TL;DR — We visited every unique domain ever posted to Hacker News, found which ones publish RSS/Atom feeds, and packaged the results as monthly parquet snapshots with rich metadata.

623,957 feeds discovered across 1,755,955 hosts, spanning 232 months from 2006-10 to 2026-03.

Last updated: 2026-04-05T09:21:39Z

Why this exists

RSS is not dead — it's just hard to discover. The <link rel="alternate"> tag that points to a site's feed is buried in HTML <head>, invisible to users. Feed auto-discovery requires fetching every homepage, parsing the HTML, and often probing well-known paths like /feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml when the link tag is missing.

Hacker News is the best proxy we have for "interesting sites on the internet." Over its 18+ year history, hundreds of thousands of unique domains have been submitted. This dataset answers a simple question: which of those sites have RSS feeds, and what do we know about them?

What you get

Each row = one host with a validated feed, enriched with:

Feed metadata — URL, type (RSS/Atom), title, description, language, generator, last published date, item count
Site metadata — HTML <title>, meta description, generator, language, favicon
OpenGraph — og:title, og:description, og:image, og:site_name, og:locale
HN context — story count, total score, first/last seen timestamps for that host in the given month

Hosts without a valid feed are excluded. The feed must parse with gofeed and contain at least one item.

File structure

data/
├── 2006/
│   ├── 2006-10.parquet      ← first month of HN
│   └── ...
├── 2024/
│   ├── 2024-01.parquet
│   └── ...
└── 2026/
    └── ...
stats.csv                     ← per-month scan metrics
README.md

Each parquet file is ZSTD-compressed and sorted by hn_story_count DESC.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
`host`	string	Lowercase hostname (e.g. `simonwillison.net`)
`feed_url`	string	Discovered feed URL
`feed_type`	string	`rss`, `atom`, or `unknown`
`feed_title`	string	Feed title
`feed_description`	string	Feed description or subtitle
`feed_language`	string	Feed language tag
`feed_generator`	string	Feed generator (e.g. `Hugo 0.121.0`)
`feed_last_pub`	timestamp	Most recent item published date
`feed_item_count`	int	Items in feed at scan time
`site_title`	string	HTML `<title>`
`site_description`	string	Meta description
`site_generator`	string	Meta generator
`site_language`	string	`<html lang>` or meta language
`site_favicon`	string	Favicon URL
`og_title`	string	OpenGraph title
`og_description`	string	OpenGraph description
`og_image`	string	OpenGraph image URL
`og_site_name`	string	OpenGraph site name
`og_locale`	string	OpenGraph locale
`hn_story_count`	int	Stories from this host in the month
`hn_total_score`	int	Sum of HN points for the month
`hn_first_seen`	timestamp	Earliest story time in the month
`hn_last_seen`	timestamp	Latest story time in the month
`scan_time`	timestamp	When this host was probed
`month`	string	`YYYY-MM` partition key

Feeds discovered by year

  2006  █░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  11 feeds (28 hosts)
  2007  ██░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  2,638 feeds (9,126 hosts)
  2008  ██████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  7,677 feeds (26,992 hosts)
  2009  ██████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  12,662 feeds (44,217 hosts)
  2010  ████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  19,340 feeds (66,440 hosts)
  2011  ████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  28,438 feeds (107,087 hosts)
  2012  ████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░  32,813 feeds (112,505 hosts)
  2013  █████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░  34,641 feeds (108,925 hosts)
  2014  ███████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░  32,464 feeds (103,471 hosts)
  2015  █████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░░  34,729 feeds (106,076 hosts)
  2016  ██████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░  35,537 feeds (104,215 hosts)
  2017  ██████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░  35,644 feeds (102,162 hosts)
  2018  ██████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░░░  35,911 feeds (95,701 hosts)
  2019  ████████████████████████████████░░░░░░░░  37,892 feeds (96,110 hosts)
  2020  ███████████████████████████████████████░  45,813 feeds (117,867 hosts)
  2021  ████████████████████████████████████████  46,382 feeds (115,979 hosts)
  2022  ██████████████████████████████████░░░░░░  40,534 feeds (94,062 hosts)
  2023  ████████████████████████████████████░░░░  41,828 feeds (98,036 hosts)
  2024  ████████████████████████████████████░░░░  42,236 feeds (101,207 hosts)
  2025  █████████████████████████████████████░░░  43,855 feeds (109,331 hosts)
  2026  ███████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░  12,912 feeds (36,418 hosts)

Quick start

DuckDB (fastest)

-- Everything, everywhere, all at once
SELECT * FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/hacker-news-rss/data/*/*.parquet';

-- Top 20 feeds for January 2024
SELECT host, feed_url, feed_title, hn_story_count
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/hacker-news-rss/data/2024/2024-01.parquet'
ORDER BY hn_story_count DESC
LIMIT 20;

-- Most-submitted feed hosts of all time
SELECT host, feed_url, SUM(hn_story_count) AS total_stories
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/hacker-news-rss/data/*/*.parquet'
GROUP BY host, feed_url
ORDER BY total_stories DESC
LIMIT 50;

-- What blogging platforms power the HN front page?
SELECT
    CASE
        WHEN site_generator ILIKE '%wordpress%' THEN 'WordPress'
        WHEN site_generator ILIKE '%ghost%' THEN 'Ghost'
        WHEN site_generator ILIKE '%hugo%' THEN 'Hugo'
        WHEN site_generator ILIKE '%jekyll%' THEN 'Jekyll'
        WHEN site_generator ILIKE '%next%' THEN 'Next.js'
        WHEN site_generator ILIKE '%gatsby%' THEN 'Gatsby'
        WHEN site_generator ILIKE '%11ty%' OR site_generator ILIKE '%eleventy%' THEN 'Eleventy'
        WHEN site_generator != '' THEN site_generator
        ELSE 'Unknown'
    END AS platform,
    COUNT(DISTINCT host) AS sites
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/hacker-news-rss/data/*/*.parquet'
GROUP BY platform
ORDER BY sites DESC
LIMIT 15;

-- Build your own OPML: export all feeds as XML
SELECT '<outline text="' || feed_title || '" xmlUrl="' || feed_url || '" htmlUrl="https://' || host || '"/>'
FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/hacker-news-rss/data/2024/*.parquet'
WHERE feed_url != ''
GROUP BY host, feed_url, feed_title;

Python

from datasets import load_dataset

ds = load_dataset("open-index/hacker-news-rss")
df = ds["train"].to_pandas()

# Top feeds by HN engagement
top = df.groupby("host")["hn_story_count"].sum().sort_values(ascending=False)
print(top.head(20))

Python (DuckDB)

import duckdb

df = duckdb.sql("""
    SELECT host, feed_url, feed_type, SUM(hn_story_count) AS total
    FROM 'hf://datasets/open-index/hacker-news-rss/data/*/*.parquet'
    GROUP BY ALL
    ORDER BY total DESC
    LIMIT 100
""").df()
print(df)

How it's built

Extract — Query the full HN archive (public ClickHouse replica) for story URLs grouped by month. Normalize hostnames, deduplicate, skip known non-feed hosts (github.com, youtube.com, twitter.com, etc.)
Discover — For each host, fetch the homepage and scan <head> for <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"> or atom+xml tags. If nothing found, probe well-known paths: /feed, /rss, /rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed.xml, /index.xml, and others.
Validate — Parse each candidate with gofeed. Must return at least one item. This eliminates false positives from HTML error pages served at feed paths.
Enrich — Extract HTML meta tags, OpenGraph properties, and feed-level metadata from the homepage and feed XML.
Cache — Results are cached locally (JSON). Hosts already probed — whether they have feeds or not — are skipped on re-runs. This makes incremental scanning fast.
Publish — Write ZSTD-compressed parquet via DuckDB, commit to this HuggingFace repo with stats tracking for resumable backfill.

20 concurrent workers, 10s timeout per host. Polite but thorough.

What's not included

Feed content — This is a directory, not a mirror. Use feed_url to subscribe or fetch current items.
Non-story URLs — Only HN stories (Show HN, Ask HN, and regular submissions with URLs) are considered. Comments linking to sites are not.
Sites that block bots — Some sites return 403/503 to our user agent. They won't appear in the dataset even if they have feeds.
IP-based hosts — Numeric hostnames are skipped.
The usual suspects — GitHub, YouTube, Twitter/X, Reddit, Wikipedia, Amazon, and other aggregators/platforms are excluded since their feeds are well-known or not useful at the domain level.

License

Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0). Source data from the HN public API.

Downloads last month: 67

Total file size:

64.9 MB

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