

Reducing the HN overload ... - RiderOfGiraffes
http://jeffmiller.github.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload

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wccrawford
Normally, I like watching the RSS because I see everything, and I find things
that are interesting that never get voted up high enough to hit those feeds.

However, lately, there's been a ton of crap that has nothing to do with
hacking or startups. That makes it really tempting to start using those feeds
and let others do the work of weeding out the crap.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
My problem is that the items I'm most interested in never really get the
upvotes to pass the thresholds, so I'm looking to train a Bayesian filter to
match my interests, and rank items based on that.

I'm sure I'm not the only one.

~~~
xtho
But isn't that the point of a social news website that the community (whose
members should of course have similar preferences as you have) does the
filtering for you by upvoting interesting articles. Otherwise I could run such
a filter over a collections of rss feed aggregators, couldn't I? By using a
social news website, users IMHO implicitely claim that community-based
filtering works better than any algorithm could, don't they?

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Perhaps you miss my point. I said:

    
    
      > ... the items I'm most interested in never
      > really get the upvotes to pass the thresholds,
    

I've found dozens of items that I'm interested in and which never got more
than one or two upvotes. They never made it to the front page. Often they've
been resubmitted, the timing has been right, or the title has been changed,
and suddenly it's got tens, on some cases hundred of upvotes.

There are many, many items that slip through, unnoticed, unloved, that should
get upvotes, but due to poor timing or poor titles don't.

I want a system that helps me catch them.

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Kilimanjaro
"It’s also terribly inefficient to repeatedly check HN, because you have to
rescan stories you’ve already seen."

That, and the small font.

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chrisaycock
I subscribe to the RSS feed for cperciva's Hacker News Daily:

<http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>

