
Less annoying Hacker News - mmt
http://hn.elijames.org/
======
lettergram
I appreciate the idea, but I question the merit. Importantly, I think what it
is really optimizing for are posts without experts on Hacker News.

As the author of [https://hnprofile.com](https://hnprofile.com) \- I've spent
a long time analyzing this...

For example, you post something about PostgreSQL on HN it'll have a ton of
discussion. That's not just because there is squabbling, it's because people
are interested. Often it is a disagreement, but it could be providing
additional context. Take this comment thread on PostgeSQL 11:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17962821](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17962821)

The comments are significantly more interesting and helpful than the article
(not that the article is bad, just the collective knowledge of HN provides
more value). I often upvote items because I think they are interesting, but I
comment asking questions, adding context, or providing feedback. That's the
value of hacker news, IMO.

If you filter that out, I might as well just go to my feedly.

Edit: Prior discussion about hnprofile:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981)

~~~
mmt
> Take this comment thread on PostgeSQL 11:

That example doesn't seem to support your point.

211 upvote with only 54 comments seems like a thread with a very high votes-
to-comments ratio as well as a high absolute number of upvotes, so I would
expect the algorithm to rate it highly.

Perhaps, enough readers looking at the thread and enjoying the article _or_
the discussion would leave an upvote, even if they don't leave a comment.
However, in the "squabbly" threads, commenters seem to overrun upvoters, and
quickly at that.

I've seen some where someone was creating new HN accounts to circumvent HN's
comment rate-limiting, due to wanting to respond on so many sub-threads. It's
difficult to imagine that kind of fervor resulting in thoughtful discourse or
even conforming to HN's guideline regarding being more substantive when more
divisive. As such, a high comment-count velocity would be a good "negative"
measure, but, absent that, just comment count is a good enough heuristic.

> If you filter that out, I might as well just go to my feedly.

Personally, I don't think I'd use it as an exclusive filter, but, perhaps, as
a next step after the HN front page (but before the HN page 2).

~~~
lettergram
I think this post itself is a great example. At the moment, there's a post
about vaccines above this post. It has had very little discussions, isn't
really about "hacking".

Literally the first comment is complaining how it's lacking:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17997400](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17997400)

In the OP's link, the vaccine article appears above this post by a wide
margin. It shouldn't.

~~~
mmt
> It has had very little discussions,

That can be viewed as a very good thing, considering the word "vaccine" can be
a lightning-rod fod flamewars, even on HN.

> isn't really about "hacking"

It's about science and how it's funded, which is routinely a topic of interest
here, and is well within the guidelines: "That includes more than hacking and
startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything
that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

> In the OP's link, the vaccine article appears above this post by a wide
> margin. It shouldn't.

Ah, but I disagree. The discussion in this thread is very "meta" and could
easily be characterized as annoying, even though I don't (yet) personally find
it to be.

~~~
shadowsun7
I’m the author of hnconf and I personally find this meta thread rather
annoying. It gratifies me to see that it’s ranked really lowly on my site! ;)

------
shadowsun7
Author here. There’s a longer description in the Github readme:
[https://github.com/ejamesc/go-hn-confidence](https://github.com/ejamesc/go-
hn-confidence)

I should note that while this site is how I weaned myself off Hacker News,
it’s no longer as useful as it was in the past (hnconf has existed for 6
years). I’ve a feeling dang has taken this observation into account (that
upvote to comment ratio is a signal of quality) and they’ve adjusted HN’s
ranking algo accordingly.

I still use the site, but for a different reason: a site that updates once
every 30 minutes is far less addictive than a site that updates all the time.

Shameless plug: if you’re interested in little career optimisations like
these, you might want to check out my writing at
[https://commoncog.com/blog](https://commoncog.com/blog)

------
gnulinux
Imho it's the other way around. Threads with a lot of discussion is
interesting because... there is a lot of discussion meaning there are multiple
views and rational arguments. I think I like HN's algorithm better than this
one, but it's a very interesting idea, so it's definitely good that we have
both (for algorithmic variety).

~~~
paradite
That's exactly what I built a while ago:

[https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio](https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio)

It has both sorting orders and also past archives, with the other way round
sorting as default.

------
danmg
Here's the real 'less annoying' hackernews:

[https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-
content](https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content)

This generates an RSS feed with the contents of the articles inlined and
available at [https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-
content/...](https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-
content/output.rss)

By-passes most soft paywalls. No Javascript. No Tracking. No 'social' media
buttons. No modal dialogs. Just text you can read in a terminal based rss
reader like canto.

------
Deimorz
HN itself already pushes down articles that get more comments than votes.
Maybe not as aggressively as this site does it, but threads definitely drop
down the rankings very quickly if the number of comments starts outpacing the
score much.

------
paradite
I made a similar web app a while ago.

However, in my web app, I sort by reverse order by default to show the most
heated submissions first, with the option to reverse the order.

As a bonus, it also has past archives. Feel free to check it out:

[https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio](https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio)

------
jciochon
Cool site. Like a lot of folks here, I always appreciate things that are
minimal and quick.

However, I’d like to ask:

1) what, to you, makes HN annoying? In my experience it is already a very
minimal, light, and quick site. What problem did you aim to solve?

2) does this offer any advantage of the many minimal HN sites? E.g. hckrnews?

~~~
hashmap
It favors hn links that have a low squabble index.

> This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to
> this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative
> ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a
> high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to
> produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.

~~~
jciochon
Ah I see, perhaps I was too quick to the draw.

I haven’t heard the term “squabble index” before, and google returned zilch,
but I like it. That being said, I tend to use the comments on HN as a filter
for whether or not the article itself will be worth my time. Perhaps this is a
flawed heuristic.

------
mythz
In an effort to provide a higher signal-to-noise ratio I've created a "Tech
News Only" website at:

[https://techstacks.io](https://techstacks.io)

As I'm more interested in reading about Technology News and announcements
instead of the more political and non-technology content that's frequently
appearing on HN.

It's a mix of HN/Reddit where anyone can create and become an "owner of a
Technology" where they can moderate content posted to their own section and
enlist other Moderators to help.

It's optimized for fast navigation and posting with a number of keyboard
shortcuts to access most pages of the site. The benefit over HN / Reddit is
richer metadata so you can drill into just the news you're interested in. You
can "Subscribe" to different technology content and you can post full markdown
so content is richer and more visually appealing (if that's what you prefer).
In a way I like to think of it as a "hosted RSS" as you can customize your own
news feed (in addition to the global feed) in just the content you're
interested in.

The sites other primary purpose is to learn about the different "Technology
Stacks" that popular Startups and Apps use, which is primarily where all the
external contributions are going towards.

It's an OSS/BSD project which you can read more about its features and how it
was built at:

[https://github.com/NetCoreApps/TechStacks](https://github.com/NetCoreApps/TechStacks)

Previously I was posting all the interesting Tech News/Posts I've found on
HN/Reddit but haven't been able to keep up in the last 3 months due to work
time constraints, I'll pick it back up when everything settles back down
again, but would obviously love if others could contribute Tech
News/Announcements they find interesting.

Ultimately I'd really like to frequent a better "Tech Only News" feed of HN's
expert comment quality as I feel that a lot of good Tech Content is being lost
and hidden by clickbaity and political news.

------
anonu
From the site:

> the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-
> discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a
> disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes

I don't know if this is a perfect way to capture interesting things. Many
times I read the headline on HN and then go straight to the discussion.

What HN really needs is an algo that matches interesting articles to your
profile. I use hckrnews.com to filter out the most upvoted and commented top
posts. But I often find that things that interest me the most may not be the
most voted or commented on items.

------
dorkwood
I find this page a little hard to scan. I see that you're going for a minimal
look by keeping all post info on a single line, but the varying line length
means that the number of upvotes, for example, is in a very different place
each time. On the HN homepage, I can glance down in a few seconds and see
which posts have the most upvotes, but here I need to concentrate quite hard
to do the same since my eye has to do a bit of searching.

------
aidenn0
We should comment a lot on this post, thus ensuring it's high on HN, but low
on itself, right?

~~~
sethherr
Exactly

~~~
ggm
very meta

~~~
steve_adams_86
Squabble squabble

------
klenwell
_This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to
this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative ones.
In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high
upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to
produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes._

Interesting thesis. The current listing didn't convince me there's any merit
to it.

I might check this site out more often if it included the HN front page
ranking and a green/red up/down arrow showing the relative diff.

~~~
07d046
I've wondered about making the opposite, that is, a view that sorts by
controversy.

There are quite a few things that get posted here that quickly get votes,
quite a few comments, but are soon killed/massively down-ranked by flags.
Sometimes it would be interesting to be able to see what these are if you
don't see them in the hour or two that they're visible. I know they're often
controversial social or political topics and that HN doesn't really want them,
but they can still be interesting to look at.

~~~
majewsky
You might want to have a look at [https://hckrnews.com](https://hckrnews.com)
\- it shows all stories that ever were on the frontpage, ordered by time of
first appearance on the frontpage.

~~~
07d046
Thanks, I'd seen that before, but completely forgotten about it.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according
to this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative
ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a
high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to
produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.

I seem to remember HN itself also penalises posts with a lot of comments, on
the same grounds (that they're likely to be controversial) no?

------
xte
To be honest I follow HN via feed (Rss2Email), have tried hackernews Emacs
interface but it's simply too limited. WebUI is horrible and IMVHO can't be
really improved with web-tech.

For me the best thing is resurrect usenet and create an hn group, eventually
prox-ed to the site. It's not a matter of coding but means, websites are great
if they are hypertext, if they are applications (like support comment etc)
they are bad. newsgroups or mailing-lists work pretty for discussion.

------
Grue3
I prefer the chronological order of hckrnews. Also this is more annoying to me
because I cannot access it without a proxy (from Russia, probably because it's
hosted on AWS).

------
barrowclift
For those that are interested, I took a slightly different approach by making
a “Hacker News Cleanser service that will periodically hide articles based on
title keywords, site, and user.

[https://github.com/barrowclift/hacker-news-
cleanser](https://github.com/barrowclift/hacker-news-cleanser)

------
ivm
My approach is just filtering out the submissions that distract or annoy me:
[https://gist.github.com/ivmirx/66a0015884d44297ea05a8c54d935...](https://gist.github.com/ivmirx/66a0015884d44297ea05a8c54d93566d)

------
jspash
It’s kind of ironic that if there is a lot of interest (comments) in this
project that it will fall off the front page. But not on Hacker News itself.
Only on the project page itself.

------
kwhitefoot
It's also less annoying because the layout makes better use of the screen
space and the hotspots are larger which makes it even better for mobile and
touchscreen devices.

------
datpuz
The ironic thing is that Hacker News' sorting algorithm puts your site on the
front page, while your own does not. I like it though :)

------
runn1ng
Great!

More political and "bikeshed-dy" an article is, the more comments it has. This
seems great to eliminate that type of fluff.

------
Markoff
i find the most annoying thing it's not mobile friendly, good luck tapping on
comments on front page

------
binbag
But you need people to use vanilla HN in order to feed this ranking. Should
they use both?

------
bernardlunn
This will mark me as uncool or whatever but why is HN annoying. I like it

~~~
elcinr
It's constantly bombarding me with ads and spam emails.

------
vinni2
Are there APIs to scrape hackernews?

~~~
newscracker
Yes. Some sites as well as apps use it (so scraping the web pages is not
required).

See here:

[https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)

------
shmerl
Using number of comments as a negative sorting factor sounds wrong. That's a
very crude way of marking controversial topics.

------
VyperCard
️ [http://hackurls.com](http://hackurls.com)

