Here's another option if you want a (hopefully) well-formed and de-duped news.yc RSS feed: http://friendfeed.com/api/feed/room/newsyc?format=rss

Another fun RSS / Friendfeed hack: I use the RSS stream from searchyc to pipe my news.YC comments into my Friendfeed stream.

A couple folks mentioned I should post it here, full details here:

http://arclanguage.org/item?id=9092

And this feature request:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=92734

Just awesome. Open source at its best: wanted the fix, wrote the patch. Hopefully pg^H^Hupstream will accept it after vetting.

Where do we go to see commit messages and such? I'm trying to gauge how open the project is, and am curious about details beyond the source itself.

I mean, you don't have access to pg's version control, but he released the News.YC source as a part of Arc (http://arclanguage.org/install) with the directive "go now, and bring forth clones."

That fits my definition of open.

I'd pay someone bits of currency if they could give me an RSS feed of my "saved" links.

It'd be pretty trivial to add once the RSS feed in general is fixed (as in, maybe 5 lines of code). In some ways this patch is an experiment: if it looks like in general Paul is interested in patches I'll probably implement a few things on my wishlist. If this patch in some form doesn't go in, it's honestly not worth my effort to implement / fix things since I don't have any intention of running an arc news site myself.

Yes, I didn't realize that "saved" links aren't perpetual (only go back to 210 total - which, for me, is 41 days).

Thankfully, there is http://searchyc.com to surface old, good articles.

Can we also get the url, or at least the host, of the link in the RSS feed, as we get it on the homepage?

Instead of a patch, could we have a separate RSS feed for stories in order?

(I'm being lazy here, as the change would break the News.YC twitterbot http://twitter.com/newsycombinator)

Well, the current feed is basically invalid. It's not structured the way RSS feeds are supposed to be, and I'd consider breaking the Twitter bot better than breaking all newsreaders. I've at least tested in Mail.app and Thunderbird and I've heard the same for Google's reader. I'm a really heavy RSS user and news.yc is basically the only news site I frequent where the feed is not usable.

If I were reading via RSS that'd also open up some options for filtering with Yahoo Pipes, which I do with a lot of my RSS feeds, since I'm not particularly interested in the mainstream stories that hit news.yc (NYT, BBC, Slate, Salon, et al)

It'd be really nice if the RSS feed went to HN and not directly to the article. The RSS feed is useless to me as I have to have the HN page open anyway to get to people's comments.

Tried it once with a Yahoo Pipes mashup. The problem is that it gets an "updated" status every time somebody writes a comment which is annoying for the way I read RSS.