Hacker News firehose feed

For me, at least 80% of the value of HN comes from the discussions in the comments. There are some incredibly smart people here with extremely diverse backgrounds. I've benefited greatly not only from their insight, but from being forced to step back, rethink, and reevaluate my own thoughts on different issues.

By turning the contents into an RSS feed of hyperlinked articles, I think it strips away a lot of this value and removes the incentive to participate in the discussion. It devalues the site and turns it into just another source of links.

Maybe that's just me.

It'd probably bother me less if firstly, the feed linked to the HN article & discussion itself, and secondly, it came from somebody whose contribution to the site went beyond commenting on their own articles about creating RSS feeds of said site.

http://static.scripting.com/hackernews/rss.xml

Each item points to the article being linked to from the HN entry. The <comments> link points to the HN discussion page.

The feed is realtime, it has a functional <cloud> element, and the notification server works (at least for now, knock wood, praise Murphy).

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/soapMeetsRss.html

I am following it in http://daveriver.scripting.com/. It's a lot of news, but I like having it there. You're welcome to poll it, but please no more often than once a minute. It only updates at most once a minute, so there's no point in polling more frequently.