
The Case for RSS - mpweiher
https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2017/11/the-case-for-rss
======
webwanderings
> If you’re not careful, every time you open your RSS reader, there will be
> 1,000 unread articles waiting for you, which completely defeats the purpose
> of using RSS.

No, it does not.

The point of RSS is that you subscribe all your interests which you
consciously come into contact with. You then have a steady stream of content
waiting at your fingertip.

The solution for "1000 unread articles" is to have a shift of perspective in
your mind, that it is okay if you cannot get to all the knowledge and
information in the world. This is, as long as you have prioritized your
reading lists properly.

~~~
fendmark
RSS was strategically killed by Google, Facebook, and Twitter and the rest of
the web followed. RSS was basically the open source TiVo of content
distribution.

Content not wrapped in ads, isn't good for business. Period.

The creativity unleashed by hackers with unfettered access to Twitter's RSS
payload was legendary.

I loved RSS. I still do. I still use Shaun Inman's Fever RSS every day. It is
really unfortunate that he has discontinued it, the guy is an artist at the
highest level, but I get it.

RSS would be all but dead today if it wasn't for Wordpress's universal support
of it. Major props to Matt Mullenweg and everything he stands for.

It should have become the backbone of the web and Dave Winer and Aaron Swartz
more celebrated for it.

Instead it is just a footnote. A story of a time before everything digital was
wrapped in glorious, money making ads and companies discovered charging for
API calls as a business model.

~~~
neya
I think the RSS decline is more of due to a simple supply/demand problem. (I
hypothesize) RSS lost because most people who are on the internet aren't tech
savvy enough to configure an RSS reader.

Because reading from an RSS source required you to have an RSS reader of sorts
and there was some configuration required on the users' part - Install a
client/setup an online tool, this was an extra (rather complicated) step as
compared to say, simply going to Facebook and subscribing to a page you like
with the click of a button.

Now, I'm not discounting the possibility it may have been killed strategically
by the internet giants, because it's not in their interest, but I do believe
Google Adsense (at that time) did allow you to publish ads into your RSS feeds
somehow. So, maybe they killed it because of poor adoption rates and the
configuration required to setup one?

~~~
memco
> Because reading from an RSS source required you to have an RSS reader of
> sorts and there was some configuration required on the users' part

Up until a few years ago Safari supported RSS natively: there was a button you
could click and a native RSS url would open in your browser that you could
read and filter and everything.

Nowadays the alternative in Safari is "reader" mode, which removes all the
website styling and leaves just the main content and also the notifications
API, which allows you to subscribe to a site (if they support it) and get
notified of new content without even opening your browser.

I didn't really use RSS and don't use the replacements either. I really like
the idea of RSS and I think it's worth implementing for people who like it,
but I never found it useful for myself.

~~~
Artemix
Actually, when you open a RSS feed in Firefox, it shows a simple interface
with the organized feed and propose you to subscribe to it, creating a "magic"
bookmark in your bookmarks toolbar which lets you quickly access it and tweak
it.

------
mceoin
Google Trends for RSS is pretty telling:
[https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss](https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=rss)

Personally, I think it's a big loss that we have moved away from the RSS
format specifically, and the open web generally.

~~~
baby
Nobody has moved away from RSS, it's just not as trendy, but major blog
platforms ship with RSS by default. Every time I want to add a blog to my list
I can find an RSS link (on some rare occasion there is no such link, and an
email to the website developer is enough, actually I'm suspecting that most
blogs have a RSS feed nowadays because at one point they received requests to
create one)

~~~
seanp2k2
RSS is nigh-unusable for many sites now because they only put the first few
sentences of an article in the feed, then "continue reading on our site <link>
[where we can show you our ads]". It makes sense from a business perspective,
because RSS has no good way to embed ads. However, it greatly diminishes the
value of RSS -- reading ALL of your content in one easily-organized place.

The best alternative that I've found is Feedly, which can show ads inline.

~~~
tedunangst
As someone who hosted RSS, but not ads, the reason for doing that was
primarily bandwidth related. Serving unchanging content to clients every five
minutes is just wasteful. A lot of RSS clients are shit.

~~~
baby
that's why we had feedburner. Is it still a thing?

------
5_minutes
The big offender here is Google. They nuked it with killing Reader and
FeedBurner is also minutes away of being sunset.

Choosing between evils, Google seems a better bet then Facebook, ofcourse, but
these actions they've taken will backfire for them eventually. The more "open"
and "accessible" web, should be in their benefit, long term thinking.

But what I see, what they're busy with is self driving cars, google glasses,
augmented reality and all of that: GREAT.

But supporting some basic, easy, cheap, webstandards, they're just completely
neglecting and they might up being the next AT&T, or IBM.

They do have some charm offensives going ("Google News Lab") and, well,
basically any big tech corp looks better then Facebook -- if you care about
the internet in it's current form, Google is really screwing us over. I really
am convinced Google is completely losing it's way.

There's no real good quick adequate alternative that I can think of, but they
could've just done things so much better, and it would've costed them, quite
literally, nothing.

~~~
bad_user
> _Choosing between evils, Google seems a better bet then Facebook_

We are treating these companies as if they are sports teams. No, we don't have
to choose between evils.

> _The more "open" and "accessible" web, should be in their benefit, long term
> thinking._

An open Internet is only in the benefit of small and medium companies and
startups.

Companies like Google have virtually unlimited resources at their disposal.
All doors are open for them, all possible loopholes are within reach. When all
else fails they can just drop a couple of billion $ and nobody can say no to
that.

~~~
lucideer
> > Choosing between evils, Google seems a better bet then Facebook

> We are treating these companies as if they are sports teams. No, we don't
> have to choose between evils.

This is very very slightly OT but I've asked this exact question within HN
comments before and never really received any satisfactory answers...

Yes, I fully agree that it shouldn't and doesn't need to be a choice between
the two sports teams, but even in a hypothetical world where it was, how on
earth is anyone presuming that the infinitely pervasive Google is somehow more
ok than the very opt-outable facebook?

~~~
Vinnl
I've found it's easier to opt out of Google than of Facebook. The former is
difficult because their products are relatively good (I consciously use a
different browser, search engine, etc, but at the same time there's eg no
competition in the field of mail clients), whereas the latter (including
WhatsApp) is difficult due to the immense social pressure. I appreciate that
far less.

~~~
lucideer
You're not opting out of Google simply not using their service though. You're
using Google invisibly just by visiting most major websites or by using a lot
of (non-Google) software which integrate their services.

~~~
Vinnl
True, but in that regard Facebook almost equals it. But yeah, it's worrisome
for both - luckily also mostly blockable on an individual basis.

~~~
lucideer
Facebook is mostly blockable on an individual basis, but Google really isn't.
There are so many vectors:

\- Google provides a geolocation service for applications to locate you by
triangulating you relative to nearby wifi hardware. This sends data to Google
about your devices wifi hardware and the ssids it detects. This isn't an in
website feature, so normal content blocking doesn't help, it will be an
application setting. Firefox and Safari both used to use this (Mozilla have
now created a competing service).

\- Google provides suspicious site screening services ("safe browsing"
advisories) to many applications, including browsers.

\- Google hosts most of the CT logs. I'm actually not 100% sure how the
mechanism works here in detail, so this may eb a red herring, but it seems to
be that browsers may periodically send a list of https sites you visited to
these log servers to audit the certs for those sites

\- Google provides free fast DNS which sends all of your DNS traffic to their
servers. This may be set by the administrator of the network you're connecting
through.

\- Google analytics is used by many non-browser applications, and also in
areas of the browser not covered by content blockers, e.g. Firefox's add-ons
settings page.

\- Many sites use Google js cdns and ajax apis for required functionality, so
a content blocker will need to set whitelists to get the site to work.

\- there are more such things, these are just examples

Facebook does none of the above.

Something like Decentraleyes will help with the cdns and a custom firewall,
hosts file, filtering proxy or things like Little Snitch can help with some of
the others but none of these are trivial.

~~~
Vinnl
In my eyes the CDN was the hard thing among those, as I'm not sure how many of
them Decentraleyes manages to replace. Most of the others, though, are either
blocked/not used for me, or used because I feel there are benefits (i.e. not
through social pressure), namely the safe browsing advisories.

------
marban
As someone who's been working with RSS aggregation since its inception I can
say that even if there's a steep decline from a trend perspective, the support
from almost any major site is still alive and kicking. For those who remember
popurls 1), I've recently launched a new site at
[http://www.hvper.com](http://www.hvper.com) and 90% from it is based on pure
RSS. So long for its death.

1) [https://medium.com/hvper/popurls-goes-
hvper-2867b1b6b2bd](https://medium.com/hvper/popurls-goes-hvper-2867b1b6b2bd)

~~~
jklinger410
Thank you for chiming in here. Reading so many of these comments of people
basically talking out of their asses?

Hey guys, just because you don't think about or use RSS anymore doesn't mean
the entire platform is dead and no one uses it, haha.

Jesus the hubris in this thread is insane. I have been using RSS via Feedly
uninterrupted for 4 years and counting. No problems, haven't paid a dime,
works great.

Yes, not as popular. Apparently losing mindshare these days is akin to
actually not existing.

~~~
marban
Yeah, Google Trends has been advocated by so many Create-a-niche-site
Marketing Experts that it's become the undisputed barometer for putting a
number or value behind just about any term, including Bitcoin price
forecasting. The only times I'd use it is to decide whether I should still
wear my 80s fanny pack today.

Now let me check my Alexa ranking.

~~~
jklinger410
Alexa ranking! xD

Oh man, we can be friends.

------
gklitt
I’ve been hacking on a Twitter client that batches your tweets and lets you
consume them in a more pull-oriented daily digest format, with the ability to
customize rules for which subset of tweets get included in the digest. In my
personal usage I’ve found that this makes Twitter feel more like a manageable
RSS feed, and limits the impact on my attention because I only get updates
once a day. Is this something people would be interested in using if I
released it? Any feedback on the idea?

~~~
dannysu
It's a good idea, and I do the same.

Except I actually just have Twitter via a RSS feed. I wrote some code that
generates RSS from Twitter lists and I consume it and filter it just the same
as any other RSS feeds.

~~~
hopesthoughts
Do you plan on releasing the Twitter list RSS feed generator? It's something
I've wanted for a while.

------
xahrepap
I really feel like RSS+<something else> could've been the standards for open
social networking if the major feed readers didn't loose steam and FB and
Twitter supported it (which is probably why they don't)

I often wish for the Open-Social equivalent of email. Anyone can host it, I
can subscribe to people on different hosts. And if I don't like the way my
feed is aggregating I can choose another.

~~~
reidacdc
> I often wish for the Open-Social equivalent of email...

This is a pretty good description of the Mastodon social-network model, there
are several nodes, and your account on one node can subscribe to accounts on
others. It's distributed in a kind of nntp-like way.

In my world, it made a pretty big splash about a year ago, but I've drifted
away from it.

------
Animats
RSS is great. Most of the major news sources, from the BBC to Fox News to NPR,
have useful RSS feeds. Technically, it works OK. Real content is out there.

But there are two big problems. First, it doesn't add ads, as others have
mentioned.

Second, it's really easy to unsubscribe. This is why so-called "newsletters"
are sent as spam emails. RSS could do the job just fine. If the recipient
really wanted the newsletter. The first time a "newsletter" sends out "NEW
OFFER BIG SALE...", the recipient clicks "unsubscribe". They're unsubscribed
then and there, will never read another item, and the sender can't do a thing
about it. The sender doesn't even know they're gone.

RSS doesn't disempower the end user. Modern web technologies are designed to
keep the user firmly under the thumb of advertisers. That's the problem with
RSS.

~~~
cJ0th
> First, it doesn't add ads, as others have mentioned.

I think this is more a problem of scale. Simple, text-based ads could work if
the audience is very specific. For instance, you could start each item with a
one or two line message by a sponsor. Ads could be purchased for a fixed
amount or even on a pay-per-click basis if the url is a referral.

This could work brilliantly on a regional level I think. For instance, a local
news paper could draw attention to a new restaurant that will open up soon, a
sale at a mom&pop store and so on...

------
strong_silent_t
I love RSS and shout-out to newsblur.com for keeping the dream alive. It is
wonderful to use a system that isn't being optimized around the needs of
advertisers.

~~~
blakesterz
newsblur! I've been happy with that as well since Google dumped Reader.

------
account0099099
I bet if someone re-wrote the specification using JSON or YAML, everyone would
start using it again.

~~~
mceoin
I suspect you might be right.

Personally, I think the main reason RSS failed to get bigger adoption was a UX
problem. Clicking on RSS and getting a page of code is just too confronting
for most people. Thus it never managed to get the same adoption as other
republishing buttons like Pin, Like or Share.

~~~
kazinator
The main problem with RSS is that it is simply not _discoverable_.

The related UX problem is that major browsers didn't have a built-in reader,
so there is nothing with which to discover RSS.

To use RSS, you have to get some add-on like Brief for FireFox, or third-party
app for Android. Or else use some website like Google Reader (I think that's
dead now?).

Before you do that, in the first place, you have to know what the heck RSS is,
and what are the benefits: why should you be installing this additional stuff
for interacting with some hidden aspect of the web.

Browsers need to make it discoverable by alerting users, like by bringing up a
bubble: _" Hey, user! This web page's updating listings are available in a
condensed RSS feed [learn more.] You can register the feed into my built-in
feed reader, and then not only browse the items conveniently, but be alerted
of new ones, search through the items, and delete ones you don't want."_*

When we were recently looking, on Craigslist, for a bunch of different types
of items simultaneously, I showed my wife RSS. From the beginning: how it is
the condensed version of a web-site, and how you need a program to deal with
it (went through an installation of Brief on Firefox). Then how you add feeds
to the reader, and go look at them through the Brief toolbar button, etc. Then
configuration: explaining how Brief just surfs the RSS periodically the same
way that a human being refreshes a web page, and that the frequency can be
configured, as well as how long the items are stored.

So after that she was using it daily, no problem, and mostly liking the
convenience of just checking the feeds for what has dripped in, and being able
to erase the duds, as if it were an e-mail inbox.

~~~
ece
Profiles on FB and Twitter are decidedly less discoverable than blogs and
potential RSS feeds. I can subscribe in one click from Firefox, same from
Chrome with an official add-on. I won't need to come back to the original site
unless I absolutely want to.

I think the problem is in monetization, that's why FB and Twitter stopped
offering them, and Google killed GReader too. It's not a coincidence that
Twitter is having trouble monetizing, when it's the new way to get news. As a
publisher and as a reader RSS makes perfect sense, but how do you build a
generic infrastructure in between the two as a utility? This is essentially
the question.

~~~
kazinator
Yes; sites don't want you to know about RSS because it's a way to bypass their
portals to just get to the goods.

I suspect that most sites that have RSS feeds don't expose them
_intentionally_. They just used some framework which automatically creates it.
If they knew, they'd put an end to it. "What, someone can grab a list of our
items without seeing the main page at all? Turn that shit off!"

Even though the items do contain links that beckon the user to that site, it
still minimizes their interaction.

~~~
ece
No, it helps discover-ability, and makes me more likely to come back when
instead I might not bother. Marketers and someone wanting people to read their
content would know the value of RSS.

Even if you're ad-supported, I'm more likely to visit you if you have an RSS
feed. Not to mention any non-profit or academic website could let people
follow new developments easier.

------
Deimorz
Haven't seen it mentioned in here yet, but I've recently started using
Inoreader ([https://www.inoreader.com/](https://www.inoreader.com/)) as my RSS
reader and am quite happy with it so far. I haven't tinkered with it very
deeply yet, but it seems to have a lot of great features for organizing feeds,
viewing in different formats, and so on.

~~~
fern12
I love RSS, and have been using Inoreader since Google Reader's demise. Well
worth the $15 annual subscription fee.

------
mmanfrin
Google will never recover in my eyes for the shuttering of Reader, which was
an attempt to move people to G+.

------
oeuviz
Huge fan of feedly.com here. I would for sure reduce my consumption of web
news in favor of print if it wasn't for feedly. Just helps me organise and
read content so it is usable for my own purposes.

~~~
marojejian
Second. I am super cheap - but i actually pay them now, so I can get "mute
filters." Want to live in a world where no one mentions Trump or chatbots? I
do :D

This lets me focus in on my 1000s of other feeds, which have something
interesting and valuable to say.

------
briandoll
Been really enjoying using Feedbin
([https://feedbin.com/](https://feedbin.com/)) to keep a curated list of
things I actually want to read, but often miss via Twitter or even Facebook.

------
doctornemo
Hear hear! I've been arguing this for several years now, most recently:
[https://bryanalexander.org/2017/07/07/i-defy-the-world-
and-g...](https://bryanalexander.org/2017/07/07/i-defy-the-world-and-go-back-
to-rss/) . Facebook's algo is deeply messed up.

------
zapperdapper
When we talk about RSS I hope we are including Atom in that too!

After Google Reader went "tits up" I switched to Inoreader (a web-based
reader). Still using it quite happily.

Yes, the case of the disappearing feeds is something I wrote about recently -
I believe it's all part of a plot to control the web...

[https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/woeful-
web.html](https://coffeeandcode.neocities.org/woeful-web.html)

------
indescions_2017
There was a brief "Golden Age". I want to say around 2005 or so. When you had
a proliferation of MP3 music blogs such as "Hype Machine". All with
distinctive curatorial voices and great taste. And all distributing their MP3s
using RSS. Just the music. No ads, filler or other detritus.

And you could write your own little client program in like 100 lines of C#.
That would aggregate all the various feeds. And download just the MP3 files
overnight. Providing you with a tasty gigabyte-sized bouquet of rare bootlegs,
unreleased demos, forgotten imports, and much more every morning.

Spotify playlists have supplanted that particular use case. But the design
favors promotion. Pushing overlooked talent to the fore. And bubbling up gems
that may have been subsumed in the volume of noise.

To find rarities, such as this classic R.E.M. set from the Paradise Theater in
Boston, Summer '83 (where they opened for The Replacements). You have to
stumble on it via Youtube. Or find a friend with an actual collection of old
vinyl ;)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kok2fGjIUWI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kok2fGjIUWI)

~~~
smcnally
Hype Machine is still around & active. [http://hypem.com](http://hypem.com)

------
hopesthoughts
I love RSS! I'm between readers right now though. The one I'm using only loads
a few feed items at a time so it's annoying. If someone can recommend a reader
that presents feeds as a list of links, and has a bookmarklet I can use for
subscriptions, I'd greatly appreciate it! Keep in mind that I'm using a screen
reader. Lol it doesn't have to validate perfectly though.

------
CharlesW
> "For several years now, the trend among geeks has been to abandon the RSS
> format."

I wish he would've named even a handful of examples that prove the point. Even
Medium offers RSS feeds for users, publications, and tags.

And also, RSS is also at the center of the enormous and growing medium of
podcasting, which nearly a _quarter_ of Americans enjoy every month.

------
extide
I make heavy use of RS -- I use TT-RSS as a reader and subscribe to lots of
feeds. I pretty much use it as a 'starting point' for most of my news
gathering. Even if RSS seems to be dieing off, pretty much all major news
sites and CMS systems still have RSS built in so it is not dead yet..

------
LaSombra
I still use RSS. After Google News was discontinued I moved to NewsBlur,
[https://newsblur.com](https://newsblur.com), and never looked back.

RSS is the one way I keep track of the things I want and the speed I can
follow, differently from Twitter.

------
627467
I've kept my subscription list in Feedly, which I open every now and again. I
like the highlights it selects for me.

At peak Google Reader I suffered from "inbox zero" syndrome and recall zapping
through hundreds of posts a day (being full time student in dorms help with
having free time). But something rss, email and social media have thought me
is that you'll never see it all. So I never pay much attention to the vast
majority of the dress I subscribe to.

I certainly look forward to more decentralized systems like rss in the future.

------
strict9
It's a good case! Though I don't use dedicated readers as I used to, it's a
great format and important part of the open web.

I still hold on to customizable aggregator protopage.com, though I wish
iGoogle hadn't gone away. Also regularly check the fixed-selection aggregators
like alltop and popurls, though the latter seems to have been abandoned.

Posts like this encouraging desktop clients are fine, but where is the slickly
designed web client for RSS feeds? Until I find it, I'll stick with protopage.

~~~
hughw
Is Feedly slick? I like it

~~~
strict9
Turns out I had an account with a bunch of follows from years ago. Thanks for
the reminder!

------
krylon
Is RSS/Atom sufficiently unpopular that it need somebody stepping up and
making a case for it?

If so, that makes me sad, I rather like it. I am currently on my fourth
iteration of building an RSS reader with a web UI, using a Bayes network to
distinguish between interesting and boring articles. It is not very
sophisticated, but it works well enough in filtering out the items I do not
want to see.

Needless to say, this thing relies on RSS to fetch news items. Kind of what it
was made for, as far as I could gather.

------
robgibbons
I for one built my own RSS reader which I serve locally with NodeJS. I update
the sources every minute and keep them in a MongoDB collection. I even added a
Mercury API integration so if I like a summary, I can click a link and read
the whole article in-line (formatted consistently, and just how I want it --
no ads)

[https://mercury.postlight.com/web-parser/](https://mercury.postlight.com/web-
parser/)

------
nreece
Contrary to trends & general opinion, RSS usage for content aggregation &
monitoring is on an increase, specially in the business world and niche
industries.

I'm speaking from our own experience running a little startup, Feedity -
[https://feedity.com](https://feedity.com), that helps create custom RSS feeds
for any webpage.

------
jasonkostempski
The biggest case for me is no rescanning over things I've already seen. Also,
filtering things I know I'll never want to read (anything from certain domains
and some keywords) removes a ton of cruft, even when subscribed to otherwise
high-volume feeds.

Edit: Another big win, not needing yet another account to be tracked and
targeted through just to get at a feed. Best example being YouTube.

------
DonHopkins
Who remembers the time before they'd hammered out the rules for escaping html
in RSS item title elements, and all the cool kids were syndicating each
other's feeds on their blogs, then some chucklehead posted an item whose
rhetorical title was "What happens when you put &lt;blink&gt; in the title?"
and the whole blogosphere started blinking?

------
eitland
What I'm hoping to get time for to help out here is starting to write on my
dumb blog again and have full RSS.

I never earned anything from ads anyway (can't remember if I even activated
them).

Anyone else would like to try?

As long as it isn't about "building an audience" and monetizing we could have
blogrolls, links to post by other programmers and forget all about SEO
nofollow etc etc.

------
luxpir
Newsbeuter user here... usage dipped in the last year but have been looking to
get back into the habit. Nice CLI speed and efficiency!

------
lj3
Does anybody here know of a good native RSS program for Windows, Linux and/or
Android? All of the ones I've tried are buggy or ugly or just unfriendly to
use. My Reeder envy has gotten so bad, I've been running Reeder in a VMWare
instance.

~~~
sassenach
On Android I am using Flym, though it doesn't seem to get old entries upon
subscription. It is built on the sparse rss app, it is GPLv3 and it has a
newer relative spaRSS
[https://github.com/Etuldan/spaRSS](https://github.com/Etuldan/spaRSS) which
is more recently maintained.

~~~
lj3
Thanks for bringing that to my attention! spaRSS is a decent contender. It's
pretty, fast and it looks like it does what it should. One small wrinkle: it
doesn't seem capable of importing opml files on newer android devices. A bug
was filed 2 years ago, but it was closed without being fixed.

------
calmchaos
Filter the articles based on the rules you define:
[https://nodetics.com/feedbro/](https://nodetics.com/feedbro/)

------
pgnas
It works. Very tiring to have stuff that is rock solid exchanged for junk.
Move on, find something else to go after.. there is so much that is just
mediocre

------
luord
I use theoldreader myself, and have very little reason to stop checking my RSS
feeds.

------
nicksergeant
If you’re looking for an RSS reader that does away with unread counts, check
out [https://siftie.com](https://siftie.com)

------
pgnas
It works.

------
featherverse
RSS is as important as E-mail.

Sure today people are mostly focused on corporate run social media like
Twitter or Facebook but nobody really likes them. Everyone is constantly
bitching about their practices. And you can't really make money on Social
Media, which means corporate run social media is going to die some day, when
they all realize there's no cash in that expensive cluster of cows.

RSS is free, and everyone can use it, no matter what blogging software you
use. Operating your own blog gives you more control over content and
presentation, as well as smaller details such as how your commenting system
works. It's the superior choice.

It's free. That's important. Nobody controls RSS. Anyone can write an RSS
reader. Anyone can write a blog app that publishes RSS. This ensures it will
be around to survive the rise and fall of social software trends. When the
smoke clears and people emerge from the rubble of the corporate landscape, RSS
will be there, welcoming them home.

footnote: I saw this article in my "Hacker News" RSS feed.

------
ptc
Yeah VSS can be quite misleading, =p

