Hillel Wayne

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Visit buttondown.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Aug 2024 – Sep 2026

Microsoft tried to own content syndication with ICE. How open RSS beat it, and what that war teaches us about open formats like email.

X.400 promised recallable, scheduled, self-destructing email. Why simple SMTP won instead, and what we lost and gained when it did.

A rough start to what would later become one of my favorite tech ads from the 80s.

A beloved hometown impersonator had no idea what he was signing up for with this photoshoot.

What started as endearingly bootstrapped marketing descended into soulless corporate sales.

E-COM was a $40 million US Postal Service project to deliver email on paper. Why it failed, and why spammers were its only real customers.

Two years of nightmarish smiles and makeup before anyone laid hands on Mimic Systems' actual product.