Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Most of the sources of hard news have RSS feeds. Reuters. The BBC. The New York Times. The Hill. National Weather Service. These are all crap-free. No ads. No "10 ways to waste your time and money". Just news.

I have an Model 14 Teletype tape printer from 1926 in a brass and glass case hooked up to the Reuters RSS feed. I've had this at steampunk conventions, and it usually lives in my living room. Push a button and get the news.[1] Or leave it on, and it starts up whenever Reuters posts something new. Technical details.[2]

[1] https://archive.org/details/Aethericmachine14 [2] http://www.aetherltd.com

View on HN

That sounds like an awesome project to hack together. I look forward to making something similar one weekend.

Rebuilding a teletype properly is going to probably take you more than one weekend.

Yet some RSS feeds do contain ads/spam.

> hard news

> The BBC

Have you visited the BBC News website recently?

They even have Daily Mail style headlines now, where a random word is capitalised for emphasis:

"Up to NINE terrible things happened"

I browse with an ad blocker, so those are actual headlines, not Outbrain/Taboola (ugh) links.

Yeah, they do those things. But they make up a minority of their magazine content.

They still do a lot of 'hard news' stuff (along with the vast majority of their output which is straight 'normal news'). For example, just this week: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/g4s_brook_house_i...

> But they make up a minority of their magazine content.

No excuse. That crap is paid for with my taxes. They don't need to lower themselves to that standard.

That shit permeates, you know? The news side will look like that eventually.

I'd have thought taxes + license fee would be enough to avoid the race to the bottom, but here we are.

Why not make a complaint where they can actually see it, then? http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/complain-online/

Try to steer their decisions with your voice.

REMEMBER TO USE CAPS!

I recall 10 years ago it wasn’t nearly as terrible. Did something happen to the bbc?

Best i can tell, there is a new generation of "journalists" coming onboard that have been trained in the style of "blogs".

And it seems to be far from unique to the BBC, you can notice it with all the national broadcasters (Though BBC being English and thus have a worldwide reach in its original form, is more noticeable outside of the UK).

Although I have to be honest, the tagesschau is still immune to this trend. Let’s hope it never arrives at http://www.tagesschau.de/

Blair made them compete on ratings which is retarded when you have a guaranteed income. Another thing he ruined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com