For me, at least 80% of the value of HN comes from the discussions in the comments. There are some incredibly smart people here with extremely diverse backgrounds. I've benefited greatly not only from their insight, but from being forced to step back, rethink, and reevaluate my own thoughts on different issues.
By turning the contents into an RSS feed of hyperlinked articles, I think it strips away a lot of this value and removes the incentive to participate in the discussion. It devalues the site and turns it into just another source of links.
Maybe that's just me.
It'd probably bother me less if firstly, the feed linked to the HN article & discussion itself, and secondly, it came from somebody whose contribution to the site went beyond commenting on their own articles about creating RSS feeds of said site.
I totally absolutely completely agree the comments are very important. That's why the feed links to the comments in the <comments> element of each <item>. Your RSS reader/aggregator should give you a one-click way to get to the comments based on that info.
Added it to twitterfeed here: http://twitter.com/hnfirehose - I'll work on adding rssCloud to Twitterfeed over the weekend to make it truly real-time :-)
I am following it in http://daveriver.scripting.com/. It's a lot of news, but I like having it there. You're welcome to poll it, but please no more often than once a minute. It only updates at most once a minute, so there's no point in polling more frequently.
This is actually the first time I've heard about rss cloud, though apparently rss cloud has been around for ages. Is there any particular reason you went with this over PubSubHubbub?
There are a number of issues with the RSS Cloud. There are proposals to fix RSS Cloud (see discussion here http://rsscloud.org/walkthrough/openDiscussion.html), but there is not yet a new specification incorporating these changes.
One thing that remains to be done is figuring out how the encoding works. Not sure if the funny characters are coming from: YC, the API service I'm using (http://api.ihackernews.com/new) or JSON, but there are some funny encodings that show up. The feed is usable but looks dorky sometimes.
I just added code to filter special character sequences. As I encounter special characters in the JSON, I'll just change them to more innocuous characters. Like turning a curly single quote, which is communicated by this triplet: ’ into a straight single quote.
For me, at least 80% of the value of HN comes from the discussions in the comments. There are some incredibly smart people here with extremely diverse backgrounds. I've benefited greatly not only from their insight, but from being forced to step back, rethink, and reevaluate my own thoughts on different issues.
By turning the contents into an RSS feed of hyperlinked articles, I think it strips away a lot of this value and removes the incentive to participate in the discussion. It devalues the site and turns it into just another source of links.
Maybe that's just me.
It'd probably bother me less if firstly, the feed linked to the HN article & discussion itself, and secondly, it came from somebody whose contribution to the site went beyond commenting on their own articles about creating RSS feeds of said site.