

Ask HN: why are there no dates in the HN RSS feed? - lkrubner

I use Planet to aggregate all the RSS feeds that I want to read:<p>http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.planetplanet.org&#x2F;<p>But the Hacker News RSS feed has no date or pubDate, or any other kind of timestamp suggesting when the item went live:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;rss<p>Because of this, Planet glumps all the HN stuff at the top of my RSS feed. I&#x27;d like for the material to show up chronologically, like all of the other items in my feed.<p>Why does HN RSS not support any kind of date?
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ricardobeat
HN's RSS "feed" is actually just the home page formatted as XML. It shows
posts sorted by votes, and that is constantly changing. If it displayed posts
by date, you'd have an endless stream of content that never got to the front
page.

A smarter implementation would keep a tally on past items to avoid duplicates,
and emit a new item (with a pubDate) when it reaches the front page.

