Hacker News RSS | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News RSS

hnrss.github.io

101 pointsspansoa57 comments

Funny to read this from my RSS reader. Happy to see RSS catching back on!

See also: the builtin HN RSS feed at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

And also the RSSHub capabilities here: https://docs.rsshub.app/en/programming.html#hacker-news

I've been subscribed to news.ycombinator.com/rss for a few years, but (more often lately) I have noticed that it does not update frequently, and many stories that have appeared on the desktop site (not "new", but on the front page) do not appear in the feed.

I will give https://hnrss.org/frontpage a try.

I have also been using 'news.ycombinator.com/rss' for years, I have no problem with it, but then I only fetch and view the actual content of the xml in real time, and don't have a reader storing and sorting the entries.

What I can say is, the /rss feed always 100% matches the frontpage at the time of it's fetch.

EDIT: looking at the /rss feed, it's missing a <guid> tag for articles, which maybe confusing some readers that rely on that tag for article uniqueness.

I saw that too. I used to run my own HN RSS feed that was just a pass-thru to HN's RSS feed, but with the comments as the primary link. No matter how often my feed reader fetched, I routinely saw links show up on HN Daily or HN Blogs that my pass-thru feed hadn't captured.

Eventually I learned that hnrss has a flag to make the comments the primary link. I switched to that, and no more problem.

> Eventually I learned that hnrss has a flag to make the comments the primary link. I switched to that, and no more problem.

This has been my only annoyance with the HN RSS feed. I'm so glad to have learned about this.

Wait, what is this flag?

This is my greatest annoyance with the official feed....

For the front page, the RSS URL is:

https://hnrss.org/frontpage?link=comments

hnrss also has some other nifty flags to only show links with a given number of updates or comments:

https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=100&comments=25

I think the HN RSS feed reorders entries which confuses some RSS readers.

> it does not update frequently

How often do you retrieve? I find it to be one of the most active

HN also frequently changes post titles and these show up as different articles on my RSS reader. I think RSS allows specifying a unique feed item id so this can be avoided but HN doesn't set it.

If Google reader had never existed, I feel like RSS could have become the foundation of the modern web.

It honestly amazing we had e-mail before the messes of today. Otherwise we'd be stuck with a dozen different "mail" apps.

The 90s had competition here. There was MSN, FirstClass, Internet, Compuserve, AOL. The Internet won, but no it's not as simple as "we already had email". It didn't start out unified.

I'm talking about for the consumer. Sure, the Internet sure had a leg up on winning, in retrospect, because it was open and built by schools too. But imagine if Microsoft had successfully pushed MSN as "the" network for high schools?

These competitors were point-and-click easy for nontechies long before the Internet was.

And all those apps want to become E-Mail.

Not familiar with google reader and its impact on rss. Could you explain? Thanks

I tried many times to use rss but found the ecosystem to be terrible.

Google reader leveraged Googles search index to allow users to easily find RSS feeds on any topic, and build a personal feed of all the articles from their chosen topics.

Think a Gmail type interface, but for RRS with a built in RSS search.

Then one day, Google just killed it, and over night millions of RSS feeds cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

Google Reader disappearing certainly had an impact, but I think there is another factor that contributed to companies abandoning RSS: user tracking & advertising.

For example: our country's version of eBay used to have a great RSS service where you could set up a feed for search queries on their site. I would skim through all the feeds once a day to see if there where any deals I liked. But now they have replaced it with an email service, which requires me to visit their website to see the results of the queries (every query also has it's own notification email). Which means they get data on the things I am potentially buying and how engaged I'm with them (since the email is coupled to my account, the RSS was not). It would also give them an opportunity to present some ads, because I have to visit their site every time I want to see if there are any interesting results.

Took over the ecosystem the stopped its service.

> I tried many times to use rss but found the ecosystem to be terrible.

If you are in the apple ecosystem, I would recommend giving it a try with NetNewsWire + A feedbin subscription.

NetNewsWire has an iOS and a macOS client and has a clean UI. FeedBin's killer feature is that they provide an email address that you can use to subscribe to newsletters - being able to read these along with other blog updates is a game changer.

I have found that the best content is from people who write their own newsletters or blog on their own platform. After experiencing the internet liberated from all pop ups, pay walls, advertisements, GDPR harassment and google AMP, I don't think I can ever go back.

Care to elaborate? Why an existence of a popular RSS reader has to do with preventing a protocol it is using from being more recognized?

Not op, but my guess is that by creating a centralised service which abstracted RSS away, it meant that when Google killed the reader it damaged the ecosystem as a whole, including the underlying protocol.

Exactly

Google making Reader very good, and it becoming the most popular method of using RSS (for reading articles, at least - not for podcasts), and then suddenly killing it, can be seen as pretty much an "embrace, extend, extinguish" move.

Hey everybody, hnrss maintainer here.

Just FYI, I’ve recently added a (what else?) RSS feed for hnrss if you want to stay updated: https://hnrss.github.io/updates.xml

If you're using hnrss in interesting ways I'd love to hear about it! Reply below.

I have GitHub Student Pack and Mailgun gives a generous free tier.

I've plugged RSS2EMAIL into Mailgun via a script on my server that emails me stories that match my criteria.

I have also written a script that pushes a custom notification to my phone on other criteria.

Thanks so much for this. It’s how I read HN :)

What RSS Readers is everyone using? I have used tiny tiny rss before, but was wondering if there was another alternative

Newsblur https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur or hosted https://newsblur.com/

You can use the newsblur API in newsboat as well.

What's the API doing for you within newsboat?

Not exactly a reader, but I use rss2email[0]. It’s pretty easy to setup, has optional HTML/CSS support, and I run a cron job to pull feeds daily. I like being able to browse through articles wherever I can get email without having to rely on a separate, proprietary service or self-hosting.

[0] https://github.com/rss2email/rss2email

The Firefox-recommended reader is quite good:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feedbroreader...

Feeder (https://f-droid.org/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder)

NetNewsWire for macOS/iOS[0]. It was the best RSS reader for Mac OS X in the far past and they have now revived it and made it open source. I particularly like that you can sync feeds via iCloud or self-hosted instead of an external service.

[0] https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire

Incidentally, do you have any trouble with this loading images from articles?

Not that I noticed, but I mostly scroll through headlines to open them in the browser and don't use the articles much.

Reeder on mac and iOS: https://www.reederapp.com/

Inoreader: https://www.inoreader.com/

I made https://readr.nz/ which works pretty well for me. Source code is here https://github.com/fallaciousreasoning/progrssive

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rss-feed-reader/pn...

I use (and made) https://sumi.news - RSS, newsletter, and Twitter support. No subscription. Clean chronological feed, and a per-feed recent entry view.

Feedly. Does everything that Google Reader did, as far as I can tell.

My own:

https://i.imgur.com/xTftp6J.png

It's cranky, and feature-lite, but is tailored for how I consume RSS.

https://bazqux.com/

I use Feeder.

https://feeder.co/

http://www.netvibes.com

Miniflux

https://miniflux.app/

https://fraidyc.at

newsboat