Like many of you, I read Hacker News through an RSS reader. The Hacker News RSS only has title links, no preview or link to the comments page (unless the item has no URL, like this one). To go to the comments page, you have to navigate to news.ycombinator.com, find the item you want, and click on comments. PG: can you please add a link to the comments page from the body of each RSS item. Thanks!
There are comment links in the rss feed. Some readers show them and some don't. If anyone can give me the exact syntax that would work in the latter, I'll try it.
I brought this up a while ago here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35363" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35363</a><p>I was using Google Reader, and there was no comments link, but have since switched to NetNewsWire (OS X) where everything works correctly. It doesn't look like it'll change.
A while ago someone (sorry, forget the name) created an alternative feed which shows a link to the comment page: <a href="http://harumi.ath.cx/newsyc" rel="nofollow">http://harumi.ath.cx/newsyc</a><p>Works fine with Google-Reader.
I'm using Vienna (OS X) which as far as I can tell works perfectly for every one of the other 200+ feeds I subscribe to - but not for Hacker News. It looks like simply replacing the <comments> tag with a description tag containing (only) a hyperlink to the comments page would fix the problem. Many readers ignore the <comments> tag.