Ask HN: Who do you follow via RSS feed?
Posted by znpy 2 days ago
Hello there!
I just set up TinyTinyRSS (https://tt-rss.org/) at home and I'm looking into interesting things to read as well as people/website publishing interesting stuff.
This, among the other things, to reduce the daily (doom)scrolling and avoid the recommendation algorithms by social media.
So: who or what do you follow via RSS feed, and why?
Comments
Comment by sien 2 days ago
I follow things that post maybe once or twice a week or once a month. For things with new information every day, like Hacker News, I check the website.
A few of the things that I follow that may be a bit different for people are :
Arnold Kling - a PhD economist who worked in technology and is genuinely different.
https://arnoldkling.substack.com/
Noah Smith - a PhD economist who writes about economics and the world
Roger Pielke Jnr - a guy with a PhD who writes about climate and energy and was excommunicated by the climate priesthood.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/
Andrew Sullivan - a conservative, gay, HIV positive, Catholic writer who campaigned for gay marriage.
Comment by swah 1 day ago
Comment by cagey 1 day ago
Probably > 80% of my RSS feeds are Youtube channels.
Comment by brianmz 2 days ago
https://techtalksweekly.io/ - new software dev conference talks and podcasts
https://ciechanow.ski/ - interactive articles about science and engineering
https://jvns.ca/ - great technical content overall
This is a great thread btw.
Comment by browningstreet 2 days ago
Comment by abnercoimbre 2 days ago
P.S. Even HN is something you should personally control. It's very useful whenever moderators flag a submission you might've liked.
Comment by Mixtape 2 days ago
These usually sit in the corner of my screen through the day. Some are better than others for work purposes. The Verge could probably go, and 404 is a bit more socially-focused than the rest. In particular though, having rapid updates from BleepingComputer and El Reg is a great way for me to learn about new vulns, issues that might affect my users, etc.
Comment by swah 1 day ago
Around 20 subreddits, 10 youtube channels and 10 blogs...
Comment by dcminter 2 days ago
https://scrollprize.org/ - The Vesuvius Challenge: Using high intensity X-ray scans and computation to attempt to retrieve lost scrolls from Pompei; real uplifting Sci-Fi stuff! Possibly the most heartwarming thing I know of on the internet; snatching ancient knowledge from the flames of history! What could be more poetic?
https://www.science.org/blogs/pipeline - In the Pipeline: The blog of Derek Lowe (pharmaceutical chemist), (in)famous for articles like "Sand Won't Save You This Time" Always interesting, though a lot of the chemistry goes way way over my head. Some political stuff lately, unavoidably given the current secretary of health.
https://blog.dshr.org/ - David Rostenthal: Digital preservationist.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com - Jeff Geerling: Raspberry Pi, Arm, digital radio, and other nerdery. I enjoy his videos, but I love that he does a plaintext version (first?) that's not just a transcript.
https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/ - Rob Pike: Programming luminary (Go, UTF-8, Unix, etc.)
https://fasterthanli.me - Faster than Lime: Amos's blog leaning heavily towards Rust. I'm a beginner in Rust, but I love this guy's style of writing even when the stuff he's writing about is beyond my current skill level.
Anyway, those are my go-tos at the moment. I look forward to trying a bunch of the others recommended here. Oh and I currently use Feeder under Android as my RSS reader; it's unexciting, which is what I look for in an app these days :D
A last recommendation - as part of trying to avoid doom-scrolling, I have a paper subscription to The Economist and I'm trying to train myself to read that instead of going to news sites. The lack of immediacy helps keep the emotional reaction in check (it's not as addictive of course).
Comment by nelsonfigueroa 2 days ago
https://www.writesoftwarewell.com/ - very good software posts, mostly around Ruby on Rails.
https://crankysec.com/ - Cybersecurity rants mostly, fun to read.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/ - Ed Zitron's writings. Good counterpoints to all the AI hype these days.
These come up often on HN but I'll call them out anyway:
https://jvns.ca/ - Julia Evans, good technical content all around.
https://xeiaso.net/ - Xe Iaso, good technical content all around once again
Comment by thefz 2 days ago
Raymond Chen https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/author/oldnewthin...
Cory Doctorow https://pluralistic.net/feed/
Comment by binsquare 17 hours ago
Comment by migmaldo 2 days ago
- Julia Evans - Daniel Stenberg - Geohot - Cloudflare and Netflix’s respective tech blogs - TorrentFreak - LWN.net - and some others in spanish -
Comment by embedding-shape 2 days ago
Could you share some of them? Always looking for high quality authors from the home-sphere, but finding it increasingly difficult to find anything worthwhile.
Comment by dcminter 2 days ago
Comment by topherjaynes 2 days ago
Comment by tylerhillery 2 days ago
- Anton Zhiyanov
- Register Spill by Thorsten Ball
- Phil Eaton
- Mitchell Hashimoto
- Gunnar Morling
- Jack Vanlightly
- Charity Majors
- Bryan Cantrill
- Marc Brooker
- NULL BITMAP By Justin Jaffray
Another tip is you can subscribe to YouTube Channels and Podcasts via RSS as well. I wrote a little bit about my setup to help reduce doom scrolling: https://tylerhillery.com/blog/how-i-consume-the-internet/
Comment by chistev 2 days ago
Comment by mold_aid 2 days ago
Comment by hahahahhaah 2 days ago
Comment by chriswarbo 2 days ago
I convert feeds to maildir, and read them in email clients (Thunderbird, KMail, Emacs+Gnus, Emacs+mu4e, etc.). That lets me use the same setup for emails and feeds; keeping them on a network mount makes sync trivial; etc.
I use http://www.chriswarbo.net/git/feed2maildir which is a fork of https://github.com/sulami/feed2maildir that rips out a bunch of unneeded complexity (config files, databases, fetching, looping, etc.)
Comment by steanne 2 days ago
Comment by happytoexplain 2 days ago
Comment by unindented 2 days ago
(It’s my OPML file translated to HTML via Hugo.)
As to why, they generally post original and insightful stuff on topics I care about, like web dev, security, Ruby, Rust, etc.
Comment by rcarmo 2 days ago
Comment by brynet 2 days ago
Comment by mainmeister 2 days ago
Comment by shantara 2 days ago
Comment by susam 2 days ago
The web browsers don't highlight the feed URL information embedded in the HTML anymore, quite unfortunately. But if you go to a YouTube video, say, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kaIXkImCAM> and then view or inspect the HTML source, you can find the LINK tag for the feed:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TNs2ohrc6hnRQ5Sn2w">
So the feed URL in this case is: <https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCi8C7TN...>.Comment by znpy 2 days ago
I didn't know you could follow youtube channels via RSS! Where do I find the feed link, given a youtube channel?
Comment by shantara 2 days ago
I have removed Youtube apps from all mobile devices and only watch the creators whose content I'm interested in through RSS, without notifications and distractions. It's a much more pleasant experience, definitely recommend.
Comment by nelsonfigueroa 2 days ago
Comment by susam 2 days ago
Comment by empiko 2 days ago
Comment by Brajeshwar 2 days ago
Comment by techtalksweekly 2 days ago
I'm building a newsletter (with an RSS feed available) called Tech Talks Weekly where my subscribers get one email per week with all the latest Software Engineering conference talks and podcasts.
Comment by quinncom 2 days ago
- Apricitas Economics
- Avery Pennarun
- Civic Texts
- Citation Needed
- Derek Sivers
- Die, Workwear!
- Electrospaces.net
- Ethan Mollick: One Useful Thing
- Lukasz Olejnik: Tech Letters
- Matt Kiser: What The Fuck Just Happened Today?
- Molly White: Citation Needed
- Paged Out!
- Patrick McKenzie: Bits about Money
- Peter Steinberger
- Peter Welch: Still Drinking
- Sam Rose
- Simon Willison
- Squishy Computer
- Sylvain Kerkour
- Zeynep Tufekci: NYT
Here's a OPML of these: https://s.strco.de/f/feed-20260127.opmlComment by ajdude 2 days ago
All of my YouTube and nebula channels I follow via RSS and I think that's kind of giving me the most bang for my buck. I can just get focused on the videos that I want to subscribe to without having to even go to YouTube and get pulled into the algorithm, as well as a few sub Reddits, hacker news front page (it's how I found this post), Lobste.rs, 404 Media, some local blogs (my food co-op, biking website, other community things), some web comics, one news group, and a couple forums.
I've also contemplated Podcasts, but I still have a dedicated player for that.
Comment by navigate8310 2 days ago
Matt Lakeman
Global China Pulse
Sinocism
Bartosz Ciechanowski
brr
Construction Physics
Jonathan Nolan's substack
On the Seams
Quanta Magazine
Matt Levine - Bloomberg Opinion Columnist
Aeon | a world of ideas
Classic Film and TV Café
Experimental History
The Marginalian
The Prism - Gurvinder
The Technium
Westenberg.
Chameth.com
Activity in the release-notes tag
All Things Distributed
An Untitled Blog
Charles Hugh Smith's Substack
Chips and Cheese
computers are bad
Dwarkesh Podcast
Francis Stokes :: Githublog
iRi
Rest of World - Latest Stories
Shtetl-Optimized
Signal Blog
マリウス
Comment by nickthegreek 2 days ago
Comment by blackfawn 2 days ago
Comment by sdsd 2 days ago
Comment by nhhvhy 2 days ago
Comment by qanuta 2 days ago
Lots of webcomics
NPR,BBC,CBC
Local news
...and THIS site!
Comment by znpy 2 days ago
Via RSS?
Comment by topherjaynes 2 days ago
Comment by shashasha 2 days ago