Ask HN: Who do you follow via RSS feed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who do you follow via RSS feed?

73 pointsznpy53 comments

Hello there!

I just set up TinyTinyRSS (https://tt-rss.org/) at home and I'm looking into interesting things to read as well as people/website publishing interesting stuff.

This, among the other things, to reduce the daily (doom)scrolling and avoid the recommendation algorithms by social media.

So: who or what do you follow via RSS feed, and why?

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I use the fantastic Inoreader that is better than Google Reader was.

I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website.

A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are :

Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different.

https://arnoldkling.substack.com/

Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world

https://www.noahpinion.blog/

Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood.

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/

Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage.

https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/

me too; Inoreader was my first/only stop after Google Reader, and is one of the only paid subscriptions I maintain.

Probably > 80% of my RSS feeds are Youtube channels.

Thanks for the plug - the compact list view did give me the fuzzy feelings in my belly ;) Moving from NetNewsWire to this for a while...

another positive vote for Inoreader , really the best none self hosted, as long as you keep your subscriptions within their free limits :)

I pay. I've found it's worth it.

Too bad that their new interface is awful. Wastes so much space, and cannot normally collapse the left bar at all. So first thing after updates or login is to hit "Support" and "Click here to switch back to the old version". It's way more usable and doesn't waste space for unnecassary things.

98% of everything you follow has RSS. It’s not like a quaint, unlisted Vermont antique shop.

This includes YouTube channels, major newspapers and podcasts!

P.S. Even HN is something you should personally control. It's very useful whenever moderators flag a submission you might've liked.

Multiple high quality company engineering blogs including https://netflixtechblog.com/, https://www.uber.com/en-US/blog/engineering/, DoorDash etc.

https://techtalksweekly.io/ - new software dev conference talks and podcasts

https://ciechanow.ski/ - interactive articles about science and engineering

https://jvns.ca/ - great technical content overall

This is a great thread btw.

Great links. Was disappointed to see ciechanow.ski hasn't been updated since 2024.

I think he tends to publish only once or twice a year, so we'll probably need to stay patient.

In no particular order: 404 Media, Ars Technica, BleepingComputer, The Register, The Verge, and Tomshardware.

These usually sit in the corner of my screen through the day. Some are better than others for work purposes. The Verge could probably go, and 404 is a bit more socially-focused than the rest. In particular though, having rapid updates from BleepingComputer and El Reg is a great way for me to learn about new vulns, issues that might affect my users, etc.

Some I like:

https://www.writesoftwarewell.com/ - very good software posts, mostly around Ruby on Rails.

https://crankysec.com/ - Cybersecurity rants mostly, fun to read.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ - Ed Zitron's writings. Good counterpoints to all the AI hype these days.

These come up often on HN but I'll call them out anyway:

https://jvns.ca/ - Julia Evans, good technical content all around.

https://xeiaso.net/ - Xe Iaso, good technical content all around once again

I roo am trying to curate my RSS feed to be doom-scrolling free. These largely achieve that for me. You'll find a smattering of political posts in them, but that's an inevitable side effect of living in abnormal political times.

https://scrollprize.org/ - The Vesuvius Challenge: Using high intensity X-ray scans and computation to attempt to retrieve lost scrolls from Pompei; real uplifting Sci-Fi stuff! Possibly the most heartwarming thing I know of on the internet; snatching ancient knowledge from the flames of history! What could be more poetic?

https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline - In the Pipeline: The blog of Derek Lowe (pharmaceutical chemist), (in)famous for articles like "Sand Won't Save You This Time" Always interesting, though a lot of the chemistry goes way way over my head. Some political stuff lately, unavoidably given the current secretary of health.

https://blog.dshr.org/ - David Rostenthal: Digital preservationist.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com - Jeff Geerling: Raspberry Pi, Arm, digital radio, and other nerdery. I enjoy his videos, but I love that he does a plaintext version (first?) that's not just a transcript.

https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/ - Rob Pike: Programming luminary (Go, UTF-8, Unix, etc.)

https://fasterthanli.me - Faster than Lime: Amos's blog leaning heavily towards Rust. I'm a beginner in Rust, but I love this guy's style of writing even when the stuff he's writing about is beyond my current skill level.

Anyway, those are my go-tos at the moment. I look forward to trying a bunch of the others recommended here. Oh and I currently use Feeder under Android as my RSS reader; it's unexciting, which is what I look for in an app these days :D

A last recommendation - as part of trying to avoid doom-scrolling, I have a paper subscription to The Economist and I'm trying to train myself to read that instead of going to news sites. The lack of immediacy helps keep the emotional reaction in check (it's not as addictive of course).

Stephen Toub https://devblogs.microsoft.com/pfxteam/author/toub/feed/

Raymond Chen https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin...

Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/feed/

In no particular order of preference:

- Julia Evans - Daniel Stenberg - Geohot - Cloudflare and Netflix’s respective tech blogs - TorrentFreak - LWN.net - and some others in spanish -

> and some others in spanish

Could you share some of them? Always looking for high quality authors from the home-sphere, but finding it increasingly difficult to find anything worthwhile.

Julia Evans is an absolute treasure.

SwissMiss https://feeds2.feedburner.com/Swissmiss

In no particular order:

- Anton Zhiyanov

- Register Spill by Thorsten Ball

- Phil Eaton

- Mitchell Hashimoto

- Gunnar Morling

- Jack Vanlightly

- Charity Majors

- Bryan Cantrill

- Marc Brooker

- NULL BITMAP By Justin Jaffray

Another tip is you can subscribe to YouTube Channels and Podcasts via RSS as well. I wrote a little bit about my setup to help reduce doom scrolling: https://tylerhillery.com/blog/how-i-consume-the-internet/

Trying again to use this to avoid the algorithm from taking over. The reason is sometimes a go a few months without remembering of a specific channel then when I open that channel manually there's a bunch of new interesting content for me.

Around 20 subreddits, 10 youtube channels and 10 blogs...

A few webcomics, some entertaining YouTube channels, and HN. It used to be a lot more, but nowadays, that's it.

Shameless plug, follow mine -

https://rxjourneyserver.pythonanywhere.com/rss_feed/rss/

https://www.rxjourney.net/

Here’s the feeds I follow: https://www.unindented.org/follows/

(It’s my OPML file translated to HTML via Hugo.)

As to why, they generally post original and insightful stuff on topics I care about, like web dev, security, Ruby, Rust, etc.

HackerNews - hnrss.org

No one. It psychologically makes me feel guilty if I can't keep up. I'd weirdly rather have an email and ignore or read it than pull rss and not read for ages. Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails.

> Funny enough the only time I used rss was when I had that cool outlook integration that made them seem like emails.

I convert feeds to maildir, and read them in email clients (Thunderbird, KMail, Emacs+Gnus, Emacs+mu4e, etc.). That lets me use the same setup for emails and feeds; keeping them on a network mount makes sync trivial; etc.

I use http://www.chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir which is a fork of https://github.com/sulami/feed2maildir that rips out a bunch of unneeded complexity (config files, databases, fetching, looping, etc.)

i think thunderbird has an rss reader, though i've not tried it

I follow too many people, so I built https://feeds.carmo.io with summaries. You might enjoy the selection there and upgrade to the original feeds as needed.

Shamelessly, I have a low volume rss feed for my static-HTML articles, but I'm also using rss for the embedded mastodon feed on my website.

https://brynet.ca/

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i4eR_TNyy2YV17soWyJnbQeH2_r...

404, The Gentleman Stationer, HTMLHell, call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu, Clagnut, Crooked Timber, Platypus, Tech Policy Press, Public Domain Review, Writing at Large, Coffee with a Codex (YT)

Various webcomics, Youtube channels and Github releases for several projects.

[EDIT: This was meant to be a reply to another comment in this thread but I posted it under the top-level comment by mistake. I am leaving this comment intact anyway, in case someone finds it useful.]

The web browsers don't highlight the feed URL information embedded in the HTML anymore, quite unfortunately. But if you go to a YouTube video, say, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM> and then view or inspect the HTML source, you can find the LINK tag for the feed:

  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TNs2ohrc6hnRQ5Sn2w">

So the feed URL in this case is: <https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TN...>.

> Youtube channels

I didn't know you could follow youtube channels via RSS! Where do I find the feed link, given a youtube channel?

Many RSS aggregators automatically convert Youtube links to RSS. You can also do it manually: https://chuck.is/yt-rss/

I have removed Youtube apps from all mobile devices and only watch the creators whose content I'm interested in through RSS, without notifications and distractions. It's a much more pleasant experience, definitely recommend.

You can actually just paste the link to a youtube channel in your RSS reader and it should work. At least for me it works with NetNewsWire. For example, you should be able to copy and paste this directly into your RSS reader: https://www.youtube.com/@freecodecamp

If you view the HTML source of a YouTube video page, there is a LINK tag that contains the feed URL. I have shared an example here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46772655#46775759>.

https://simonwillison.net/

HN Personal Websites[1] by @susam was popular on Hacker News a few days back.

1. https://hnpwd.github.io

I actually setup my reddit home as my RSS feed and that home is populated by my subreddits

Shameless plug.

https://techtalksweekly.io

I'm building a newsletter (with an RSS feed available) called Tech Talks Weekly where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts.

I use netnewswire as my client and I'm self hosting freshrss, so my subscriptions can be synced between my phone and computer.

All of my YouTube and nebula channels I follow via RSS and I think that's kind of giving me the most bang for my buck. I can just get focused on the videos that I want to subscribe to without having to even go to YouTube and get pulled into the algorithm, as well as a few sub Reddits, hacker news front page (it's how I found this post), Lobste.rs, 404 Media, some local blogs (my food co-op, biking website, other community things), some web comics, one news group, and a couple forums.

I've also contemplated Podcasts, but I still have a dedicated player for that.

A few of the best reads in my Reader:

  - Apricitas Economics
  - Avery Pennarun
  - Civic Texts
  - Citation Needed
  - Derek Sivers
  - Die, Workwear!
  - Electrospaces.net
  - Ethan Mollick: One Useful Thing
  - Lukasz Olejnik: Tech Letters
  - Matt Kiser: What The Fuck Just Happened Today?
  - Molly White: Citation Needed
  - Paged Out!
  - Patrick McKenzie: Bits about Money
  - Peter Steinberger
  - Peter Welch: Still Drinking
  - Sam Rose
  - Simon Willison
  - Squishy Computer
  - Sylvain Kerkour
  - Zeynep Tufekci: NYT

Here's a OPML of these: https://s.strco.de/f/feed-20260127.opml

Crooked Timber

Matt Lakeman

Global China Pulse

Sinocism

Bartosz Ciechanowski

brr

Construction Physics

Jonathan Nolan's substack

On the Seams

Quanta Magazine

Matt Levine - Bloomberg Opinion Columnist

Aeon | a world of ideas

Classic Film and TV Café

Experimental History

The Marginalian

The Prism - Gurvinder

The Technium

Westenberg.

Chameth.com

Activity in the release-notes tag

All Things Distributed

An Untitled Blog

Charles Hugh Smith's Substack

Chips and Cheese

computers are bad

Dwarkesh Podcast

Francis Stokes :: Githublog

iRi

Rest of World - Latest Stories

Shtetl-Optimized

Signal Blog

マリウス

techmeme and memeorandum are 2 great firehouse rss feeds that I appreciate.

This site, xkcd, liliputing, some various forums, etc. but the big problem I've started having w/ RSS is when sites set up Cloudflare and the RSS feed ends up behind the Cloudflare validation prompt - I've even emailed some sites but none have bothered to fix or exempt RSS.

anthes.is, my favorite Unix blog

Jeff Geerling & XKCD are the two that stand out in my mind.

theonion.com

Lots of webcomics

NPR,BBC,CBC

Local news

...and THIS site!

> ...and THIS site!

Via RSS?

https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

Amazed this is being discussed! I’ve only consumed hacker news via rss for maybe 15 years and I guess I didn’t know there was another way to read it at this point :)

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