rdmuser

Seems like there is potentially multiple layers of trump drama going on with that bridge: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jul/16/trump-admin...

"Democrats allege Trump administration stalled US-Canada bridge opening as a favor to billionaire donor" A donor who owns a competing bridge

"The new deal requires US government approval if toll fees are lowered below regional averages, according to media reports. Previously, the Canadian government set toll prices, but the Trump administration seemed set on protecting a nearby bridge owned by Matthew Moroun, a son of the late transportation and real estate scion Manuel Moroun."

I like a lot of things about bubbles but it seems to surface a lot of negative posts that are mainly just rants. A good chunk of articles in the daily/weekly briefings kind of feel like an indie blogging spin on the negative posts/articles you'd see a lot on microblogging sites.

It regularly surfaces some good stuff so it's working but it's also kind of depressing in ways that made me leave microblogging sites. There regularly is a lot of anti ai rants, USpol rants, the web is dead, defeatist/nihilistic posts etc in the weekly/daily digests. The entire culture section are these types of posts currently.

Makes me wonder if the use of microblogging accounts to log in is partially biasing the userbase towards that kind of writing? I don't have a solution for this though and limiting to fediverse accounts probably has some upsides too.

Ultimately bubbles still gets a big thumbs up from me but I'd love to see these kinds of posts deprioritized a bit. Outside maybe a few deeper more constructive ones that link out well I don't think they represent the best of indie blogging. Anyways if you made it this deep into my ramble I hope you have a nice week.

The dev even offers free pro licenses to those who can't afford them:

"I shall add that if for some unfortunate reason you're not able to afford a license, just email me and i shall offer you one"

It's great seeing some more varied takes on search engines like this. That's essentially the same reason I use inoreaders rss search to find articles when I want to revisit them etc and it has been super handy. I know there have been some projects focused on rss search engines like OpenOrb that have some similarities to Hister. Makes me wonder if Hister could seed its history using rss.

For searches where you want more that just the first result and want a depth of results to go through and maybe even check out more than the first page of results I like to use meta-search engines that grab results from multiple sources. Plus it helps route around censorship since you are getting results from a variety of sources. Searxng is the best known one.

I was quite fond of ixquick but it shut down ages ago. These days I like etools.ch especially since it includes results from search engines like marginalia etc that I tend to forget to search directly but like having meshed into my general searches. Plus you can change which engines it uses in settings and it shows which search engine(s) each link came from which is handy.

On a related note I like to check out Serdys list of search engines with their own indexes once if a while. It gets updated here and there and includes a fair amount of search engines I don't tend to see elsewhere.

https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...

I've been wanting something like this for a while now but as an extension that runs locally. Just something I can click to get a quick response telling me if the article seems like ai so I can focus on the writing without needing to spend energy on remembering ai styles and detecting obvious ai. I'd be pretty happy to see something like that built straight into firefox.

Ultimately slop is so pervasive that I'm wasting a fair amount of time vetting text and it's affecting my ability to simply enjoy reading. I keep getting part way into an article before realizing it's low quality ai writing. Being able to get a quick heads up that it looks like ai before starting would save me a lot of energy even on articles I decide to try reading because it cuts down on mental overhead.

Personally my favorite spiritual successor to stumbleupon has been cloudhiker.net. I found kagis to be too personal blog focused for my tastes. I love that kagi is doing so much of this out in the open though.

There are a surprising amount out there: https://blog.woblick.dev/en/2025/best-stumbleupon-alternativ...

It's a good saying but the literal meaning is not entirely correct anymore. Climate change has changed the math on tree planting in a few ways. For example tree planting in your area today may backfire vs 30 years ago: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/forest-preservati...

Oh good point I also overlooked that with the anti ai list.

The big anti ai list also seems to be focused on hiding links from ddg/bing/google where this new more focused list just blocks sites. I tend to like block ones vs hiding because they pop up a nice warning no matter where I came from and I can still decide to ignore it if I want so they is more user agency instead of just quietly hiding a unclear chunk of the net from search engines.

Personally I find that I prefer badly written english or auto-translated stuff written in languages foreign to me over ai generated or even just ai polished works I've seen. There is just so much more character, depth and variance there vs ultra ai generic or slop text.

That being said this project seems focused on content farms not people who just need a little help writing so this whole conversation is a bit of a side tangent.

A new more grounded list focused on specifically blocking content farms and similar low quality sites.

A nice alternative to this very broad anti ai list: https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

Edit: Oh I should mention I found it through reddit and there is some good discussion there where they describe how they find stuff etc: https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1r9uo3j/autom...

Oh neat! I went and shared this with some Brazilian friends of mine. They tend to like stuff like this so I think it will make them happy.

I know I enjoyed checking out some sites you have in that list (using translation) so thanks!

I love browsing outside the anglosphere but it can be challenging sometimes finding curators that find regular new sites or posts to check out when other languages aren't part of your regular browsing routine.

One other thing people might like about the conversation is that it has a bunch of regional subsections so it isn't overrun by US news like a lot of news sites. Well outside the US section of course. I know I personally appreciate having another source of informed writting that also covers local factors and events.

10tons tends to make smaller scale games and you feel it sometimes but I've had a great time with quite a few of their other shooters too. You used to be able to get this bundle for cheap from fanatical sometimes, not sure if that is still the case. They are best known in the modern era for Tesla vs Lovecraft which doesn't show up in this bundle. https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/428/10tons_Shooters/

There have been a few attempts to make open source versions of Crimsonland and I had a good time with Violetland https://github.com/ooxi/violetland

The kagi smallweb site has an alternative feed that is less high traffic that only includes appreciated (liked) articles. It's not ideal for a lot of people since it's still pretty high traffic and not a lot of users use the main site with the button to appreciate things. https://kagi.com/smallweb/appreciated

You can find a few alt feeds for the kagi small web by going to the site and clicking the top right rss button. There are ones for videos, code and comics and a link to the full opml file. https://kagi.com/smallweb

Btw is there an rss feed for the hn smallweb one?

It was sold back in 2022 to Branch Metrics https://www.androidcentral.com/apps-software/branch-strikes-...

August 2024 everyone working on it was laid off except the original dev https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/9/24217077/nova-launcher-lay...

September 2025 the original dev left after being told to stop work on open sourcing it https://www.theverge.com/news/773937/nova-launcher-founder-l...

The dev has an active hn account: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=neamar

The creator has a hn account: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=meteo-jeff

His initial comment describing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28504740

It's a little neat that it works without javascript too.

Personally I like the newsminimalist rss feed for simple ai evaluated and summarized news. I don't have much experience with the site itself but it's likely also worth a check. The dev is an active part of hn.

https://www.newsminimalist.com/

The dev and the launch post from 2023:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35795388

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=t0bia_s

I'm assuming that is the app version of the kagi news page found here:

https://kite.kagi.com

https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public

The feeds for kite seem to be here:

https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/blob/main/kite_fee...

Edit: Actually if you are looking for more things to explore the kagi github has some interesting other stuff like the smallweb page and the opml file of rss smallweb feeds:

https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb

https://kagi.com/smallweb/opml

Oh totally I wasn't suggesting that as a direct replacement but more an alternate approach and that privacy factor is important to consider. Apologies if that wasn't clear. Personally I don't check that often so the occasional connection on click isn't serious vs the complexities of adding another extension even if it's a neat one.

I think you may be overlooking some nuance related to that extension vs my solution though. Extensions like that check every page you visit whereas my approach only checks on click so there is a much greater need for privacy solutions with extensions like that since they would normally be sending out your entire browser history in real time to the api.

Jstriebs solution seems pretty neat though and it's definitely something I'll keep in mind for similar use cases even if I skip using it to minimize my extension usage. I was happy to hear about it and read how it worked.

Personally I use this bookmarklet to check if sites have been submitted since I like to minimize extensions:

    javascript:void(location.href="https://hn.algolia.com/?query="+location.href)

Tbh I've been working on a big feedback list since early this year after finding scour through /r/rss. This year got busy etc so I haven't sent it in yet but I'd like to soon once I polish it up.

Being able to apply custom interests to all feeds globally has been a wonderful way to run into new stuff online. I was genuinely surprised how great of addition scour was to my rss setup since I'm already a longterm experienced user with a well curated follow list of a several hundred feeds.

I've always been curious what the front page of hn would look like if you filtered out all the tech posts. I'd love a rss feed for that. Maybe make it top weekly or monthly instead since that would cull a large % of posts?

One site I've been really enjoying for filtering through feeds including all hn submissions is https://scour.ing/about. You input interests and it filters rss based on that. You can even follow your profile using an external rss reader. It's inspired by sites like bear blog and seems to be trying to do everything right re treating users well. I'm a long time rss user and rarely find new rss projects interesting enough to use but scour instantly hooked me because it works and is trying to do everything right by its users.

I love when projects add rss feeds like this. The feed articles look great and are individual items per story not one big list as one article which I appreciate.

That rss feed seems to be specifically for the world category. Anyone know if there are other feeds? Edit:nvm you can find each feed at the bottom of the page.

I wonder if there might be an opportunity here to use evaporative cooling to boil off water from unpotable sources like seawater as a way to clean and desalinate it instead of using up our cleaner water supplies.

Oups linked the wrong hn thread about that easter egg. Here is the one that got a bunch of attention back in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14653017

Sadly late 2021 the original dev passed away. Someone has taken over stewardship of the project but it is currently moving slowly and they are seeking more contributors (javascript skills are a plus).

He was a bit of a hn user and seemed good natured and pleasant. Though I didn't know him I was sad to hear he'd passed both as a Redirector user and a fan of good people doing good things. I know he'd mentioned being happy to get recognition on here. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=einaregilsson

I really enjoyed the original devs write up on creating an easter egg specifically targeting Mark Hamills avatar in game. https://einaregilsson.com/an-easter-egg-for-one-user-luke-sk... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30715746