HN Explorer

Ask HN: What's on your RSS reader?

148 points by Guyag ↗ HN
I'm interested to hear what you think is good/important enough to warrant following, admittedly with the aim of expanding my list. I'd also be interested to hear what reader you use.

Here's my list (most of these are easily searchable so I won't link them):

Comics: Cube Drone, Dilbert daily, Garfield daily, Invisible Bread, lolnein, Poorly Drawn Lines, The Oatmeal, xkcd

Misc: xkcd what if?, John A De Goes' blog [1], Still Drinking [2], Krebs on Security

I use a Telegram bot [3] as a 'reader' of sorts (no affiliation).

[1] http://degoes.net/

[2] https://www.stilldrinking.org/

[3] https://telegram.me/TheFeedReaderBot

77 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] thread
JoshTriplett
I don't actually use RSS for news, because all the regularly updating sites I read fall into four categories:

- News sites like HN or LWN, where I find the RSS experience quite suboptimal compared to participating directly.

- Blogs, which I read entirely via Planet aggregators: Planet Debian, Planet GNOME, Kernel Planet, and Planet Mozilla.

- Comics, serialized stories, and other things where I want to read every page and remember what I haven't read. For these, I use Comic Rocket (https://www.comic-rocket.com/), which a friend and I wrote years ago. Every one of the comics you mentioned is tracked there, along with XKCD's What If.

(That's in addition to mailing lists, which includes announcement lists, and Twitter, which also covers things like This Week In Rust.)

akkartik
The trouble with your approach (mixing everything into time-sorted feeds) is that you are more likely to see high-volume posters. You're more likely to miss out on low-velocity but high-quality sources. I've written indirectly about this before: http://akkartik.name/post/2009-05-19-21-30-46-soc. But that was a long time ago. These days I don't care about relevance or personalization. I just make sure that I diversify my personal reading regardless of what the world around me is putting into its brain: http://akkartik.name/feeds.xml. There's almost 250 sources in there, but it generates 2-3 posts a day that I don't ever want to miss.

A recent thread with tons of recommendations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11563516.

aylons
I actually find RSS more valuable for sites that do not update often. You know, that one blog from an incredible guy who posts five times a year, or from a friend of yours who post a project update even now and then.

I also subscribe for sites that update very often, such as Hack a Day, so I can scan the headlines and sort very fast what I want to save for later (GTD style). For this, I use newsblur keyboard shortcuts.

JoshTriplett
I tend to use Comic Rocket for those rarely-updating sites too; anything with a next link works. For instance, I read http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ that way, and several other things that update even less often (a few times a year).

Every time I try an RSS reader, I find myself drowning in things I don't actually care to read in their entirety. And I prefer to read almost everything on the original site, rather than in a newsreader.

nmy
What's LWH ?
JoshTriplett
LWN: https://lwn.net/ . Best source for FOSS news; next best thing to reading all of the Linux Kernel mailing list and many other first-hand sources, as well as reports from numerous conferences.
santoshmaharshi
I stopped using RSS readers after the demise of Google Reader & my shift to Twitter. But I can't live without these sites which take me almost to all the placed on the net :) HackerNews- Daily morning read, can't live without it. Slashdot - News for nerds, stuff that matters :) Techmeme - A river of news to read corporate tech news. Kottke - I am not kidding, I read it daily to impress my 8 year old daughter - from Pixar to movies to planet discoveries. Techdirt - Interesting debates on tech policies. Edge.org - If you really have good supply of Coffee & very solid conversations.

Enjoy.

younata
I wrote (and maintain) my own rss reader for iOS - https://github.com/younata/RSSClient/, here's a trimmed down version what I follow:

News:

- Electrek - https://electrek.co (Basically Tesla news, but ostensibly EV news)

- Hackaday

- MacRumors

Swift/iOS Dev:

- Natasha The Robot - http://natashatherobot.com

- Swift Weekly Brief - https://swiftweekly.github.io

- This Week in Swift - http://swiftnews.curated.co

- NSHipster

Misc:

- xkcd What If

- Wait but Why

- Mr. Money Mustache

There's also other stuff not really worth mentioning - serialized stories (mostly just feeds for a few reddit user's posts), my blog, some comics, etc.

arkadiyt
Can you share what it looks like? The github screenshots link is broken
PudgePacket
If you follow the link on the github page to the app store there is screenshots there.
confounded
Interestingly (on reflection, not surprisingly) since going back to RSS, I've been reading a lot more from sites with expert content, but ugly typography.

- Math Babe (https://mathbabe.org)

        + Superb musings and coverage on the societal
          impact of everything becoming a prediction
          problem (occasional applied technical 
          discussion)
- Tech Dirt (https://www.techdirt.com/)

        + Lawyers Rule Everything Around Me
- Light Blue Touchpaper (https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org)

        + Thoughts on infosec from Cambridge Computer 
          Laboratory (influential on policy, excellent
          coverage of conferences)
- Muckrock (https://www.muckrock.com/)

        + News from the FOIA wars
Guyag
Tech Dirt seems to have quite a high volume. Do you use any filtering, or just manually scan over?
confounded
You're right --- I just skim the headlines.
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elgabogringo
I use netvibes. Basically replaced my old "my yahoo" page about five years back. Love it.
EvgeniyZh
http://cacm.acm.org/ - Communications of the ACM

https://www.hpcwire.com/ - HPCwire: Global News and Information on High Performance Computing

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/ - Lambda the Ultimate

https://openai.com/blog/ - OpenAI Blog

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/ - Shtetl-Optimized. The Blog of Scott Aaronson

http://feedworld.net/toc/ - Theory of Computing Blog Aggregator

http://deepmind-ai.blogspot.com/ - DeepMind AI

https://www.technologyreview.com - MIT Technology review

And a bit of fun:

http://phdcomics.com/comics.php - PhD comics

http://www.smbc-comics.com/ - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comics

https://what-if.xkcd.com/ - What If?

atmosx
Thanks for this list, the MIT review looks great.

For ACM, I'm a bit confused, for the basic subscription they offer 1 publication (like a magazine) or you have to pick up a topic? They offer dozens of publications.

davimack
About 200 different feeds, so knowing what you're looking for would be good.

I use Brief on FireFox with Live Bookmarks. Let's me control frequency of downloads, navigate using keyboard, etc.

webwanderings
Whoa, is Brief still being developed? I gave up on it a long ago; it was a decent service.
vollmond
Here's my pastebin: http://pastebin.com/X6mMEMD1

I removed the "IRL" category of people I know personally.

Lots of these are defunct. "Comics" is the only category I keep up with on a daily basis -- the rest is much more sporadic, just based on what catches my eye when I'm skimming the unread list. I have around 6000 unread items at the moment.

After Google Reader closed down, I switched to Feedly for a few months, then installed Tiny Tiny RSS on my shared hosting -- never have to worry about the service shutting down or modifying its features without my permission anymore.

[dead] TheWiseOne3
Thanks so much for posting a list of 6000 mostly broken links.
kettlebell
The RSS reader I use is the one I (re)designed called RSSPBRRY. It's available on Github. Link is in my profile, for anyone who wants a peek.
michaeldwan
Which RSS reader do you all use? RSS fell by the wayside for me after Google Reader was shutdown. I thought HN+Reddit+Twitter+Medium would replace it but I still find myself missing updates from several wonderful sites that don't update regularly.
Bootvis
I like NewsBlur, has a good web client and a nice app for iOS (phone and pad).

Edit: maybe also for Android but I simply don't know.

dochtman
It is, indeed, also on Android. I use it there constantly, works great. Back in the Google Reader demise days, I tried pretty much everything that was available, and NewsBlur was clearly the best. I've happily paid for it ever since. The founder and his staff are responsive to issues on Twitter, too.

As for what I read:

- Blogs category: 116 "blogs", which is to say irregularly (sometimes very rarely) updated feeds with longer-form content (includes some podcasts).

- Miscellaneous category:

  - Charles Arthur's daily link list

  - Daring Fireball

  - LWN.net

  - Marco Arment

  - Matt Mullenweg

  - Planet Gentoo

  - Planet Mozilla

  - The Codeless Code

  - Trivium
- Comics

  - CommitStrip

  - Dilbert

  - Geek&Poke

  - Not Invented Here

  - Oglaf

  - Power Nap

  - Questionable Content

  - Strong Female Protagonist

  - wulffmorgenthaler

  - xkcd
The full list, if you're interested, is here:

https://dirkjan.ochtman.nl/files/NewsBlur-djc-2016-07-31.xml

batatanova
Inoreader has plenty of advanced features. It's better than what Google Reader was like.
brotherjerky
I used to use Digg and switched over recently to Inoreader, way better in almost every way.
mfkp
+1 to inoreader, I've been using it since the demise of Google Reader. Stable, full-featured, and great mobile apps.

https://www.inoreader.com/

mindcrime
Digg Reader. It's simple but functional.
patrickxb
theoldreader.com is what I use. Closest to Google Reader...
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edhelas
I'm using Movim (p.s.: I'm the author - https://movim.eu/). I have a little daemon in Python that parses hundreds of RSS/Atom feeds and push them to public XMPP Pubsub nodes, https://github.com/edhelas/atomtopubsub.

After that I just use Movim to subscribe to them and I can enjoy real-time pushed news in a nice UI that is available on my phone, browser on in an app. And everyone can also subscribe and publish on new nodes. I really think that XMPP is a really nice protocol to do such things.

girzel
Gwene's rss-to-nntp converter: gwene.org. Which has been down for the past couple of days, and I'm missing my fix!
theknarf
I'm completely in love with Feedly. They also replicated Google Readers api, so you can use Feedly as your single-sign on, but use another RSS reader that understands the old Google Reader-api if you prefer to jugle RSS readers around a little.
nreece
RSS feeds rock! Just needs a bit of tweaking to lower the noise, which is still very low, and best of all - untouched by algorithmic sorting, compared to social platforms like Twitter, Facebook etc.

Some interesting feeds we've created using Feedity are listed at https://feedity.com/featured.aspx

shameless plug: Using our tool at https://feedity.com, you can create custom feeds for any webpage (including Twitter and Facebook).

fspoettel
thanks for the shameless plug, I was looking for exactly this the last time I tried making a habit out of reading RSS feeds.
CapnGoat
I use Feedly with Reeder for Mac as the RSS client.
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nvader
One source that I am always delighted to see pop up each week in my Feedly reader is The Codeless Code: http://thecodelesscode.com/contents Each article is a parable or koan that aims to convey some kind of programming best practice. I'm very happy to recommend it.
daveevad
I read the New York Times in mine via a phantomjs script that pulls out the text courtesy of DOM selector 'p.story-body-text.'

It's not perfect but I cannot find a closer approximation to the Kindle newsstand experience on a computer screen.

I am an All Digital Access subscriber of the Times and consider my actions justified under the Terms of Service, for whatever that is worth.

I use the Newsbeuter RSS reader.

ents
feedly because it's free but read thru reeder
benwr
- Slate Star Codex (http://slatestarcodex.com/)

     + Really good analysis of complicated and interesting
       issues in science, medicine, politics, rationality,
       ethics, and community dynamics.
dejv
I am using BazQux Reader (https://bazqux.com/). The name is awful and it is also paid, but it is very fast, stable and very similar to Google Reader.

Bonus point: it is written in Haskell

zetaben
I'm using Newsblur (http://newsblur.com YC S12), mostly through its Android application which works great offline in the subway.