I’m an avid reader of news.yc, but it’s annoyed me for some time that the RSS feed is rather broken. So, I decided to dust off my Lisp skills and give it a go. The biggest chunk was adding code to do conversion from UNIX timestamps to UTC in Arc. Significant stuff that works now:
- Articles are properly sorted newest to oldest.
- Articles have proper timestamps so that they’re sorted properly by feed readers.
- Articles that drop off the homepage aren’t immediately removed from the feed to prevent them from being duplicated in if they come back.
Patch is here.

Yay! *Please* HN admins, review & apply.
March 31st, 2009 at 2:02 pm
But how to use it?
April 7th, 2009 at 10:21 am
Well, hopefully Paul will apply it to news.yc at some point. Presumably the last week he’s been busy with YC applications. We’ll see. Other than that it can be used in other installs of the same software (e.g. New Mogul)
April 7th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
RSS Feeds are really very helpful and you could get site and news updates from it.,:’
May 20th, 2010 at 8:37 pm
Very good blog you have here but I was wanting to know if you knew of any message boards that cover the same topics talked about here? I’d really love to be a part of online community where I can get feedback from other experienced people that share the same interest. If you have any recommendations, please let me know. Thanks!
April 9th, 2012 at 8:39 am