
Hacking Hacker News - stickhandle
http://joelgrus.com/2012/02/16/hacking-hacker-news/
======
rickdale
This is totally cool and kudos to you. But be aware there are limits of
personalized hacker news. I think Bill Maher put it best when ranting just
last night about facebooks customized news feeds:

 _Newspapers may be old-fashioned, but here 's what we're losing if you never
see one. They are trying to tell you what's actually important, not just
what's important to you. You may not read the whole paper, but you at least
see headlines, making you aware that something's going on outside of your
microtargeted world of fashion or music or Wiccans or zombies or whatever
you're into._

Replace 'newspapers' with hacker news and you get the point.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohtmZDZCGM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohtmZDZCGM)

~~~
hnriot
total nonsense, the classifier is just pushed upstream, from what I want to
see, to what some ad-motivated editor wants me to see.

newspapers reported stories to sell you something, be it papers, ads or
someone's agenda, not because they believed we'd all be more rounded citizens.

~~~
ketralnis
But in the case of filtering Hacker News you're taking that pre-filtered list
(filtered by geeks and startup folk and whathaveyou) and filtering it even
more.

Whether that bubble is a subset of some other bubble, it's still a bubble.

------
joelgrus
Oh jeez, who submitted this again? I learned my lesson a couple of years ago,
everyone hates this. :)

~~~
joelgrus
Also, FYI, I don't even use this anymore, these days I just read the HN
frontpage. :)

~~~
tlarkworthy
Its exactly the kind of thing I would build and abandon. So the maybe more
interesting things is why you don't use it? I presume its a UI thing, or
classifier is unreliable, or something?

I would love to hear why vanilla HN is better now.

~~~
joelgrus
I don't know that vanilla HN is better now. I abandoned it for two main
reasons:

1\. The Hacker News API I was using was very unreliable and would go down for
days / weeks at a time, which made the whole pipeline unreliable.

2\. I was consuming this as an RSS feed, but when Google Reader shut down I
abandoned my RSS habit cold turkey, so now I pretty much only read sites that
I visit directly, or things people link to on FB / Twitter.

~~~
icebraining
Why did you use the API instead of consuming the HN RSS feed itself? They even
offer a big feed for such usage:
[http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html](http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html)

~~~
joelgrus
Ha, mostly because I didn't know about it. The big feed is not all that
discoverable.

------
smoyer
"The model can only get better with more training data, which requires me to
judge whether I like stories or not. I do this occasionally when there’s
nothing interesting on Facebook. Right now this is just the above command-line
tool, but maybe I’ll come up with something better in the future."

If you let your program log into HN using your account, it should be able to
tell which of the stories you've up-voted there. If you use that as the input
to your classifier, as you read stories on HN, simply mark those that interest
you by up-voting them.

I'm also curious to know whether the stories are weighted by age to account
for changes in what you find interesting.

------
minimaxir
FYI, the new Hacker News API allows easy programmatic access of story/comments
and infinite chronological paging. You could download _every_ Hacker News
story in less than 2 hours without breaking the API request limit.

[https://hn.algolia.com/api](https://hn.algolia.com/api)

~~~
e15ctr0n
There's a list of all the apps that have been built based on this API:
[http://hn.algolia.com/cool_apps](http://hn.algolia.com/cool_apps)

~~~
pak
Yup, I've switched over my Chrome extension [1] to use Algolia's API instead
of HNSearch (which is shutting down), and so far, it seems to be working
peachy.

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
sideba...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-
sidebar/ngljhffenbmdjobakjplnlbfkeabbpma?hl=en-US)

------
arnorhs
If this is a solution to the "not enough links that I personally like" \-
kudos to the author. Nice to find a fun project to work on that will also
solve a problem for them.

I personally despise recommendation / personalization algorithms of any kind.
I still have never found one that's actually better than myself at
distinguishing articles that I'd like to read, music that I want to listen to,
tweets I'd like to see, etc.

When reading HN, I'm constantly surprised by links that would not normally be
on my radar for things I'm interested in. I think personalization algos, in
general, are good at filtering those away.

Since the author mentioned HN being too much of a firehose and this then also
being a solution to the "too many links to keep up to date on" problem, the
solution might be a bit simpler than the author suggested.

HN already has the "best" links at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/best](https://news.ycombinator.com/best)

It's hard to find - it's in the 'Lists' section in the footer, but it's still
there and I use it all the time, when I haven't been actively reading HN for a
while.

------
hayksaakian
ideally you could train the data set from stories i've upvoted on HN

[https://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id={{username}](https://news.ycombinator.com/saved?id={{username})}

------
pflanze
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602407](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602407)

------
AznHisoka
It seems you prefer to read articles from:

\- WashingtonPost

\- BusinessWeek

\- MarginalRevolution

\- NY Times

[1] Based on BuzzSumo's social data:

[http://app.buzzsumo.com/#/influencers?q=@joelgrus&type=influ...](http://app.buzzsumo.com/#/influencers?q=@joelgrus&type=influencers&result_type=relevancy&blogger&influencer&company&journalist&regular_people&ignore_broadcasters=false&page=1)
(Press View Links Shared, Analyze Links Tab]

------
himal
Github link:
[https://github.com/joelgrus/hackernews](https://github.com/joelgrus/hackernews)

------
seizethecheese
From the first paragraph: "people vote [links] up or down." Um... can't links
only be voted up?

~~~
sethaurus
Past a certain karmic threshold, both are allowed.

~~~
ColinWright
Are you sure? I have over 60k karma and still can't downvote links.

------
j2kun
It seems there is a small but very strong subculture of HackerNews readers who
enjoy reading and discussing mathematical things. I would love to have a
separate feed of those stories (and then after I'm done I could browse the HN
front page), and I have often thought about the possibility of writing a
program to do that.

DataTau (the HN for data mining) seems to have failed, so I imagine a filter
is the way to go rather than make a new website.

~~~
jt2190
I think one of the challenges of hosting a "sub-HN" is that the hosting costs
are hard to justify.

This raises the question: How does YC justify hosting costs? My completely-
off-the-cuff-assumption-take-this-with-a-huge-grain-of-salt is that YC
benefits by having a huge audience to make announcements to, like job postings
at YC funded companies, various pg essays, or just investing in overall
goodwill from the HN audience. Probably the most likely reason is to increase
deal-flow to YCombinator itself, though.

~~~
icebraining
Why does it need to have some justification beyond being a fun hobby? HN is
hosted on a single server, and it probably uses less than 1TB/month, so it's
not that expensive for someone with a Bay Area tech salary, let alone the
whole YC.

------
kra
I just use the 50 or 100 point minimum feed in my reader, and skip articles
that don't look interesting based on how much time I want to spend. Sometimes
I only read articles if they're a day old and the first comment makes them
look interesting.

------
ninjakeyboard
Cool story bro. You may want to check out digitalocean for hosting - their
cheapest option is only $5 a month - about equivalent to the smaller $40/month
aws option. It's very simple as well.

------
siculars
Ideas this the first time around. Cool, but still have the same problem I had
then. Confirmation bias.

------
ingend88
Interesting. This will go into today's top5HN Newsletter. Signup at
top5hn.launchrock.co

------
piracyde25
Wait, this is 2 years ago?

