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). There are link-outs and fallbacks galore, so you can easily read the original if needed.In the spirit of open source, offlinerss exists purely for my convenience, but you can have the code too - here it is in case you like it. 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.It scrapes HN comments and all linked articles, runs them through Readability (Firefox “reader mode”), uses Jina AI and archive.today to pull article content, and caches what it fetched very carefully so as not to overload any service. End result is a feed that is fetched when you go online and stays readable offline on your device, without overuse of any particular service. That’s why it 404s without a secret that only myself and my feed reader know, which isn’t part of the source code.I had a lot of fun vibecoding this, back and forth with Claude, testing limits and pulling back to a place that’s reasonable, tuning cache other parameters so as to balance my convenience against not overloading the generous free services it uses. This simple requirement (offline readable versions of HN and Lobsters, but reasonably up to date) contains tremendous complexity and engineering tradeoffs, and the agent is only too happy to 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 really well for me, and might just be helpful to you.Please enjoy.