5 ms·

A Google Reader Replacement written in Haskell and Ur

112 points by Rickasaurus 13y ago

msoad 13y ago
The language my RSS reader in written in is not important for me.
- hkmurakami 13y ago
  maybe the "excellent" part would interest you then?
- Nekorosu 13y ago
  I can just hope English language'll get some more importance in your life. :)
  - msoad 13y ago
    That's offensive. I'm trying my best speaking in YOUR language
- true_religion 13y ago
  Well this is hacker news, and not consumer news.
- brador 13y ago
  If you prefer simplicity try http://skimfeed.com http://skimfeed.com.
- bvttf 13y ago
  If it was open source it would, I'm reluctant to run tiny tiny rss because of my own anti-PHP bigotry.
Locke1689 13y ago
I would love to hear more about your Ur/Web experience (if you are the author Rickasaurus?).
- Rickasaurus 13y ago
  I would be just as interested in an experience report. Hopefully we can coax the author into giving a talk on it at some point.
- vamega 13y ago
  The author posts a number of details and seems to be answering questions at http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_written_in_haskell_and_urweb/ http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_w...
- paulkoer 13y ago
  For those interested in an experience report I'll copy and paste the post from the developer from http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_written_in_haskell_and_urweb/ http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_w... (go there for some additional discussion): <--- 8< ----> Hi, I'm developer of this RSS reader and want to share with you why Haskell is a big win for my project. First. Haskell is a fast compiled language. Most RSS readers are written in Python, Ruby or PHP. And they're all quite slow or requre a ton of servers to handle the load. With Haskell I'm able to quickly implement complex features and don't think much about performance. Second. Haskell is very high level and handles concurrency well. It's not a problem to write very generic code or spawn thousands of threads. Third. There a many good libraries now (much more than 10 years ago ;). I want to thank Bryan O'Sullivan, Michael Snoyman and all other package authors for their efforts on making Haskell true platform. I'm especially like text, riak, aeson, http-conduit and warp packages. They're used 24x7 under load and I haven't found any major problems with them. And few quirks. Unfortunately not all packages are equal in quality. Many libraries are toys or don't work well under load. But at least there are libraries to take some code from. Bindings to C libraries (as well as C libs itself) are evil. I've had problems with almost every C package I've tried (curl, regex-pcre, hsdns). Long-lived ByteStrings can cause memory fragmentation and ten-fold performance drops. So I'm using Text for everything except I/O. Haskell was missing fast malformed html/xml parser. But it took only a couple of days to write fast-tagsoup package that parses tens of MB/sec. In general with Haskell I can quickly write high level code that runs fast. And (at least for my project) I'm seeing that most tasks now are CPU bound (due to fast SSDs), not I/O. So compiled yet high-level languages shold gain more popularity now. If you have some questions about reader implementation details feel free to ask me. PS: reader is profitable, so I'm thinking it could be counted as a Haskell success story ;) </--- 8< --->
autotravis 13y ago
"Start your free trial today!" and no pricing info...
- MartinMond 13y ago
  From the FAQ: You can choose any price you want from $9 to $29 annually.
MartinMond 13y ago
I just signed up and this is the best Reader replacement I've seen so far. Someone actually thought through what an evolution of Reader should be. It can subscribe to non-RSS pages like Facebook public pages or Google+ pages. If the feed only contains teasers it scrapes the pages to get at the the full text and displays that inline. This seems to be a Reader replacement by an actual former Reader user.
nakedrobot2 13y ago
This does look excellent. I look forward to seeing how well it works on mobile. I wonder if there is any native ios / android implementation in the works? I would happily pay for both! But the name? How am I supposed to pronounce it? I'm sorry to say this, but a name like this could be a serious impediment to getting widespread adoption. It's not as bad as calling it something like "flaming purple penis of death" but it's not that far off.
- shurane 13y ago
  It's from the sequence of ["foo","bar","baz","qux", "quux", ...]. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#English Doesn't sound like a great name, but whatever. It's a placeholder at least.
  - nakedrobot2 13y ago
    Oh! Thanks for explaining. I had no idea.
  - tome 13y ago
    I had no idea "qux" came before "quux". How embarrassing. It's like counting "one, two, three, five".
- vshabanov 13y ago
  Mr.Reader and Feeddler supports BazQux on iOS. And there is a beta Android app from the author of gReader https://github.com/noinnion/newsplus https://github.com/noinnion/newsplus I'm not a native English (Russian in fact) and didn't knew that qux (or bazqux?) is unpronounceable. I'm reading it like Buzz-Cooks which sound somewhat funny in Russian. There are some advantages with this name. It's unique (very easy to find mentions) and always on top of alphabetical lists. And from what I'm seeing name is not that important if you have good product. But maybe I do some "rebranding" later.
Nux 13y ago
Nice, but I don't see a "download" link. Without the ability to run my own, how can I be sure this will not go the way of the "Google reader"? Especially being a "one man show".
- mheiler 13y ago
  You never know. But you can reduce the likelihood for that to happen by paying for it.
ForFreedom 13y ago
This looks good
jay_kyburz 13y ago
hey.. so.. the reason I stopped using Google Reader was that many of the feeds I was subscribed to would only include the first few paragraphs of the blog entry forcing me to click through to the blog anyhow. (This is what killed RSS for me) Is there a reader that will just open the web page that the feed item links to rather than the text of the feed?
- jeena 13y ago
  I just removed all those feeds from my subscription list and only follow the ones who put the whole article in their feed. Works very well for me.
- omaranto 13y ago
  Someone here on HN said that this one scrapes the web page linked to by the feed item oif the feed only contains teasers.
- dmbass 13y ago
  Check out Newsblur's story view (or text view if you don't want the site's hideous styling).
kayloos 13y ago
I have a really good impression of the site, and might use it as my feed reader. One question: Do people really want to pay for a feed reader? On one hand the price is low compared to what we use on day-to-day goods, but I'm curious as to whether a feed reader is something that the average hacker would pay for.
- yfefyf 13y ago
  Maybe it's also your information center.
- Rickasaurus 13y ago
  As someone who will use it every day I don't mind a small fee at all.
- vshabanov 13y ago
  From what I see people pay for a feed readers. Especially after Google decided to close one well known free RSS reader.
jcartledge 13y ago
Can I suggest mentioning mobile apps which can sync with BazQux on the landing page? I left quickly because it didn't appear there were any options for mobile/device sync, but then I saw this on the feedbin landing page (which has a great App Support section): > Mr. Reader is a RSS News Reader for your iPad that synchronizes with Feedbin, Feedly, BazQux Reader, FeedHQ, Feed Wrangler and Fever.
- vshabanov 13y ago
  Had no time to fix landing page )
Phlogistique 13y ago
Author: please consider open-sourcing your code. NewsBlur and FeedHQ do it and they are profitable. Plus a huge open source Haskell+Ur exemple would be a very good thing for the community. I'm more inclined to choose FeedHQ or NewsBlur as my Google Reader replacement of choice because I know it will be possible to use them even if the authors don't want to work on it anymore.
- bhoung 13y ago
  I believe this is it, though github is down for me now so I can't really tell. https://github.com/bazqux https://github.com/bazqux
  - toni 13y ago
    That's only API docs and some forked Haskell libraries. You can't find source code of the actual app there.
- vshabanov 13y ago
  Probably I'll open-source it at some moment in future. But just have no time to do it now.
- SkyMarshal 13y ago
  Looks he answered that at his reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_written_in_haskell_and_urweb/casruww http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_w...
krfantasy 13y ago
Amazing! First time I saw Haskell-based website. But this is not free, I'm sad.
- tel 13y ago
  Take a look at https://www.fpcomplete.com/ https://www.fpcomplete.com/. They're trying to push the edge of Haskell web dev commercialization.
  - krfantasy 13y ago
    thanks!
ams6110 13y ago
I'm not interested in news reader apps but I had never heard of Ur/Web before... I'm glad that was mentioned in the title as it's not obvious from the site; always nice to hear about new frameworks.
- Rickasaurus 13y ago
  Ur is a really cool language from Adam Chlipala of MIT. It has a bunch of novel language features that help you write correct web code.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

112 points by Rickasaurus 13y ago

msoad 13y ago

The language my RSS reader in written in is not important for me.

hkmurakami 13y ago
maybe the "excellent" part would interest you then?
Nekorosu 13y ago
I can just hope English language'll get some more importance in your life. :)
- msoad 13y ago
  That's offensive. I'm trying my best speaking in YOUR language
true_religion 13y ago
Well this is hacker news, and not consumer news.
brador 13y ago
If you prefer simplicity try http://skimfeed.com http://skimfeed.com.
bvttf 13y ago
If it was open source it would, I'm reluctant to run tiny tiny rss because of my own anti-PHP bigotry.

Locke1689 13y ago

I would love to hear more about your Ur/Web experience (if you are the author Rickasaurus?).

Rickasaurus 13y ago
I would be just as interested in an experience report. Hopefully we can coax the author into giving a talk on it at some point.
vamega 13y ago
The author posts a number of details and seems to be answering questions at http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_written_in_haskell_and_urweb/ http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_w...
paulkoer 13y ago
For those interested in an experience report I'll copy and paste the post from the developer from http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_written_in_haskell_and_urweb/ http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_w... (go there for some additional discussion): <--- 8< ----> Hi, I'm developer of this RSS reader and want to share with you why Haskell is a big win for my project. First. Haskell is a fast compiled language. Most RSS readers are written in Python, Ruby or PHP. And they're all quite slow or requre a ton of servers to handle the load. With Haskell I'm able to quickly implement complex features and don't think much about performance. Second. Haskell is very high level and handles concurrency well. It's not a problem to write very generic code or spawn thousands of threads. Third. There a many good libraries now (much more than 10 years ago ;). I want to thank Bryan O'Sullivan, Michael Snoyman and all other package authors for their efforts on making Haskell true platform. I'm especially like text, riak, aeson, http-conduit and warp packages. They're used 24x7 under load and I haven't found any major problems with them. And few quirks. Unfortunately not all packages are equal in quality. Many libraries are toys or don't work well under load. But at least there are libraries to take some code from. Bindings to C libraries (as well as C libs itself) are evil. I've had problems with almost every C package I've tried (curl, regex-pcre, hsdns). Long-lived ByteStrings can cause memory fragmentation and ten-fold performance drops. So I'm using Text for everything except I/O. Haskell was missing fast malformed html/xml parser. But it took only a couple of days to write fast-tagsoup package that parses tens of MB/sec. In general with Haskell I can quickly write high level code that runs fast. And (at least for my project) I'm seeing that most tasks now are CPU bound (due to fast SSDs), not I/O. So compiled yet high-level languages shold gain more popularity now. If you have some questions about reader implementation details feel free to ask me. PS: reader is profitable, so I'm thinking it could be counted as a Haskell success story ;) </--- 8< --->

autotravis 13y ago

"Start your free trial today!" and no pricing info...

MartinMond 13y ago
From the FAQ: You can choose any price you want from $9 to $29 annually.

MartinMond 13y ago

I just signed up and this is the best Reader replacement I've seen so far. Someone actually thought through what an evolution of Reader should be. It can subscribe to non-RSS pages like Facebook public pages or Google+ pages. If the feed only contains teasers it scrapes the pages to get at the the full text and displays that inline. This seems to be a Reader replacement by an actual former Reader user.

nakedrobot2 13y ago

This does look excellent. I look forward to seeing how well it works on mobile. I wonder if there is any native ios / android implementation in the works? I would happily pay for both! But the name? How am I supposed to pronounce it? I'm sorry to say this, but a name like this could be a serious impediment to getting widespread adoption. It's not as bad as calling it something like "flaming purple penis of death" but it's not that far off.

shurane 13y ago
It's from the sequence of ["foo","bar","baz","qux", "quux", ...]. More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable#English Doesn't sound like a great name, but whatever. It's a placeholder at least.
- nakedrobot2 13y ago
  Oh! Thanks for explaining. I had no idea.
- tome 13y ago
  I had no idea "qux" came before "quux". How embarrassing. It's like counting "one, two, three, five".
vshabanov 13y ago
Mr.Reader and Feeddler supports BazQux on iOS. And there is a beta Android app from the author of gReader https://github.com/noinnion/newsplus https://github.com/noinnion/newsplus I'm not a native English (Russian in fact) and didn't knew that qux (or bazqux?) is unpronounceable. I'm reading it like Buzz-Cooks which sound somewhat funny in Russian. There are some advantages with this name. It's unique (very easy to find mentions) and always on top of alphabetical lists. And from what I'm seeing name is not that important if you have good product. But maybe I do some "rebranding" later.

Nux 13y ago

Nice, but I don't see a "download" link. Without the ability to run my own, how can I be sure this will not go the way of the "Google reader"? Especially being a "one man show".

mheiler 13y ago
You never know. But you can reduce the likelihood for that to happen by paying for it.

ForFreedom 13y ago

This looks good

jay_kyburz 13y ago

hey.. so.. the reason I stopped using Google Reader was that many of the feeds I was subscribed to would only include the first few paragraphs of the blog entry forcing me to click through to the blog anyhow. (This is what killed RSS for me) Is there a reader that will just open the web page that the feed item links to rather than the text of the feed?

jeena 13y ago
I just removed all those feeds from my subscription list and only follow the ones who put the whole article in their feed. Works very well for me.
omaranto 13y ago
Someone here on HN said that this one scrapes the web page linked to by the feed item oif the feed only contains teasers.
dmbass 13y ago
Check out Newsblur's story view (or text view if you don't want the site's hideous styling).

kayloos 13y ago

I have a really good impression of the site, and might use it as my feed reader. One question: Do people really want to pay for a feed reader? On one hand the price is low compared to what we use on day-to-day goods, but I'm curious as to whether a feed reader is something that the average hacker would pay for.

yfefyf 13y ago
Maybe it's also your information center.
Rickasaurus 13y ago
As someone who will use it every day I don't mind a small fee at all.
vshabanov 13y ago
From what I see people pay for a feed readers. Especially after Google decided to close one well known free RSS reader.

jcartledge 13y ago

Can I suggest mentioning mobile apps which can sync with BazQux on the landing page? I left quickly because it didn't appear there were any options for mobile/device sync, but then I saw this on the feedbin landing page (which has a great App Support section): > Mr. Reader is a RSS News Reader for your iPad that synchronizes with Feedbin, Feedly, BazQux Reader, FeedHQ, Feed Wrangler and Fever.

vshabanov 13y ago
Had no time to fix landing page )

Phlogistique 13y ago

Author: please consider open-sourcing your code. NewsBlur and FeedHQ do it and they are profitable. Plus a huge open source Haskell+Ur exemple would be a very good thing for the community. I'm more inclined to choose FeedHQ or NewsBlur as my Google Reader replacement of choice because I know it will be possible to use them even if the authors don't want to work on it anymore.

bhoung 13y ago
I believe this is it, though github is down for me now so I can't really tell. https://github.com/bazqux https://github.com/bazqux
- toni 13y ago
  That's only API docs and some forked Haskell libraries. You can't find source code of the actual app there.
vshabanov 13y ago
Probably I'll open-source it at some moment in future. But just have no time to do it now.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
Looks he answered that at his reddit thread: http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_written_in_haskell_and_urweb/casruww http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1ha5dd/rss_reader_w...

krfantasy 13y ago

Amazing! First time I saw Haskell-based website. But this is not free, I'm sad.

tel 13y ago
Take a look at https://www.fpcomplete.com/ https://www.fpcomplete.com/. They're trying to push the edge of Haskell web dev commercialization.
- krfantasy 13y ago
  thanks!

ams6110 13y ago

I'm not interested in news reader apps but I had never heard of Ur/Web before... I'm glad that was mentioned in the title as it's not obvious from the site; always nice to hear about new frameworks.

Rickasaurus 13y ago
Ur is a really cool language from Adam Chlipala of MIT. It has a bunch of novel language features that help you write correct web code.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]