
Ask HN: Create custom, personal Hacker News email digests - jchmura
I&#x27;ve had this idea swirling in my head for a while that there should be a service that allows you to setup custom filters of Hacker News submissions and then receive a digest of them either daily or weekly. You could make something similar to a where clause (i.e. `title contains &quot;javascript&quot; or text contains &quot;javascript&quot;`). This would define the list of links you would receive.<p>Is this something you guys might find useful? I&#x27;m thinking of throwing something together as a weekend hack project.
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tacon
I like the serendipity of Hacker News, so I don't want to filter out or in
specific topics. But if you filter for quality, I love that. Using machine
learning to pick out the "best" items was the subject of a discussion
recently:

[http://pyvideo.org/video/2612/enough-machine-learning-to-
mak...](http://pyvideo.org/video/2612/enough-machine-learning-to-make-hacker-
news-reada)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297)

The author is nice enough to keep that app going here:

[http://hn.njl.us/](http://hn.njl.us/)

It is an opinionated filter, but with ADD I can get caught reading most things
on the front page. This guides me to some important links that don't initially
seem all that interesting.

I asked the author if he would share his training set, or open source the app,
but apparently not. If you can turn that web app into an RSS feed or a digest,
that would help.

As for your idea to filter on keywords, you can get that working as an RSS
feed using Yahoo Pipes without writing any code.

~~~
jchmura
Interesting. I had not seen that discussion. I'll take a look.

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gus_massa
I also like the mix of stories and subject in HN, but when one subject
saturate the front page I use hnapp to filter the other stories. For example
you can subscribe to the rss of
[http://hnapp.com/?q=javascript%20type%3Astory%20score%3E1](http://hnapp.com/?q=javascript%20type%3Astory%20score%3E1)

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zhte415
This would be useful, particularly in a use-case where I'm interested in a
niche topic that I wouldn't like to miss anything in.

A filter, like 'hit the front page', 'in ask', 'above XX points', 'above XX
comments' would also be useful as a simple, well, filter.

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sraquo
I personally prefer RSS over email, so I've built
[https://github.com/raquo/hnapp](https://github.com/raquo/hnapp) for the task.
Just thought you might want some code to get started.

~~~
jchmura
That's almost what I had in my head. That's a cool little utility. You did a
lot of hard work already :P

