Hacker News is a popular social site on the Internet today. It focuses on technology and development for the most part, but you’ll also find other topics of interest posted on the site. Site users can vote for items posted on the site to increase their visibility on the site.
While most users probably access Hacker News directly in web browsers, some may prefer to use RSS. The site supports RSS, but not like Reddit supports RSS. You can subscribe to the main RSS feed using the site’s own infrastructure, but customizations are not supported natively. There is an open source project, however, that allows you to subscribe to various Hacker News RSS feeds to pull items of interest into your RSS feed reader automatically.
RSS does not require an account, but there is no explanation on the site about how to subscribe to Hacker News RSS feeds. The following paragraphs provide you with the missing information.
You can subscribe to the main Hacker News feed, but also to specific keywords or users that interest you. Is that how it works.
Hacker News RSS Feeds
If you only want to receive the top news, you can subscribe at https://news.ycombinator.com/rss. Just add the URL to your feed reader and you’re good to go.
The open source project hnrss provides you with custom RSS feeds for Hacker News. Here is a list of sample RSS feeds you can subscribe to:
- Latest Hacker News Posts: https://hnrss.org/newest
- Latest Hacker News Comments: https://hnrss.org/newcomments
- RSS feed of the best comments on Hacker News: https://hnrss.org/bestcomments
- Keyword-based RSS feeds on Hacker News (headline search only): https://hnrss.org/newest?q=KEYWORD1+OR+KEYWORD2
- RSS feeds for posts with X-number of points and/or X-number of comments: https://hnrss.org/show?points=100&comments=25
- Show HN RSS feed: https://hnrss.org/show
- RSS feeds for the most active posts with ongoing discussion: https://hnrss.org/active
- Hacker News Jobs Feed: https://hnrss.org/jobs
- Posts by a specific user: https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=USERNAME
- Comments from a specific user: https://hnrss.org/threads?id=USERNAME
- All for a specific user: https://hnrss.org/user?id=USERNAME
You can use the examples above to create custom RSS feeds for Hacker News. Here are some real world examples:
- https://hnrss.org/newest?q=Mozilla – Returns newest posts about Mozilla.
- https://hnrss.org/newest?q=Windows11 — Returns newest posts about Windows11
- https://hnrss.org/show?points=500 – Returns all posts that reach 500 points on the site.
The ability to retrieve custom RSS feeds is great as it filters out noise in the main Hacker News feed or site.
Now you: Do you use custom RSS feeds for sites you regularly visit or monitor?
Summary
Article name
How to subscribe to Hacker News custom RSS feeds
Description
Learn how to subscribe to custom Hacker News RSS feeds to read filtered posts in the RSS reader of your choice.
Author
Martin Brinkman
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Tech News Ghacks
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