Hacker News Reader

What client would yoi use with this?

You can use Thunderbird or Gnus

Note that if you just want RSS, Thunderbird supports it natively. You might want to use Feedbase for the social stuff though.

What social stuff are you referring to?

You can comment on any article (or comment) in Feedbase.

I self host freshrss right now, i was just curious since usenet might provide an interesting g vector for more complex filtering

Any nntp client that renders HTML. Most obvious choices are Gnus, if you like Emacs, and Thunderbird.

You can use more old school clients such as slrn, tin, and nn - but usually displaying HTML takes some work.

Pan is another GUI client, I don't remember if it renders HTML.