments, and it suggested: web, URLs, hyperlinks, online-identity, permanence, flexibility, referencing, resource-management, web-architecture.
The user can select which tags better represent the link, and create custom routing as such: https://yourlinkservice.com/hn/hyperlinks/referencing/
Oh, how I wish!
Except that many sites and services are hostile to this because it encroaches on their "attention territory".
If as an author you link to an idea you already carefully expressed elsewhere as a blog post or book, the comment gets put down or censored for "promoting".
More often on HN now, to avoid punishment, I just copy/paste my original writing rather than give the reader a link to explore more deeply.
There's clearly a gap between what we preach as good "academic" ways of spreading information and ideas, and the reality/practice in systems that control expression.
From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste the relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment. None of us are in the habit of following every link. Even if you do have to copy+paste in this way, at least the text you're copying from has a permanent home.
The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contributing to the discussion.
Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to try to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app.
That's a bit like being in the thrall of an intense and interesting conversation and saying "sorry I have to go mail you the documents". It breaks the flow and defeats the purpose of a technology that was designed to overcome exactly that pitfall.
> From the point of view of a Hacker News reader, it's easier if you copy+paste relevant text from your blog post directly into your comment.
True. And I do that often enough as well. In addition I want to give the reader a genuinely interesting link (which itself contains further well researched links to explore the topic. Again, that's what we built this technology for.
> The taboo against 'promoting' is also there for a reason. Sometimes people really are motivated by bumping the hit-count on their page, rather than by contribution to the discussion.
Understood. And sometimes people aren't motivated to by hits. Crucially there's no mechanism for distinguishing the two and so conversation is stifled out of fear.
> Things are certainly worse on the major 'silo' websites that are engineered to t to prevent people navigating away from their domain or equivalent mobile app.
They certainly are, but do we want to emulate that and let HN become the same?