Hacker News is a popular social site on today’s Internet. It focuses on technology and development for the most part, but you find other topics of interests posted to the site as well. Users of the site may vote for submitted items on the site to increase their visibility on it.
While most users probably access Hacker News directly in web browsers, some may prefer using RSS. The site supports RSS, but not like Reddit supports RSS. You may subscribe to the main RSS feed using the site’s own infrastructure, but customizations are not supported natively. There is an open source project, however, that allows you do subscribe to various Hacker News RSS feeds to pull items of interests into your RSS feed reader automatically.
RSS does not require an account, but there is no explanation on the site on subscribing to Hacker News RSS feeds. The following paragraphs provide you with the missing information.
You may subscribe to the Hacker News main feed but also to specific keywords or users that you are interested in. Here is how that works.
Hacker News RSS feeds
If you just want the main news feed, you may subscribe to https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. Just add the URL to your feed reader and you are done.
The open source project hnrss providers you with custom RSS feeds for Hacker News. Here is a list of example RSS feeds that you may subscribe to:
- Newest posts on Hacker News: https://hnrss.org/newest
- Newest comments on Hacker News: https://hnrss.org/newcomments
- Best comments RSS feed on Hacker News: https://hnrss.org/bestcomments
- Keyword-based RSS feeds on Hacker News (searching titles only): https://hnrss.org/newest?q=KEYWORD1+OR+KEYWORD2
- RSS feeds for posts with X-number of points and/or X-number of comments: https://hnrss.org/show?points=100&comments=25
- Show HN RSS feed: https://hnrss.org/show
- RSS feeds for the most active posts with ongoing discussion: https://hnrss.org/active
- Hacker News Jobs feed: https://hnrss.org/jobs
- Posts by a specific user: https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=USERNAME
- Comments by a specific user: https://hnrss.org/threads?id=USERNAME
- All by a specific user: https://hnrss.org/user?id=USERNAME
You may use the examples above to create custom RSS feeds for Hacker News. Here are some real world examples:
- https://hnrss.org/newest?q=Mozilla — Returns new posts about Mozilla.
- https://hnrss.org/newest?q=Windows11 — Returns new posts about Windows11
- https://hnrss.org/show?points=500 — Returns all posts that reach 500 points on the site.
The ability to retrieve custom RSS feeds is excellent, as it filters out noise in the main Hacker News feed or on the site.
Now You: do you use custom RSS feeds for the sites that you visit regularly or monitor?
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