I use to mess with rss and agree with Marco on the purpose of them. Then I found a better solution, just subscribe to some of the awesome curated newsletters out there that do all this for you. HN has one - http://hackernewsletter.com and Peter Cooper's tech focused ones (https://cooperpress.com/) keep you in the loop in a particular stack, plus a lot of others that I've seen.
Now I don't have to check anything these days, except my email, which of course I check everyday anyhow!
That may be fine for some, but newsletters are inherently limited by the amount of space they are willing to provide to links, and by their domain, because most letters are topic-specific. While newsletters can support maybe 20 links per week, RSS is adept at handling hundreds if not thousands.
Moreover, one of the great benefits of RSS is that it is customizable and one's reading experience pertains specifically and only to them. With newsletters, one is throwing their reading experience to the mercy of the newsletter editor. This is not to say that newsletters aren't valuable. Their spontaneity and conciseness provides a great reading experience. (Although, I think Twitter is superior at this type of thing anyway.)
But, given the idiosyncrasies of newsletters, I just don't believe that they are tenable alternatives to RSS. Those who want to read a lot of content from an eclectic array of specific sources still need something like RSS.
If you want to specifically choose your sources, I think you're right. If you're happy with a 'best of' on a topic by topic basis, newsletters can/do work.
With newsletters, one is throwing their reading experience to the mercy of the newsletter editor.
This is part of the appeal for many non-power readers. The majority are not particularly interested in curating or even controlling their sources and are happy to outsource it to either trusted editors (see almost the entire print media or something like Techmeme) or the "cloud" (e.g. Reddit or Hacker News).
For my part, it's a lot of browsing, including places like Hacker News and Reddit, and notably a lot of great things get submitted to HN but never get any votes.. those are always the coolest finds. There are also a lot of Twitter users to follow who produce content and tweet about it. I also get a lot of direct e-mails from people who create things, perhaps a third of links come via outreach from authors.. but that's the sort of thing that only happens after you've been doing it a while.
In the comparison photos, is the poor quality one from something like a MakerBot? Maybe I've never seen a close-up photo before, but I always thought they created higher quality than that.
Yes it is. Extruded pieces can be pretty gnarly. This is exacerbated at small feature sizes, which is what you see here, especially on the birdcage which is about 3cm tall. To be fair, most people would clean that birdcage up a bit before showing it to anyone.
Most of the objects you see on the page have been cleaned up. For instance, over the "Accessories - Form Finish kit:" heading you see a part that hasn't had its temporary supports removed. The bracelet is a little furry on the bottom. It looks much better near the top of the page where it shows in a montage after cleaning.
It is sending a simple get request to the comments links, so it should load roughly as fast as reloading the full page. As per expired links, it takes the links that are on your page. Can you be more specific about that?
Sorry I wasn't clear enough in my criticism. It's of the original site not this improved version.
What I meant is the expiration of the "next" page link at the bottom of the main list. If someone could fix that to either send me to the write page in a paged set or simply send me back to the new links page with the fresh content I'd be indebted for life.
The other criticism of hacker news is how slowly it loads sometimes. I love the content don't get me wrong. And it's free so I feel like a jerk complaining. But it's painfully slow sometimes. I'd never have a site so slow. It would be unacceptable to me.
What will be really cool is to see how the "hide comment scores" effect looks using this (assuming at some point they will be able to collect that). I think the one liner type comments might show a big drop.
The switch happened in mid-May, 2011 (I don't remember the actual date). My scores went up slightly, but using this tool it's impossible to tell (since the limit is 100). I tried to change the limit in the HTML file using firebug, but I guess there's a server-side check for that (good!). Anyone care to hook against the API?
Now I don't have to check anything these days, except my email, which of course I check everyday anyhow!