HN Explorer

Ask HN: RSS Feed for Comments?

27 points by TechRemarker ↗ HN
In my RSS apps, the top HN feed has always shown a page with a link to view comments. Alas trying out Readwise Reader which is amazing but a bug where feeds like HN, DF etc go straight to the external url bypassing the commentary content which is why most of us subscribe to these wildly popular feeds. In meantime, is there a top HN rss feed that just includes the HN links and not the external links so will work in rss reader that can’t handle it normally yet?

19 comments

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JadoJodo
I think you'll have to use something like https://hnrss.github.io/
heavymark
Thank you. At quick glance, in that list I don't see any feed there that is of the standard top HN but have "Comments URL" labeled as just "URL" so will pull into RSS feeds normally? Unless maybe I'm missing something? Eitherway, glad to discover that link as could be helpful for other things in the future.
c7b
Not sure I get your question right, but this points right to the HN comment page under <link>

https://hnrss.org/frontpage?link=comments

heavymark
Oh I didn't see that. I think that might work! At quick glance it looks like it's showing different results than the normal feed I subscribe to: "news.ycombinator.com/rss". Can you confirm the "/frontpage" is the same feed as "news.ycombinator.com/rss"?
heavymark
It seems like that /frontpage one shows every single item that appears on the front page, rather than /rss that shows just the top items? Is there a hnrss.org ?comments one specifically for /rss? If so that would be perfect.
heavymark
It looks likes hnrss comments supports "points". Do you know what the threshold for the main /rss feed points is? That is, perhaps items only show on that if they are 5 points or higher or something? If so then on hnrss could do something like https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=5?link=comments. Unless RSS uses other signals other than simply a number of points?
edavis
Hi, I created hnrss.org so I can take a stab at this:

1) Yes, adding `?link=comments` is the right way to switch the `<link>` RSS element from the submission URL to the HN comments URL. And since that's a global option, you can also do something like `/newest?points=25&link=comments`. Just join multiple parameters with `&`.

2) The difference between news.ycombinator.com/rss and hnrss.org/frontpage is `/rss` appears to be an exact replica of the HN homepage just as a RSS feed (so the submissions move around in the feed like they do on the homepage) while `/frontpage` is a reverse chronological feed of all HN submissions that currently have the `front_page` tag applied to it within Algolia.

(When Algolia indexes HN submissions, it attaches "tags" that can be referenced later. One of those tags is `front_page` which just means the submission is currently on the front page. See https://hn.algolia.com/api for more.)

Hopefully that clarifies why the two feeds appear to have different items.

3) While hnrss.org does have a `?points=X` filter, that's unrelated to `/frontpage`. Like I said, `/frontpage` is just submissions with the `front_page` tag while `?points=X` only returns submissions over X points. You can combine them, but you don't have to.

Hope this all helps!

MollyRealized
I don't know if you will agree, but even as a strong RSS user, I don't find RSS to be useful for HN. I tend to prefer the hckrnews.com interface - like a traditional RSS feed display, it is one-line per title, reverse chronological, but has some additional notations and sorts that are useful to me.
wink
In contrast, I only visit any of the home, latest, top or whatever pages like once a year, I only read HN via RSS - but like the OP stated, I need both links, one to the original article and one to the comments (or the proposed only comments-link)
heavymark
Yes, I love HN in my RSS and find it very useful, but yes, I'm sure that varies for everyone. Dedicated apps for HN, Reddit, etc, certainly offer a better experience for those platforms individually, but for me having everything in one place is much more practical and ideal, and then can use apps/sites for individual sites as needed.
princevegeta89
I agree with you. I started self-hosting Miniflux recently, and the HN feed (just for the frontpage items) was sending me about 100 items everyday. I felt that was too much and removed the feed.
alxmng
https://sumi.news shows separate links for comments and the article.
heavymark
Is that HN top news, or another website aggregator? While I imagine there are a lot of other aggregator sites out their with various rss feed types, this question would be in regards to HN Top News section specifically. Unless that link is for that?
alxmng
An aggregator. HN’s RSS already includes a comment link in <comments> element, but many aggregators don’t display this.
notacoward
I've been using hnrss.org and it's great, but I'll also add a warning. Even the best HN commenters don't consistently write as well or as thoughtfully here as the typical blog, let alone a professional communicator, but they do tend to be very prolific. Therefore, the overall quality in my RSS stream has gone down a bit. Seems a bit more Twitter-like TBH. Maybe your RSS reader isn't the right place for HN content.
heavymark
Thanks, yes the quality can certainly vary, however have been a subscriber of HN for as long as I can remember and find a great deal of value, but yes, as time goes on most of my feeds/site do you require a bit more effort to find as much quality since so many are shouting these days. I've recently switched RSS readers and that improves for my needs in almost all aspects except with the major one issue of not properly support linkblogs/hn etc. So until that's resolved figure a different feed that has the comments page as the primary link will be a good workaround. Sounds like HNRSS.org maybe the solution. Can't seem to find an HNRSS equivalent to the main /rss feed however. This appears to be the closet https://hnrss.org/?link=comments but where /rss just includes a few of the most popular per day, that HNRSS feed seems to show every single one that hits the front page which wouldn't be ideal for my needs. It looks like you can use points such as https://hnrss.org/frontpage?points=5?link=comments to get closer. Do you know if the main /rss page is based on some point threshold and what number that may be? Or is it based on other metrics beyond points and thus HNRSS won't be able to provide an exact equivalent?
leshokunin
Did you find a way to get an rss of new front page links, but it'd link to the discussion rather than the url?