

Personalized Hacker News Frontpage - riffer
http://www.swimwithoutgettingwet.com/hnitems/

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riffer
This is a tool to tilt the Hacker News frontpage towards a particular user.

As HN grows, there is more interesting content added to it. What if there was
a way to get this content that would be interesting to you, with less of the
pain? This is a tool to do that.

And if you're new to HN, or are a casual commenter, that's okay too. You just
have to find at least one user whose comments and judgement you respect. Then
you can look at the page tilted in their direction.

~~~
palish
"As HN grows, there is more interesting content added to it. What if there was
a way to get this content that would be interesting to you, with less of the
pain?"

Then for the average user the front page would consist of mostly annoyingness.

A shared front page is a Good Thing. That's why PG never implemented the
ability to hide stories a'la Reddit.

That said, this is cool from a technical standpoint. :)

Off the top of my head, you should display more stories, display their point
values, have the link go directly to the article, and have a separate link to
go to the comments (and list how many comments there are). If you can. Bonus
points for adding upvote arrows.

No, wait, don't do that. Then people might use that instead of the main HN
interface.

~~~
riffer
Thanks for the feedback. You know, I have somewhat mixed feelings about The
Shared Front Page. For a small, cozy community there's no question it's the
right way to go. And for a larger site, using things like hide functionality
as a band-aid is a mistake as well. At the same time, there is a ton of
exceptional content out there that we know we miss in the current state, so
there's definitely room for an effective technical solution. In terms of this
particular tool, I think you put your finger on it when you pointed out that
applying this to the HN frontpage is a bit of a mis-application. Filtering 30
stories that most users have at least glanced at the title for, and hence have
some familiarity with, down to 8 is not particularly interesting in and of
itself.

The title of the article links to the discussion, and the URL links to the
submission link. Without the underlining, that isn't as clear as it might be.
The idea of the upvote arrows is clever, but then that might invoke "The Fury"
aka The Ban and/or The Email.

~~~
palish
Heh. You know, there's probably nothing wrong with having a recommendation
engine for Hacker News. After all, the frontpage is still the frontpage, so
people can use the recommendation engine without it degrading the quality of
the site, because most people still use the front page. This could be a great
feature for power users of HN.

Of course, there's a problem if _everyone_ switches to _primarily_ the
recommendation engine, but that's unlikely.

One thing, though. You should really display the points-to-comments ratio.
Unless a submission seems very interesting, I'll usually ignore it if it has
more comments than it has points. (That does not apply for "Ask HN"-type posts
though.)

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taitems
Shameless self promotion, but:

I use this keyword/tagging plugin that I made some time ago, and it visually
highlights articles that are relevant to my interests.

[http://taitems.tumblr.com/post/312274510/hacker-news-
tagging...](http://taitems.tumblr.com/post/312274510/hacker-news-tagging-
plugin)

------
stjarnljuset
What data do you use to generate User Comment Clusters?

~~~
riffer
A set of scraped comments, indexed to get the English terms. This is basically
the same stuff I used in the 'Similar Hacker News Users' tool from a couple of
weeks ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1046301>

Except now it is user -> personalized list of submissions, instead of user ->
similar users

