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Until 10 years ago, i used Dash for that. It’s still around https://kapeli.com/dash

It’s instant, works offline, auto-updates, and includes all the websites you listed, and allows for custom ones too.


What do you use now?


Submitted, because I just found out that even after 28 years, the definition of "upstream" and "downstream" is still heavily contested.

> Umm, no. Fix the Envoy proxy terminology so that it isn't obviously wrong.


The posters interpretation of why Envoy is using downstream on listener side and upstream on backend side is wrong. There's a formal definition in RFC 2616:

  upstream/downstream
    Upstream and downstream describe the flow of a message: all messages flow from upstream to downstream.
Now HTTP is obviously bi-directional but since for most reverse proxy usecases responses far outweigh the requests upstream means "the backend"


Yes, Singapore is great for that. But to be fair with the other cities, it’s very hard _not_ to have abundant vegetation in tropical rainforest climate. Everything grows rapidly and stops at nothing in its way.

In other climates, like European ones, this becomes much more complex. Germany struggles even to keep its forests alive with long stretches of missing rain, higher temperatures, and new pests. Single trees in cities constantly die. Spain is in large parts a desert etc.

I really hope we find a solution/adapted plants to keep cities from heating up so much.


FWIW, some fast growing non-native trees now grow trivially in central Europe too.

Ailanthus[0] is invasive as heck and Paulownia[1] grows everywhere too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailanthus_altissima

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paulownia_tomentosa


> Yes, Singapore is great for that. But to be fair with the other cities, it’s very hard _not_ to have abundant vegetation in tropical rainforest climate. Everything grows rapidly and stops at nothing in its way.

Eh, have a look at other tropical cities like Johor Bahru or Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur and you can see that it's very much possible to have way less greenery than Singapore.

The recent trouble with the Borkenkäfer was just a consequence of monoculture. Germany doesn't struggle with keeping forests alive: it's normal at any one time for individual trees in forests to die. Decaying dead wood is important for the ecosystems.


> The recent trouble with the Borkenkäfer was just a consequence of monoculture.

Even worse. It was monoculture of trees that aren't even native to the climate zone. The trees were imported from Scandinavia for their superior lumber quality, and were on edge even without the added stress from droughts and heat waves.


Less than Singapore for sure. Less than European cities, I’m not so sure. I don’t have the numbers but if you do an image search of Jakarta (probably one of the worst vegetation-wise and boasting a population of a quarter of Germany) it still has trees in every picture and many more than let’s say Frankfurt or Madrid. The latter has many photos without a single tree.

79% of all German trees are sick. Monocultures and beetles play a role but the problem is much bigger than that: https://www.bmleh.de/DE/themen/wald/wald-in-deutschland/wald...


It's much much more complex than that. Climate is only one factor and by far not the most important one. Prosperity and structure of the city plays a much more important role. Singapore is an outlier because it's a rich country on an island the size of a city.

Big cities in Europe are usually surrounded by more rural areas in most of Europe for historical reasons (surrounding farmlands used to feed the city), lessening the need for city parks and greenery since the countryside was surrounding the city. If the city IS the country and even isolated on an island, that's of course not an option.

Another factor is also rooted in history. Like most cities in Europe, Singapore is old, though most of its growth happened in the past 60 years with proper urban planning. Europe's cities on the other hand grew over centuries without any kind of modern urban planning and the pressure of rebuilding quickly after the many devastating wars didn't help either.

Finally there's the issue of money - being one of the richest countries/cities on Earth helps tremendously with building a nice, liveable urban environment compared to some cities struggling to keep basic infrastructure running.


I would see that as an absolute win. Socialization is the main point I send my kids to school.

Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.


I agree but unfortunately the US education budget is driven by test scores.

Unless theres strong evidence that test scores will increase, Karen from the PTA insists that her child be given access to their phone


British schools are often pretty clear that kids are not there to socialise - they will say it in so many words.

It also depends what you by socialisation. in terms of school people usually mean two distinct things: have opportunities to spend time in social interactions, and learning social skills.

My experience of taking kids out of school is that the first reduces (because they spend less time with other kids each day) but the second increases (because they meet a greater variety of people in a grater variety of places).

That takes me to my greatest concern with AI. That kids will socialise (in both senses) with AI rather than people. What will that do to their social skills? There are plenty of examples of adults doing that (visible in places like /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI ), but at least they grew up developing some social skills. If AI is a big part of your interactions, what will the effects of that be?


Socialization goes out of fashion at a rapid pace. If I were to guess, technology deprived kids will quickly catch up with the trend when they age out of the ban.

Also use of technology anti-correlated with alcohol and drug use so there might be unwelcome side effects.


I really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail.

Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.


I've heard good things about it, for sure, but I'd argue that it isn't really an Email client. It is a Gmail client as it doesn't work with anything else. Fastmail is in the same bucket, but it is part of my contention about there not being good Email apps generally.


It’s really tempting - uses their API for that speed.

I’m worried Google won’t like it someday. It’s such a hassle if they shut you off that I want to seem like the most normal user to them. Pay Mimestream, skip ads, avoid Gmail app telemetry… any incentive for Google to permit it longterm? (Like maybe you’d switch to Fastmail if they killed Mimestream… or maybe not!)


We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.


I can code up a complex HTML table by hand faster than I create a basic MD table, but other than that, I find it difficult to achieve a good writing flow with pure HTML, even with all the automation. I author a lot of API docs, READMEs, and how-to guides, and find MD to provide the perfect mix of decently powerful markup and flexibility with supporting raw HTML when needed. The only constraint is that some markup renderers don’t support or severely restrict HTML passthrough (I ran into this with GitHub recently).


I did this on an airplane once because I didn't have Internet and I've never felt more like a real hacker since


Templated though, not manually writing it out for every blog post say. I think GP means it just has more friction as a writing format than markdown for example.


No, literally manually typing out HTML tags and everything. Many of us did it so much things like Emmet (https://emmet.io/) were invented and used so we could hammer out full HTML documents even faster.

Even after React became popular, people are still manually typing out HTML elements, although they call it "JSX" instead, but in reality it's just HTML.

My first blog on the internet literally was a bunch of .html files, where my post "template" was the first post copy-pasted when you wanted to make a new post. Changing the design involved changing the same thing across all files.


> PS: Really cool static site generators that shoot for simplicity don't require you to create extra template files written in a new, made-up template language. When you want to create a new post, you give it (a) the static files from your existing site and (b) the markdown for your new post. The "templating" engine inspects your existing posts (incl. e.g. class attributes) and then copies the same document structure into a new file, except with the right stuff (timestamp, title and heading, post content...) substituted in to the places where it's supposed to go.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30961588>


Basic HTML really isn’t a big step up from Markdown though, and no one was complaining about that. In some instances it’s simpler even. I often forget the exact syntax for a table in Markdown, by comparison <table>, <tr> and <td> are easy to remember. All of the major parts of Markdown are pretty easy, <h1>, <strong>, etc etc. It was written with human authorship in mind.

Typing out <p> for every paragraph is annoying, for sure. But a converter that switches out \r\n\r\n for a new paragraph would be a reasonable middle ground IMO.


When using AI, I often find myself preferring either plain text (no markup whatsoever; just manual / text editor formatting of text blocks) or simple html to markdown, depending on the situation. To the point that I rarely see any point in using markdown for anything. If it is meant for to be a simple text mainly for human consumption, the markups often don't add much clarity (and often bring in an amateurish look, as if the author didn't know how to emphasize using English constructs), in which case plain text feels more pprofessional. If it is meant to be [lightly] processed before being presented to a human, or if it is meant to be processed by a tool / bot / LLM, then HTML is infinitely more straightforward.

Also I often call out my colleagues if they try to put a table in markdown. Markdown is not built for tabular data in most professional settings (i.e., one or two table cell could easily take a whole line of markdown to express). A basic <table><tr><td style="background: red">some number</td></tr></table> goes a long way.


>Templated though, not manually writing it out for every blog post say.

Both. We manually run HTML just fine back in the day.


A lot of editors will auto add the ending tag, and auto-update the ending tag if you rewrite the start tag. I think it's gotten pretty darn easy to use HTML er I mean XML ;)


[flagged]


Well if you're going to be like that you may as well say something about assembly, butterflies, and what the hell's a web log anyway, spiders and beavers have nothing to do with one another.

'we have been authoring' is present perfect continuous. Going forwards, and for at least the last two 'decades', HTML blog posts can use CMSs.


That incredibly condescending phrase should be banned from HN.


It doesn't need to be explicitly imo, it falls short of many of the commenting guidelines.


It fits perfectly.


You have been authoring HTML by hand for decades. Not every SWE is a FE dev.


People have been authoring html by hand for a long time before the specialization to Frontend dev even existed...


I learned HTML 20+ years ago in high school.

I did not go to a front end high school.


Your high school taught you a front-end markup format. I'm sure it seemed like a good idea to someone at the time.


Simple HTML is easy to do. If you just want a document with information and it does not need lots of branding and great aesthetics. That is what you are looking at as an alternative to Markdown.


Java engineers write lots of HTML in java docs:)


Yes so far, but it‘s switching heavily towards Markdown.


Most front end devs can’t get HTML right either.


This is shockingly true. Most newer FE devs I have encountered are mostly trained on the popular frameworks and lack understanding of the underlying fundamentals, e.g., they only know TypeScript + SCSS and some smattering of HTML but more often know whatever templating engine and MVC(ish) backend the framework uses. It’s really helpful to understand what the browser is actually doing and all the “stuff” the framework spits out on the other end.


Modern JS/TS devs probably not, but I wouldn't even call someone a "frontend dev" if you don't know HTML, kind of being a infrastructure engineer and not knowing how any OSes work.


It’s not just knowing HTML as in writing a bunch div tags and patting yourself on the back. If you aren’t able to achieve at least 80% WCAG AA compliance you can’t write HTML.

Most frontend devs have no idea what any of that means. But then it seems everyone who can write 3 lines of code professionally refers to themselves as an ”engineer”.


Yes, it's literally about being able to use HTML effectively and knowing what you are doing, then you know HTML. I'm not sure why you bring up some arbitrary accessibility guidelines, that has no bearing if someone is using HTML correctly and neither would I gatekeep the "frontend" label on some arbitrary "must pass this particular standard", never heard something so outlandish when it comes to who could call themselves frontend developer or not.


I suspect this unintentionally satisfies my conclusion.


Only if you're willfully ignorant of the wider discussion.


Obviously. Me having technical knowledge you appear to not have on the discussion at hand makes me ignorant of the discussion at hand.


HTML was invented for physicists to be able to write papers. It's not something that's beyond anyone without frontend dev experience.

CSS, on the other hand...


You don't have to be a FE dev (which is largely a junior/mid-level position anno 2026) to write HTML.

I'm not and I've used it for years. With Markdown being a thing that has been less common, sure, but that's more of a zeitgeist thing.


Why not just use XML at this point? It has "stricter typing" and can make the spec better.


>We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease

No, we've been generating it with templates or authoring templates.

Authoring HTML by hand is a very early 2000s thing to do.


After you a FE webdev that doesn't regularly author HTML by hand?


Can’t answer the person who responded to you but:

Yesterday. Astro components.

3 million people will have seen it as I type this. More next week.


Hand on heart. When was the last time you built a serious production system for a real business that was 100% built from HTML without using any build step? Just editing the footer and header in every file when it updates (or using iframes)


Maybe not in your corner of the internet, but businesses used server side includes (SSI) for that, not iframes.

You add “include” tags to your HTML file and your web server like nginx or varnish would replace it with the fragment at runtime.

  <!--#include virtual="../footer.html" -->
I saw this was quite popular for big publishing houses with millions of articles still relatively recently 10 years ago. They would only write the HTML body of a new article and the other fragments would be included by the web server.

Very cheap, stable, and very big changes across the whole website could be done instantly since cache invalidation is trivial (the web server knows all modified dates of all fragments).

Also, no additional CDN or caching needed. Later, with CDNs there was even a variant where these fragments were hosted at the edge (ESI).


10 years ago. I bet you can’t name a single production site writing HTML files without any build tools at all. Just raw dogging using notepad directly on the server.


LLMs aside, when was the last time you wrote React/JSX and didn't write a subset of HTML by hand in them?


That is the point. No one writes HTML without any abstractions anymore. You use a framework or a build tool. Because just editing pure html files is a pain in the ass. Probably haven’t done that since 2010.


My partner and I are from two different European countries that speak different languages.

When we wanted to marry in the country of my partner, both our (catholic) churches needed to sync. They did so in their common language: Latin.

That was a fun surprise.


My spouse and I lived in London, but we both come from (other) European countries, so for our wedding, three countries and four languages were involved: the church's forms are all both in the local language as well as in Latin.

This is no different than hundreds of years ago, and it works well. Thanks to Latin, the church's _lingua franca_.


I once heard someone say "English has replaced Latin as the Lingua Franca," and started giggling incoherently.


there is probably a joke about Jean-Luc Picard speaking proper King's English


That’s pretty cool. What kind of things were your respective churches communicating about?


Assuming they're Roman Catholic, to get married in the Church at least one of the couple needs to be Catholic and records of their baptism, confirmation, etc. would be shared between the individual's church and wherever they're getting married. You also run into this if you move around a lot, not just for marriage. If you want to be confirmed, you need to be baptised. Your baptismal records may be in another state or country and would need to be shared with your confirmation church.


In fact, the baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records, so when you’re married, the marriage is communicated to that parish and added to your sacramental record (likewise for confirmation if it doesn’t happen at your baptismal church, and, less commonly ordination will also be communicated there). When parishes are closed or consolidated, the bishop will indicate what parish becomes the new keeper of sacramental records for the closed parish.¹

1. This is one of two significant cases that impact some of the two-church parishes that are part of the last decade of reorganization in the Archdiocese of Chicago. Sacramental records will be kept at only one of the churches. The other situation reflects Holy Thursday and Easter Vigil Masses. A parish is only allowed to have one Mass on Holy Thursday and on Easter Vigil, so the two-church parishes will only celebrate at one of the churches even if they had sufficient clergy to have those Masses at both locations.


> baptismal parish is the official keeper of your sacramental records

Interesting fact that I (as a Catholic) was not aware of, though I've observed it happening in practice when preparing to marry my wife, who did get all the relevant records from her home parish in a different part of Austria from where we were living at the time.

I'm curious about two things though, if you happen to know them: first is this "offical keeper" thing a Church-wide policy in all countries, not just a de facto tradition in some, and if so is it stated anywhere e.g. in Canon law as a universal practice? Secondly, how does the policy apply to those who were baptized in a non-Catholic church and later converted? Obviously an Anglican (or whatever) parish isn't going to take on the duty of being the official record-keeper for any Catholic sacramental requirements.


It is a universal practice.

For those baptized in a different church but received into the Catholic church, they will go through a ceremony at the Easter Vigil Mass (where they will typically receive confirmation and first communion) and that church will be their official keeper of records. They will have a copy of whatever proof of baptism the person had. In rare cases where a person was baptized, but there is absolutely no written record (things like an inscription in a family Bible count as written record), they will receive conditional baptism where the person doing the baptism (usually a priest, but not necessarily) will preface the words of the baptism with the phrase, “if you are able to be baptized.” This was the normative practice for those baptized outside the Catholic church before Vatican II. As mentioned in a sibling comment, the baptismal and sacramental records of the church are a key source of genealogical data for many researchers.


For a long time this was a common concept: that more central authorities should only come in where more local cannot effectively do it (subsidiarity). This was of course pretty universal until recently. The oldest counter-example I can think of is the French Revolution that started to centralise.

The church works like DNS in that regard. (Without the caching. ;)

While it was always decentralised, the standardisation of the documents was with the Council of Trent ~1550 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent


When my mother retired, she volunteered at the local church to transcribe and prepare 100 years of sacramental records to prepare them for digitization by the archdiocese. There were records in filing cabinets in offices, some in chests stored in the basement of the church, some with water damage.

The Catholic Church keeps pretty good records, for the most part. In New England, Quebec, and maritime Canada, many people can trace their ancestry back to at least the 1500s based on these records.


Solution: Latin block chain


Basically- are you baptized and are you not married.


similar experience led me to start learning Latin: once travelled to an other country within Europe and the priest in the companion asked directions from a local in Latin.


Speed is a quality in itself. We are so bugged down by slow stuff that we often ignore that and don’t actively search for another.

But every now and then a well-optimised tool/page comes along with instant feedback and is a real pleasure to use.

I think some people are more affected by that than others.

Obligatory https://m.xkcd.com/1205


I am not sure if it was simon or pg who might've quoted this but I remembered a quote about that a 2 magnitude order in speed (quantity) is a huge qualititative change in it of itself.


Yes. There are lots around; whenever the original word becomes too short for the importance people want to give it.

Tuna fish, chai tea, Enter the room -> enter “into” the room, French: hui (today) -> aujourd’hui (day of today)

Keyword: pleonasm


I'm sure I've even heard French people say "au jour d'aujourd'hui"


I'm pretty sure I've seen that one in a list, by a French person, of things they wish other people wouldn't say!


Yes, we had an epidemic of that about 10 years ago. It was everywhere. Thankfully it's mostly gone now and we're back to "aujourd'hui".


Also French: je ne sais (I don’t know) → je ne sais pas (I don’t know a step)


And recently even dropping the negation itself while keeping the meaning: “je sais pas”

I never thought about that. Interesting. This negation related cycle is apparently called Jespersen’s cycle and happens in many languages. The English equivalent

I say not -> I “do” not say -> I don’t say. -> ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle


Lived experience


Yes, this is unfortunately still the way and was very common back when iOS Safari did not allow embedded video.

For a fast start of the video, reverse the implementation: instead of downgrading from Websockets to polling when connection fails, you should upgrade from polling to Websockets when the network allows.

Socket.io was one of the first libraries that did that switching and had it wrong first, too. Learned the enterprise network behaviour and they switched the implementation.


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