Hacker News Reader

Great list, thank you. The only thing to note is that whenever I imported a large list like this in the past, I always stopped checking my RSS reader after a while because the content wasn't interesting. I think finding RSS/adding it to a reader should happen organically over time.

This may be because most feed readers don't have a proper way to triage items. Adding a feed doesn't mean you want to read everything from said feed. Usually only a subset of articles are interesting.

I built a feed reader with that concept in mind, having a separate triage stage where you only decide if it's worth reading or not. This will make it easier to handle large feed lists and find the best articles from them.

https://lighthouseapp.io/

I just build feed hydrators that get the feeds, filter them and generate a new feed for FreshRSS to consume.

For example my HN feed only surfaces articles with enough votes + comments and a few other variables.

All high-content feeds also have a maximum number of items, if it goes over they're marked as read.

I remember Firefox used to have this cool feature where you could detect any RSS feeds on the page you have open.

Now if I don't see it on a page I check the page source - some blogs don't advertise the feed but it's there.

Spotify and Tailscale do...

https://engineering.atspotify.com/feed

https://tailscale.com/blog/index.xml

Some of them redesign their blog layouts every 6 months, abandoning and then eventually rediscovering RSS. It's extremely annoying.

> I am quite surprised and a bit disappointed that almost none of them have RSS.

I think it's on purpose. It is to signal that these (those without RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all, they're marketing websites aimed to help with recruiting and making the organization seem "engineering-like".

What? That makes no sense. RSS is beloved and known among engineers. Marketers? Not so much.

Exactly, so if the blog doesn't have RSS, you know they're probably made from marketers with no input from engineering, otherwise they'd have RSS on the blogs.

Edit: Ah, noticed I made a without/with typo, fixed that, should make about 2% more sense now for the ones who the original meaning was unclear :)

Oh, I read your post backwards (thought you said RSS == more likely fluff). My fault, sorry!

To be fair to you, my original comment did say:

> It is to signal that these (those with RSS) aren't really "engineering" blogs at all

So now when I corrected that with/without typo, it looks like your previous comment doesn't make sense, but it kind of did, at the time. Sorry about that and thanks for making me realize the typo!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com