

Sortable Hacker News - scrollinondubs
http://hnsort.com/

======
taitems
A "HN Labs" style concept would be amazing. I know it probably goes against
the HN mentality, but a gmail style label system would be so useful.
"Javascript", "Press", "Databasing" etc.

~~~
mcav
That'd be quite cool: Allow users to create javascript plugins for the site.
Could have a karma minimum limit to be listed as a list of "labs" plugins.

People could tackle things like layout, sort, hide/show karma, display an
iFrame of the content, etc.

But the security implications would probably be completely unacceptable. Ah
well.

~~~
nimbix
You already can create JS plugins for HN with Greasemonkey.

I have one which currently:

    
    
      - hides links based on domain (like techcrunch.com)
      - hides links based on words appearing in the title (like gogaruco)
      - highlights names of known posters and adds a string describing them ("somenick" becomes "somenick: Firstname Lastname (Companyname)")
      - makes comment boxes bigger
      - adds a margin at the bottom
    

It's pretty easy to do, really.

~~~
lucumo
Is it available somewhere?

~~~
nimbix
I cleaned it up a bit (removed names, etc) and uploaded it here:
<http://lexandera.com/public/hackernews.user.js>

There's a configuration section at the top which you need to customize.

~~~
lucumo
Cool! Thanks!

------
nopassrecover
Pretty cool! Any way to make it remember my sort order (just a cookie or
something?). If I sort, then click a site (rather than open a new tab) and go
back it will have forgotten my order. Not a big issue but could be nice,
especially for those that might want the same sort order each time they visit.

~~~
bsd_junkie
I think a site that was submitted here about a month ago has almost the same
features except that they fetch news from everywhere, not just HN and order
them based on several interesting scores like "popular", "controversial", etc.
They call it <a href="[http://www.euraeka.com>All](http://www.euraeka.com>All)
the news that's fit to read</a>. Pretty bold claim:-) From what I can see on
their site, when you register you can "save" your sorting preferences (click
on Advanced at the top of the site) and the site also allows you to filter by
topic and domain. I am personally using it for their recommendations system.
Truth be told, all news sites are really just a portal so you can find what's
interesting to you. Once a system is trained on recommending you what you
like, then all the sorting, scoring, mashing up, etc becomes pointless. That's
goal really of every information providing site - customize the information
flow to every user to the point that every user sees a unique version of the
site based on their unique preferences. So, while I like the sortable HN
concept ultimately it needs to be extended to a personalized recommendation
news system in order to be truly useful. Euraeka and Google News are two sites
that I like, Digg's recommendations frankly suck in my opinion. Good luck to
you though, good stuff.

------
cperciva
Is there any way to get a "raw HN feed"? I imagine there are a number of
interesting hacks which could be made given real-time access to a stream of
submissions and votes.

~~~
scrollinondubs
Yeah I used Dapper.net to scrape the homepage and have it return an XML result
set. Here's the Dap: <http://www.dapper.net/dapp-howto-
use.php?dappName=HNhomepage> You can have it output JSON, RSS, XML,
whatever...

sean

~~~
jacquesm
I wonder how many people are running bots on HN to correct some 'perceived'
shortcoming of the site.

~~~
cperciva
The fact that people like to read HN in different ways isn't due to
shortcomings in HN -- it's simply an inevitable result of the fact that HN has
a large and non-homogeneous readership, and thus _any_ one way to view HN will
not satisfy everybody.

~~~
jacquesm
So, the lack of configurability would then count as a shortcoming ?

Maybe services like HN should be built up around an API where the default
website is just one way to use the site.

Everybody that is capable of doing so can then roll their own.

~~~
cperciva
_Maybe services like HN should be built up around an API where the default
website is just one way to use the site._

Many sites don't like that approach because it limits their ability to serve
up advertising; but for a site like HN, that would make a great deal of sense
-- it has certainly worked for twitter.

------
prakash
This is interesting. I have been thinking along the lines of sort/filter
considering the massive volume of good stuff that goes through this site.

<http://cin-o-matic.com/on-video.php> has a fantastic filtering system for
movies. Some of these things could be incorporated into hnsort.

------
derefr
Instead of a selectable "by-field" comparison, can we have a "formula" box at
the top that lets us write our own comparison function? I think that'd be a
lot more fun for us here to play with—we might start trying to optimize it ;)

------
jamesbritt
Very handy! Nice work, Sean. I like being able to quickly jump to threads with
high comment counts.

------
onreact-com
"Address Not Found"

~~~
philsci
yeah, opendns alerts it too.

~~~
scrollinondubs
bummer - apparently my hosting provider had a DNS outage last night that cut
the site down in its prime while it was on the homepage of HN. It's back up
now.

