
Ask HN: Idea for improvement on HN reading. - proexploit
I've been toying around with this idea lately, that would really increase my participation with Hacker News and benefit all who used it.<p>In a nutshell:
Sort by being able to disallow keywords, usernames, dates, etc. to get the stories you'll like the most first when you check.<p>In my my brief research (i.e. Google search) it doesn't look like HN has an API. Possibly scraping the data using scRUBYt! (for ROR) or a similar technique would be effective enough. Then, you would re-weight the data based on additional specifications.<p>If you took the last x00 submissions (or top x00 in current popularity) and then taught the application what you did and didn't like, it could remove, raise or lower results as they came in.<p>As an example:
In my case, Look at HN about twice a day. I generally like submissions with "Ask HN", "Tell HN" and "SASS" in the title. I don't like submissions discussing "Clojure" or "iPad" in the title. They aren't relevant to me. With my example, after scraping the data, the application could bump anything with a keyword I like up the list by 20%, and anything I don't like down the list by 50% (or 100% if I really hate everything on such a subject). There's so much more that could be said, but it seems quite simple.<p>I'm a designer mainly, and wannabe hacker. Any thoughts? Is this frowned upon by HN in general? Want to make it a reality (you hack, I design)?
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moollaza
Your idea seems pretty cool. I follow engadget.com as well and on a related
note, they offer an "apple-free" version of the site which can be changed to
exclude whatever you want through the url. So perhaps thats an idea?

Here's engadgets article on their apple-free version:
<http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/30/do-you-hate-apple-news/>

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proexploit
That's pretty cool, that's essentially what I'm talking about. Maybe this will
be enough motivation for me to finally start learning a little Ruby :)

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krainboltgreene
This sounds like a great feature! I wonder how hard it would be to put
together?

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proexploit
I doesn't sound too difficult to me, but who knows. At a minimum level, should
just scrape the first x amount of links, analyze the title for keywords and
re-order the entries.

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vkdelta
It would be an excellent feature. I am in the same boat as yours.

