Aggregating these frees me to forget about them in the rest of my life. When I scroll to the end of the timeline it actually stops, with no distractions; I reach “the end of the internet” every day.
Not OP, but I find Inoreader quite good for that. It not only handles RSS but also will monitor "normal" webpages, forming pseudo-RSS, and will also monitor Facebook pages and other alerts.
If you find yourself saying “Pretty much the only way to …”, it might be time to start questioning the morality of the continuation.
(Unless, perhaps, we want to discuss systemic behavior, incentives, and adjustments — ie Hacker News as a system and how to improve it and so on — , but to do that without casting doubt on one’s intentions, it has to be done in a way that does not appear to justify questionable actions.)
P.S. All of this coming from someone who you should not put on a pedestal, BTW. Do what I aspire to, not what I do.
It's a self-endorsement without any contribution towards the discuss topic. I didn't want to flag the poster as they seem new, but this was explicitly against the community guidelines.
Imagine if everyone that had a blog, newsletter, rss reader, news aggregator site, or AI tool did this. What would that do for community and conversation? It would be miserable, we'd call it all spam.
Instead, I'd suggest making a root-level comment talking about the OP discussion and including their tool as part of their answer, as others have done. If they don't get visibility, so be it - that's how voting works.
Seems highly random. Why would the Indian Premier Cricket League and Indy 500 be featured? These are national news which only a few people care about outside the respective countries.
Could be because the Indian Premier Cricket League (IPL), which started in 2008, is huge now. Here's the per match broadcast value of sports leagues around the world (Jun 2023):
I actually found Hacker News through https://brutalist.report/ . Nice conglomeration of headlines/links from lots of different sources. Lots of tech and science, but also a good mix of global news.
Thanks for sharing this. I've got their point about keeping the website as simple as possible using HTML, CSS and no JS, but hey, why not make an exception around UI theming? I'd love to see it in a sepia background color and serif types. That black BG with a blue sans type is doing evil to my retina.
Thanks a lot for sharing this, I've been procrastinating doing an aggregated news feed with the simplest html possible for years and seeing this live just made me happy. Thank you!
Scrolling through that pudding site, right away I notice the tell tale sign of midwit misconception.
- a story makes claims about women in the news, without any controls or comparison to men (i.e. it's useless)
- a story presents one of those toy economic models about random trades between people, not realizing they are complete nonsense with zero predictive power
This is just what I notice on a first visit. It's extremely well produced nonsense.
I really wish more blogs took on this creative approach. it's hard but such an excellent presentation style. IMO it's the best form of sharing information online
I built my own RSS feed reader web app. The difference is that it proxies the HTML of the article page, transforms it (e.g. removes advertising, adds custom styling/scripts) so that I can view the original article but with modifications to the website. I have other features like headline filters and the ability to load non-feed pages like the NYTimes home page as a feed item.
The feeds themselves are mostly random subreddits, Hypebeast, some NYTimes sections, etc.
It works a lot better than manually going to each website and browsing around looking for new content.
Yeah, I use my own opinionated feed reader, too. I’ve also structured it so that others can use it, too. lenns.io - the top feature for me is setting different priorities per source or category.
They take a headline and present an article from different 3 news sources. The 3 sources will include left leaning, right leaning and more neutral new organizations so you get a perspective from all sides.
they aren't curated from one source, they are curated by one source. This site curates from various left, right, and center leaning news sources so you can get a fuller picture.
They actually survey their subscribers/readers regularly to compile and/or update a consensus of where the various news organizations they use should be placed on their left/right/center classifications.
Given time and interest, an honest search for knowledge is preferable to reading a set
number of ideologically-rooted viewpoints.
However, given a lifetime of experience, many people have political philosophies. Right or wrong ([1]), they aren’t wanting to be challenged on any meaningful level with most articles they read.
My take is that probably only something on the order of 1% of Americans are using substantial critical thinking when reading news.
I don’t want to sound like I’m just complaining, so I’ll offer this actionable hypothesis. We are expecting too much of people given their stretched attention spans and carnivorous media habits. When I say “expecting too much”, I’m saying that it is statistically impossible for more than a rarefied subset of people to engage in a meaningful way under such conditions.
If we want some sort of Athenian town hall discussions, we would have to change the rules and context of discussion. Allowing people to bounce around cyberspace, commenting with about as much thought as birds put into mid-flight pooping is just not going to give satisfactory results.
Notes:
1. Wrong! … I’d say a vast majority of people are wrong to think their underlying philosophies about politics or human psychology are good enough as is. They are “good enough” for a token level of understanding and tribal echo chamber discussion.
If I could be benevolent version of Rupert Murdoch for a day, and hoped to educate an audience, I would still struggle to find effective ways to succeed at engaging the audience for any meaningful kind of ‘educational’ content. Heck, as much as I like comedic style news stories (a la John Oliver) they aren’t really showing how to do critical thinking. They are still largely emotionally driven, non-scholarly looks at current events. While I happen to agree with many of Oliver’s calls to action, his rhetoric vastly overshadows his analysis.
It's not quite the same, but The Week is a magazine (available online too) which summarises news stories using the perspectives of many different media outlets. It's about as broadminded and objective as you can get, I think.
Marginalrevolution is a good blog, covering current affairs, economics, finance and technology issues. One of the posters, Tyler Cowen, is great at aggregating and summarising information and it’s a combination of links and quite short thought pieces that get posted daily.
Matt Levine writes a great daily newsletter, Money Stuff. Often there is a topic in finance that I don’t really understand - recent examples are GameStop, FTX, Silicon Valley bank. He summarises the issue in a very clear but also funny and engaging way. You can sign up to the newsletter for free.
FWIW, like many others here I rolled my own RSS reader; but mostly to REMOVE features, not to add them.
Namely, I think one of the worst "features" in RSS readers is "tracking whether or not you've read every single little thing with numbers," so I wrote mine to just leave all that out and give me the top 20 or so of the day. If I miss anything, SO WHAT.
Run by the tireless Tara Calishain. Covers the world of search engines, archives, social media, online information collections, and other interesting stuff. She's been running the site 1998. Not many sites like this around much these days.
Hey,thanks very much. I was wondering where all that traffic was coming from.
For those of you who are more interested in very specific information, there's also ResearchBuzz Firehose, which indexes individual items so you can do tag- and query-monitoring without trouble. Here's an article on how to make the most of it:
https://researchbuzz.me/2015/06/23/introducing-the-researchb...
It's wonderful to see people getting into RSS and news feeds again. I have a site called RSSGizmos.com with a number of tools for making the most of RSS, including a keyword-based RSS feed generator and a tool to make RSS feeds using Bing News' loc: syntax.
Everything's free and there are no ads.
Thank you again, it was so kind of you to mention my site.
Hahaha. No probs Tara. I've been a long term reader of your site for probably a decade or so, and i've found loads of useful/ interesting stuff over the years because of it. I honestly don't know how you keep up with all the things you post about (do you ever sleep:-). Hope you and the family are well and keep up the good work;-)
If any HN readers are into RSS, monitoring topics/keywords and finding obscure stuff online I recommend checking out her tools/guides. She has some pretty creative stuff on there which are usually free to use/implement.
I don't think it counts as a news feed but I do enjoy browsing the hackaday.com. It's a bit hit and miss on the content but sometimes there are quite interesting projects on there.
I adore hackaday, but it makes me immensely sad that I'm not working more on homebrew robotics / hardware stuff. I've been working in robotics for almost 15 years and could probably put out some nice kits / tutorials if I took the time.
Specifically for Australian tech nerds, The Sizzle (https://thesizzle.com.au) is fantastic. It's the only source of tech news that has a real Aussie feel to it, and that discusses Australian tech news as well as that on a global level.
Understandable yes, but it has reached the point of unnecessary dog piling. Ars also stokes the flames by featuring as many Elon headlines as possible, and they aren't particularly objective.
I probably lack some worthwhile cultural hinterland due to HN's liberal but sciencey remit. Arts & Letters Daily would be a good addition.
But there's nothing that really feels of comparable value for me personally and I've tried many of the options that are suggested here and have been before in these kinds of threads.
I was going to add Arts & Letters Daily to my other comment as another mention. A&L Daily is an interesting feed but I have to admit I don't read it as often as something like HN and haven't kept track of it in awhile. It doesn't have the "current news" character of something like HN and is a bit hit or miss in terms material feeling compelling enough to read thoroughly, at least for me personally.
At the same time, A&L Daily curates a certain type of content that I haven't seen targeted anywhere else in a feed/aggregation. There's a certain amount of overlap with HN, but it's kind of complementary. I wish there was something like A&L Daily that was updated more often, with more material, but maybe it's just not out there.
FreshRSS is brilliant. Its ability to fetch full pages, filter CSS elements and utilise session cookies from my browser make it very easy to get a full-text article from most websites I'm interested in. If you're able to spend a little time fine-tuning after you set it up, it can be a very rewarding installation.
For general world news&commentary I've chosen Axios and The Conversation. For the quick&dirty pulse check on tech/science trends or rumors - Futurism and Futurity.
I've read The Code Project Insider for at least ten years, possibly quite a few more. It is similar to HN, sometimes but not always sourcing articles from it, with a bit of a .NET focus. It's a really good way to keep up with the industry, mailed out for free daily. You can see the current edition online at https://www.codeproject.com/script/Mailouts/View.aspx?mlid=1...
I have created a feed aggregator at https://techblogz.onrender.com (also at http://techblogz.co, sorry, got to fix it to https). It's a collection of engineering blogs specifically from tech companies (updated daily). At some point in the past, I wanted to search for a specific technical term (like Kubernetes) across all those blogs to understand how that technology is being used at various companies. But I found it a pain to do this search since you have to search for that term in each blog one by one. So to solve the problem, I created this. It is also helpful for tech interview preparation. I would love for you guys to try it out and provide some feedback.
Most surprisingly, this is an entirely static page and has no dependencies. You could download the HTML file and it would still fetch the news feeds and weather! No tracking!
Is there any AMA or other article where @dang or other mods discuss what it takes to keep this site/community the way it is? Wondering if it could be a template for others but curious how to sausage is made.
Unfortunately I don't since I got heavily downvoted for posting a Crypto Tutorial I made. It wasn't scam or anything, just a func little tutorial on how to create your own crypto coin.
I forgot about slashdot.org because for a while all the frontpage links were found on HN in a nicer format. Lately however, they have had complementary content, which is nice.
I still really appreciate their moderation system. It ain't perfect but you occasionally see highly moderated opposing viewpoints which is difficult to achieve.
I built a news digest for myself after I couldn't find a good yahoo news digest alternative. It's a once a day feed of 6-10 stories. Simple and quick enough to keep myself informed.
As aggregators, just Polygon (polygon.com), The Verge (theverge.com) and Microsiervos (microsiervos.com).
When I find an interesting personal website there I add it to my Telegram RSS feed notifier (@feedzbot), which notifies me twice a day with their new posts. At this point I have 50+ feeds there so the feed is pretty long.
Ashamed to say still Slashdot, have it in my RSS, old habits die hard. Otherwise various reddit subs since people are quick to post breaking news in whatever field I'm interested in. Then a bunch of newspapers/sources from around the world to try and get a balanced overview of things.
I kept going for way too long before shifting to hn. The comments on slashdot were so adversarial that whatever you post expect to be called an idiot. Plus having to scroll past the ASCII art swastika every day got to me and I wouldn't want my wife looking over my shoulder.
these were mini but to be honest i stopped reading them after i found hacker news. memeorandum became addictive for me because i could go there any minute of the day and see new and depressing doom and gloom, but it only ever feels reflective of the last 24 hours of the news cycle. i'd love a memeorandum that was only published weekly or even monthly.
I highly recommend the https://dailytechnewsshow.com/ podcast by Tom Merritt which usually runs 30 minutes episodes, or their 5 minute Daily Tech Headlines version.
I mean, I like it. Allsides.com's "side" identification are decided by viewers, so I'm at the mercy of the majority's observational skills. Luckily, they show a viewer more than just the one "left", "right" and "center" outlet's coverage, so if I disagree with one topic's assessment on which outlet should be the spokesperson for which end of the spectrum, I can look for whatever outlet in that topic I think would be better suited for the role.
Allsides.com does not fix the eternal vigilance needed for news cycles in our modern age, but it does make it easier.
It's not quite the same when you don't attribute clearly. Clicking reader may have the same end result, but it leaves no doubt as to where the information comes from.
Another way of getting news is an old fashioned newspaper. Being able to leaf through it lets you see headlines and quickly scan an article to see if it's interesting compared to clicking around on the web. I actually find it a fairly nice way to see lots of different things.
There are many things in the newspaper that are interesting to read that I likely wouldn't have clicked on if I saw the title in some news feed.
I ran a forum that pinned a link collection. They need maintenance and they’re not always things that everyone agrees on. Sporadic threads where everyone posts are a lot easier to interpret and don’t require maintenance.
Possibly not what you're asking since it's nothing like HN, but the other two sites I constantly check for news are theguardian.com and spiegel.de (because I'm German).
Quite hilarious when I read about some Elon Musk drama or similar in the main stream news before it shows up on HN - usually stories I end up finding in both turn up on HN first.
That's all I read - no social media or anything, too much noise, costs too much time. I'm just trying to keep an eye on what's going on in my country, the world and my field. Used to read Slashdot and others for the latter, but lately I noticed HN has pretty much everything I find relevant (and the odd delightful oddity, my favourites).
- https://www.to-rss.xyz/wikipedia/ (1/day)
Local:
- https://publicola.com (20/month)
- https://washingtonstatewire.com (1/month)
- https://southseattleemerald.com/category/news/ (20/month)
- https://www.seattlebikeblog.com (20/month)
- https://seattletransitblog.com (10/month)
- https://wasmoke.blogspot.com (2/month)
- https://washingtonbeerblog.com (1/day)
Tech:
- https://weeklyosm.eu (1/week)
- https://this-week-in-rust.org (1/week)
- https://matrix.org/blog/category/this-week-in-matrix (1/week)
- https://discourse.nixos.org/top (5/day)
Plus about 100 personal blogs (3/day) and update feeds of e.g. software releases, OSM activity in my neighborhood, etc. (6/day).