How to use the Hacker News RSS feed, plus a daily satire break

The Hacker News RSS feed lives at news.ycombinator.com/rss, and any feed reader can subscribe to it to follow the front page without opening the site. Pair it with one lighter daily read, TechTwitter IO, a free satirical paper of tech Twitter, and you have the serious feed and the funny one covered.

This guide shows how to set up the feed, what each item contains, the other official ways to follow Hacker News, and how to add a satire break to the routine.

Step 1: subscribe to the front page feed

Copy https://news.ycombinator.com/rss into your feed reader's add box. The channel is titled Hacker News and describes itself as links for the intellectually curious, ranked by readers.

Each item carries four useful fields:

Because the main link goes to the source, the feed is good for reading articles. If the discussion is what you are after, use the comments link in each item.

Step 2: decide what you actually want to track

The front page feed reflects whatever is ranking at the moment you refresh. The Hacker News FAQ says ranking divides points by a power of the time since posting, with flags, anti-abuse software and moderators also moving things, so stories come and go fast. A few ways to narrow it down:

• Only the best stories. The best page, titled Top Links, collects highly voted posts. Check it once a day instead of watching every refresh.
• A topic or a company name. The search box at the bottom of every page goes to Hacker News Search powered by Algolia. Search the term you care about rather than scanning the feed.
• Something custom. The API link in the footer points to the official Hacker News API on GitHub, for people who want to build their own alerts.

Step 3: watch the threads that matter to you

If you want to know when a thread about your product or project appears, a feed alone is a blunt tool. Search for the name regularly, or use a monitoring tool that checks a search results page for changes. Keep in mind the FAQ says threads close to new comments after two weeks, so most of the activity on a story happens early.

For the monthly "Who Is Hiring?" thread, the FAQ says it appears on the first weekday of each month, so a calendar reminder works as well as a feed.

Step 4: add a lighter read

A feed full of serious links is useful and also tiring. TechTwitter IO fills the other slot. It is laid out as a daily newspaper with sections like The Timeline, Launches, Markets and Incident Report, and a Fun & Games page with puzzles such as Connections and Jumble.

TechTwitter IO does not show an RSS feed. Instead, you can sign in with Google or X to get a ping when a new edition drops, or skip that and just open today's paper when you want it. Every back issue sits in its archive, The Morgue.

Keep the roles clear. TechTwitter IO is satire: its footer says that unless a post links to its source, the people, posts and quotes are parody or invented. For anything you plan to act on, the Hacker News feed and the original articles it links are the place to go.

Summary

Subscribe to news.ycombinator.com/rss for the front page, use Top Links and search to cut the noise, and turn to the API only if you need custom alerts. Then let TechTwitter IO be the daily laugh at the end of the list.