Astro Hacker News - NetNewsWire Turns 23

cosmic_cheese |next [-]

Hands down the best RSS reader I've used. It's fast, tiny, built extremely well, and has no flab. It sits in a certain class of application along with Alfred and a handful of others in being a standout example of craftsmanship that's reminiscent of the golden era of OS X. More apps should strive for this standard.

pavel_lishin |root |parent |next [-]

I wish it had a more accessible scripting API - I use it locally, and back up saved stories, but I have to directly hit their sqlite database to extract data out of it :/

xmok |root |parent |next |previous [-]

Speaking of Alfred, there’s also a Raycast[0] extension for NetNewsWire allowing one to combine the two[1].

Disclaimer: I authored the extension but like most Raycast extensions, it’s open-source[2].

[0]: https://raycast.com [1]: https://raycast.com/xmok/netnewswire [2]: https://github.com/raycast/extensions/tree/main/extensions/n...

tomaskafka |root |parent |previous [-]

I love it too, but I would still like some concept of folders, so that I could sort my feeds into eg. programming, design, hobbies, and then have a feed to match the mood.

dallen33 |root |parent [-]

Are you talking about NetNewsWire? There are folders, I have a bunch setup.

k2enemy |next |previous [-]

I love NNW, especially the new iteration since Brent got it back. Mac-assed software at its best.

The other day I was searching for how to turn a youtube channel into an RSS feed and tried all sorts of convoluted instructions for finding channel IDs, etc. At some point I thought this is the kind of user-centric thing that NNW has probably already thought of, and sure enough, if you just paste in a youtube channel URL as the feed, NNW sorts it out and creates a feed for you.

colesantiago |next |previous [-]

I wish more software was actually free and didn't need a subscription.

We need more software that is free, open source and comes with no subscriptions.

havaloc |next |previous [-]

I was on Google Reader, then Feedly for a long time, until the Feedly iOS client just slowly degraded and got buggy. I'm not opposed to paying for a good RSS set.

I finally switched to NetNewsWire as the front end and FreshRSS on the backend, and could not be happier. NNW being free is just the icing on the cake, it's really great, and FreshRSS was also really easy to install.

What I like about FreshRSS is that it's PHP and will install on any old shared hosting plan and uses Sqlite as the database, super easy.

geoffeg |next |previous [-]

I started out with NNW and am back on it now. After Google killed Reader I went to Feedly, then tried a few self-hosted solutions and, in the end, NNW is just the easiest solution for me since I'm in the Apple ecosystem.

sharkjacobs |next |previous [-]

NNW is like a river stone tumbled smooth and with enough weight that it feels good in your hand

pavel_lishin |next |previous [-]

I use NetNewsWire locally for some stuff, but if you're looking for a web-based RSS reader, I can also highly recommend newsblur.

isingle |next |previous [-]

This is great. I have been using NetNewsWire for over 4 years, and I love it.

arjunbajaj |next |previous [-]

A truly great piece of software! Been using it for 5+ years.

I think NetNewsWire is a great example of what software should strive for: a useful set of features, while being fast and smooth.

nntwozz |next |previous [-]

NNW is my happy place.

Every time I open the app I feel like I'm back in the era of Mac OS X Snow Leopard and Steve Jobs is about to reveal one more thing.

dewey |next |previous [-]

NNW + Miniflux is my favorite combination and I’ve been using it for many years.

eitland |root |parent |next [-]

How do you combine them?

SSLy |root |parent |previous [-]

Are you using NNW as a front-end to Miniflux?

dewey |root |parent [-]

Yea, as I bought Reeder a long time ago on iOS and got used to it. They all support Google Reader / Fever API so it all works great and I can use Miniflux web interface to read when I don’t have an app installed.

sp8 |next |previous [-]

NNW definitely restored my faith in RSS readers. Amazing software, I just use it and sync to iCloud, works flawlessly. Thank you NNW!

SSLy |next |previous [-]

Try GoodLinks if you're looking for something that looks like NNW but is a reading/bookmark manager.

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mmooss |next |previous [-]

The biggest problem with newsreaders, IME, has been managing large numbers of feeds. Most user time is spent handling redundant stories - e.g., if you have feeds from many major news sources, for each major event you get one or more stories on each feed, saying mostly the same things.

I haven't seen a newsreader solve that problem. Has anyone tried an LLM?

The best solution I know is grouping redundant stories together, possibly hierarchically: e.g., Sports > Olympics > Figure skating > Jones performance. (Fewer feeds require fewer levels, possibly just one.)

That ~ deduplicates the stories and, by displaying them together, you can compare and choose the coverage you like and delete the rest. Otherwise, IME most user time is spent sorting through redundant stories one at a time.

But as I said, I haven't seen a newsreader do that well. It seems like a good fit for LLMs. Or maybe there's another solution besides grouping?

PaulHoule |root |parent |next [-]

My YOShInOn RSS reader uses an SBERT model for classification (will I upvote this or not?) and large-scale clustering (20 k-means clusters and show me the top N in each cluster so I get a diversity of different articles.)

For duplicate detection I am using DBSCAN

https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/generated/sklearn.cl...

and found some parameters where I get almost no false positives but a lot of duplicates get missed when I lowered the threshold to make clusters I started getting false positives fast. I don't find duplicates are a big problem in my system with the 110 feeds I have and the subjects I am interested in, but insofar as they are a problem there tend to be structured relationships between articles: that is, site A syndicates articles from site B but for some reason articles from site A usually get selected and site B articles don't. An article from Site A often links to one or more articles, often that I don't have a feed for, and it would be nice if the system looked at the whole constellation. Stuff like that.

Effective clustering is the really interesting technology Google News has had for a long time.

benwills |root |parent [-]

I have been attempting this exact sort of clustering solution for a few years now (on and off as a side project). Do you have source code available, or more detailed explanations/resources of how to approach this?

Edit: I just looked around for your YOShInOn RSS reader code and couldn't find it. I did find a number of references it looks like you've made to it on various forums, etc over the years.

PaulHoule |root |parent [-]

The technical report on YOShInOn is about 2 years overdue!

You mean the k-means for diversity or DBSCAN for duplicates? Either way it is about 10 lines of scikit-learn code. Send me an email.

benwills |root |parent [-]

Both. Just sent an email. Thanks!

emschwartz |root |parent |next |previous [-]

You should try Scour (https://scour.ing)!

You specify your interests as free form text, it ranks articles by how closely they match, and you can consume your Scour feed as an RSS feed to read it in NNW.

Disclaimer: I’m the developer

dewey |root |parent |next |previous [-]

That was partially the original promise of Fever, which is the API many RSS services still support and that somehow lives on.

Nuzzle did something similar for Twitter but shut down (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2021/05/05/nuzzel).

That would be a good addition to feed readers, especially for news feeds.

cosmic_cheese |root |parent |previous [-]

I haven't used it much but I think Iconfactory's Tapestry[0] does some of this.

[0]: https://usetapestry.com/

OGEnthusiast |next |previous [-]

A nice throwback to the pre-slop, pre-engagement bait era of the Internet.

tbolt |root |parent [-]

Add pre-enshittification and that covers the trifecta of doom were in.

cgfjtynzdrfht |next |previous [-]

[dead]

ftth_finland |previous [-]

Not to take away from NetNewsWires accomplishments, but getting it was such a disappointment. Adding insult to injury, I had to pay to get the app on my iPad. It was one of the few apps I paid for and all I got was a deep sense of wasted money.

Since the demise of Byline, I’ve been rocking Inoreader and have had no reason to look back.

All I miss is Google Reader, but that’s never coming back.

The only new thing I want in an RSS reader is a handsfree, voice only mode. Being able to listen to RSS articles and navigating by voice commands.

criddell |root |parent |next [-]

NetNewsWire is free.

https://netnewswire.com/

ftth_finland |root |parent [-]

It wasn’t at the time.

criddell |root |parent [-]

Your right! I found this[1] which says it was $10 at launch.

So you paid $10 and helped support indie developers launch what, in time, evolved into an almost universally beloved app.

That should feel pretty good. Your tiny investment helped create something great!

[1] https://mjtsai.com/blog/2010/04/13/netnewswire-for-ipad/

dagi3d |root |parent |previous [-]

Doesn't Apple offer purchases refunds?