Hacker News Reader

Comment by acidburnNSA | Hacker News Reader

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.

> it does not update frequently

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

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

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

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.

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