Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas

This is something rsync.net (the service) does well. For example, I haven't seen any other service with a "CEO page"[1]. Maybe it's something common and I just haven't noticed in any other service because it was not as discoverable.

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.

[1]: https://www.rsync.net/products/ceopage.html

You'd think that OpenAI, by now, had technical writers on payroll. Well, according to LinkedIn, they don't. It's not that surprising, then, that their documentation is in such a sorry state. Why they haven't hired specialized roles for documentation is beyond me; they either think they're irrelevant, or they ruthlessly prioritize growth over docs. Whatever the reason, they're hurting themselves.

He references the site https://boringtechnology.club/ which is a great slide deck on reserving your effort to innovate on your unique solution.

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!

Another great post by Simon.

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)

Dead links are the worst. Can someone make a browser extension that uses gpt to hallucinate websites for dead links?

love Simonw blogs. I've been reading his blogs using the python interpreter since last year September. He mentioned he started doing it on his own to generate whole applications on the go.

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.

Along these lines, Square’s incident response meme lives on as https://outage.party/

I absolutely loathed a lot of Microsoft products for this simple thing. VSTS/VSO/Dev Ops/whateverNameTheyHaveNow, Sharepoint, etc were absolutely atrocious at this. Here is a deep link that’s 700 character long, with a couple of dozen base64 query strings and nonsensical path. “What’s the problem? Can you use a url shortening service? URLs are long nothing we can do about that” fuck me.

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.

no one has pointed this out yet but as a resident simonw fanboy i will point out Simon’s other examples of giving people something to link to as very effective for HN https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

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.

Useful for new wibesite

another great post, very insightful

> Hyperlinks are the best thing about the web

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]

[0] https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23865484