Hacker News and Lobsters RSS, repackaged for offline reading

Hacker News (and Lobsters) are endlessly fascinating - and reading them via NetNewsWire is empowering. But it’s annoying staring at loading screens while comments & articles load. I was wasting a decent chunk of my day. Should I read less? No! Let’s make it more efficient!

I vibecoded offlinerss to gain efficiency reading HN & Lobsters’ RSS feeds. It fetches the original feed and exports 2 items per original feed item; one for the article (pumped through a “reader mode” plugin to format it for readability in NetNewsWire) and one for the comments (also reformatted for readability, with no js and links out to the original comment pages).

The deployment I run is not accessible to you. It’s not accessible to anyone but me. It’s designed to run on Vercel’s free tier for a userbase of 1 person per deployment. If you supply the wrong secret, it will 404. But with the right secret your news reader can load the (very heavy) feed from wherever you are in the world.

In the spirit of open source you can have the code - here it is in case you like it.

I enjoyed vibecoding this, back and forth with Claude, testing limits and pulling back to a place that’s reasonable, tuning it to balance my convenience against not overloading the free services it uses.

The engineering tradeoffs are myriad, and the agent is only too happy to run experiments, oblige and build it, all so I can read tech news more efficiently. We truly live in the future.

This was vibecoded from top to bottom. It works for me, and might be helpful to you.

Please enjoy.