Ask HN: Is there a way to see only technical posts on HN? - mcnamaratw
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erik66132
I wrote a greasemonkey userscript for Firefox to reduce the number of non-
technical articles. It works alright, I never meant it to be perfect, just get
rid of the stuff that never is fun for me to read or is about topics that come
up too often.

[https://github.com/ErikHarmon/hncleanse/blob/master/hncleans...](https://github.com/ErikHarmon/hncleanse/blob/master/hncleanse.user.js)

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PopeOfNope
I did something very similar with dotjs before I realized it was introducing a
1-5 second delay in the loading of every webpage. How's the performance of
this script?

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erik66132
It's imperceptible to me. The number of search terms is pretty low. My regex
isn't as sophisticated as it could be because the script started as a simple
terms list using indexof, so it could be improved a little bit as more terms
are added.

Mainly I filter by entire sites, which helps a lot. I won't miss many
technical articles by filtering nytimes, and if I do, I can live with that.

I'll take PRs or suggestions, this was a ten minute project to scratch an
itch.

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mcnamaratw
The political and current-events stuff is very interesting, and I tend to get
distracted!

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thebillywayne
Yeah, there's so much great content here, sometimes I too seem to not get to
the purely tech stuff. You may be interested in lobste.rs. I've found that
they have nearly the same tech content, but lobste.rs is tech only.

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xtrumanx
Thanks for reminding me about lobste.rs. Last time I checked it out there
weren't many comments which didn't inspire me to leave a comment. My favorite
part of HN was the potential discussions to be had and its great to see
lobste.rs now has more comments than what I used to remember.

Odd, I was sure I had a lobste.rs account but it says my username is invalid.
Do you have an invite available?

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kzisme
This is my first time hearing about lobste.rs - care to explain what it's
purpose is (aside from a tech spin on HN)

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aikah
I guess it wouldn't be too hard to implement a basic app that would allow you
to do this. HN has an API, fetch data, then filter by keywords or links. If I
have some time,i'll hack something.

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tptacek
Yes, but it takes effort and cooperation: flag the political stories.

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woah
I've flagged this comment because I disagree with it.

EDIT: Let me elaborate: This use of flagging, like the suggested flagging of
political articles is an abuse of the HN flagging system. If you do not feel
that a story is upvote-worthy, don't upvote it. I, and most other users, have
never flagged anything. Using flags as some sort of ersatz downvote to enforce
your personal preferences is abuse of the system.

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thealistra
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
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.

Off-Topic: Most stories about _politics_ , or crime, or sports, unless they're
evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters,
or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-
topic.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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philippnagel
Tags would be useful.

