Top all-time · #2911
The NewsBlur Blog
Company blog · blog.newsblur.comprogrammingstartups
The NewsBlur Blog is the company blog at blog.newsblur.com, writing about programming and startups. Since 2011, 26 different Hacker News readers have linked it 39 times, most often “A Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers cite the NewsBlur blog as documentation for reader features such as newsletter-to-RSS, related stories, YouTube feeds and archive backfill, plus engineering posts on Redis and a Docker security incident.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
NewsBlur is a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world. A new sound of an old instrument.
Most-linked posts?
- A Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-06-29
- NewsBlur(YC S12) launches blurblogs: feed reading and sharing are back together3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2012-07-30
- /2016/07/01/newsletters-in-your-newsblur/3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-08-16
- Three Months to Scale NewsBlur2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-03-18
- Newsblur's new "Discover related stories and sites" feature2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-08
What Hacker News says?
I'm not sure what you're missing from all the existing discover features in other products, but NewsBlur has a feature that sounds like that. https://blog.newsblur.com/2025/02/02/discover-related-storie...
Comment linking /2025/02/02/discover-related-stories-and-sites/
on “Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot”Submitted A Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database as a story · 554 points
HN discussionNewsblur[1] has this feature as well and it's a nice addition to any RSS reader. 1. https://blog.newsblur.com/post/146752875548/newsletters-in-y...
Comment linking /post/146752875548/newsletters-in-your-newsblur
on “I Still Use RSS”Submitted Three Months to Scale NewsBlur as a story · 422 points
HN discussionNewsblur was offering a decent alternative free layer. https://blog.newsblur.com/2013/03/17/three-months-to-scale-n... https://blog.newsblur.com/2014/03/13/google-reader-announced...
Comment linking /2014/03/13/google-reader-announced-its-shutdown-exactly-a-year-ago/
on “Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)”Submitted Google Reader announced its shutdown exactly a year ago as a story · 211 points
HN discussionI'm not entirely sure how the Newsblur youtube feeds work, but here's an older blog post on switching to API v2, https://blog.newsblur.com/post/117767869761/a-real-solution-... I have about 20 youtube channels in Newsblur and watch them almost always within Newsblur itself, so it works well enough. For regex filtering, Newsblur has training features. You can curate a feed based off specific attributes, like author,…
Comment linking /post/117767869761/a-real-solution-to-the-deprecated-youtube-api
on “RIP Google Reader”Submitted The NewsBlur Redesign as a story · 146 points
HN discussionIt was in the summer of 2008, three years after Google launched Reader and had at least 5 million users, when I decided to write my own RSS reader. There were just so many features I wanted that I knew Google would never build and for some strange reason I thought I could make money with my own opinionated take on a news reader. Then at 4pm on March 13th, 2013, I got an email from Nilay at The Verge asking if I'd he…
Comment linking /post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur
on “RIP Google Reader”Submitted From project to profession: going indie on NewsBlur as a story · 100 points
HN discussionNewsBlur was funded as part of YCombinator Summer '12 http://blog.ycombinator.com/newsblur-yc-s12-takes-feed-readi... http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurbl...
Comment linking /post/27033939756/introducing-blurblogs-roy-and-y-combinator
on “Three Months to Scale NewsBlur”Submitted Make your own feed reader with NewsBlur's new API as a story · 69 points
HN discussionIf you like Julia Evans style you may also like Charity Majors aka @mipsytipsy on twitter https://charity.wtf/ Also I use the open source Django project Newsblur as my RSS reader, and follow Samuel's blog: http://blog.newsblur.com/ A couple others I like: https://watirmelon.blog https://martinfowler.com
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you follow?”Submitted Building real-time feed updates for NewsBlur with Redis and WebSockets as a story · 58 points
HN discussionThis! NewsBlur is awesome. For newsletters: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/146752875548/newsletters-in-yo... NewsBlur even has support for Twitter: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/145256277160/twitters-back-bab...
Comment linking /post/145256277160/twitters-back-baby
on “Kill the newsletter: Convert newsletters into RSS feeds”Submitted NewsBlur Android App is now available as a story · 6 points
HN discussion"RSS industry"?! I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them. One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor. Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emerge…
Comment linking /post/45632737156/three-months-to-scale-newsblur
on “Embrace, extend, extinguish: How Google crushed and abandoned the RSS industry”Submitted Newsblur's new "Discover related stories and sites" feature as a story · 2 points
HN discussionNewsBlur has an organizer that provides this exact info. Just sort of last update (or even stories per month) and mass delete. It's somewhat new but it makes a world of a difference. The organizer is on web and just launched on iOS. See http://blog.newsblur.com .
Comment linking /
on “O Reader My Reader – Remembering Google Reader”Submitted A Docker footgun led to a vandal deleting NewsBlur's MongoDB database (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI just announced the addition of Roy as a co-founder on the NewsBlur Blog: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurbl... . Roy is working on the iOS apps and has been instrumental in shaping NewsBlur's future. He also can put up with me for 14 hours a day, which is no small feat.
Comment linking /post/27033939756/introducing-blurblogs-roy-and-y-combinator
on “NewsBlur (YC S12) Takes Feed Reading Back To Its Basics”Submitted Newsletters in your NewsBlur as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI am very excited to see how you grow NewsBlur. It's a really great looking take on RSS feeds. As someone who had a large social group sharing items on Reader before their last round of changes, I would love to hear what your plans/timeline on adding social features are. (fyi, Samuel mentioned adding social features in his 2011 year-in-review blog post, http://blog.newsblur.com/post/15993667293/2011-year-in-revie...…
Comment linking /post/15993667293/2011-year-in-review
on “From project to profession: going indie on NewsBlur”Submitted Tracking story changes with NewsBlur as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSince I'm a fan of these low-volume but high-value things, also of NewsBlur: https://blog.newsblur.com/post/168429041705/infrequent-site-... NewsBlur has a nice feature called "infrequent site stories" that holds items like this. It's so much more useful to me than popularity-based measures.
Comment linking /post/168429041705/infrequent-site-stories-is-the-blog-reader-we-need
on “Facebook and the Silent Bob Effect (2019)”Submitted A real solution to the deprecated YouTube API as a story · 1 points
HN discussionNewsBlur (social feed reader) uses Redis pubsub for real-time as well: http://blog.newsblur.com/post/20371256202/building-real-time... . Now I'll have up to 500 concurrent clients, but I couldn't be happier with how utterly simple it was to get Python to talk to Redis to talk to Node to talk to Socket.IO in JavaScript on the browser. I use it during feed fetching to notify all of the users subscribed to a feed's upd…
Comment linking /post/20371256202/building-real-time-feed-updates-for-newsblur
on “Redis 2.6.0 RC1 Released”Submitted A Downtime Irony as a story · 1 points
HN discussionCalling docker battle tested is an extremely long stretch. It has several security issues[0], many of which are ignored by upstream as "working as intended". [0]: https://blog.newsblur.com/2021/06/28/story-of-a-hacking/
Comment linking /2021/06/28/story-of-a-hacking/
on “Ask HN: Any Good Alternative for Docker?”Submitted Offline reading with the NewsBlur iOS app as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
