HN Explorer

Ask HN: Is There a Comments-Only Hacker News RSS Feed?

3 points by Cockbrand ↗ HN
I'm subscribing to the regular RSS feed [1], in which the individual list items in my RSS reader are links to the submitted pages. I'd rather have a feed with links to the comment pages, as I use HN mostly to read the contextual discussion. I see that the feed does contain the comments, like

  <comments>https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34184163</comments>
So it should be fairly trivial to build a proxy that does what I want. Doing this would be a nice little exercise, but I don't want to re-invent the wheel if it already exists.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/rss

4 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 20.1 ms ] thread
tacosbane
https://hnrss.github.io/
Cockbrand
Excellent, thank you!

[EDIT:] Although this doesn't exactly do what I want - there's a "Best Comments" feed, but not the regular front page feed as links to comments instead of the original pages, and the "Frontpage" feed doesn't immediately show the individual HN article pages in my RSS reader. I'll look into contributing to hnrss.github.io, though.

edavis
If I understand right, adding "link=comments" to any hnrss URL should do the trick.

Docs: https://hnrss.github.io/#link-parameter

Cockbrand
That did it indeed, thanks! I've learned a bit about RSS and my RSS app (Vienna for Mac) along the way. By default, the RSS reader displays the content of the "description" tag. When I select the "Load full HTML articles" checkbox for the feed in the RSS reader, it loads the actual comments page. I had this checkbox enabled for the default HN feed, but hadn't been aware of that. Anyhow, thanks again!