
Consuming Hacker News - bobm_db
https://riskfirst.org/2019/05/14/Hacker-News
======
Jun8
I think aggregators like SkimFeed miss an important point, often made on HN:
for a lot of people, including me, a lot of the value of HN is in the
comments. In fact, going to the extreme, some posts have little learnable
content other than TIL. First example that comes to mind is a post I recently
upvoted: Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946989](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946989))
which had a small number of information-rich comments. Or there are pots where
the content is obvious from the title, where I go directly to comments to see
people's assessment, e.g. Federated Learning
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19944510](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19944510)).
On average I would say value of comments to post is 80 to 20 percent for me.

So, rather than tools for submission-based skimming/alerts, I'd like to see
advanced tools based on comments: Some ideas:

* Number of comments divided by submission points is a rough measure of contentious topics in the HN community, esp. if this is > 1\. Recent example: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970544](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970544). Sort front page by this score. Another obvious measure would be the number of grayed out and flagged comments.

* Identify comments leading to discussions and highlight them. Since comment scores are hidden this has to be done trough analysis of replies (maybe keywords "good reply" or number of replies).

* Identify comments that are informational, simple measure would be to count the number of links; harder to do would be to analyze the "factfullness".

Just some random thoughts.

P.S. I offer myself as a cautionary example of getting too much into HN: This
is the first site I skim on my phone when I get up (to get awake, you know)
and I easily spend more than an hour every day (who am I kidding, more like
two hours). _This is idiotic!_ Don't let your idea debt
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11027684](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11027684))
accumulate.

~~~
StreakyCobra
Sometimes I do not even read the article at all. Either I read a few comments,
and if it seems interesting I go to read the article. And sometime I just read
all the comments without even putting an eye on the article. So yes, I
strongly agree. HN value is in the comments.

PS: I just notice I did it again here... replying to a comment without having
seen the article. I know in general it is better to have read the article
before commenting, for sure for top levels comments at least, but in this case
my answer is independent of the original content.

~~~
m463
Sometimes I don't read the article because I have to take the time to ublock
my filters (wsj for instance, nature or medium identity redirects, etc)

------
pandatigox
Another website is hckrnews.com, which is an aggregate of all HN posts by
time. It’s really useful if you want to capture all items, as it has a feature
that shows you where left off

~~~
Shorn
I browse HN via RSS aggregator; so I catch all the articles, the thing is
designed for keeping track of what you've read, integrates with daily reading
flow along with all the other RSS feeds. Bonus points, my RSS aggregator of
choice has a nice mobile reading experience too so my browsing experience
tracks seamlessly across my various platforms.

------
sctb
> _We like to think about filter bubbles with respect to political divisions
> on Facebook. Users are relentlessly profiled and marketed-against there.
> However, they are a natural consequence of the HN algorithm too._

No way, there's just one ranking algorithm for everyone.

------
bobm_db
I'm starting to find the "new" page more relevant to me than the front page...

~~~
petercooper
If you have the time, a _lot_ of good stuff flies through without getting
upvoted (enough). But this is great for me as my job is to curate such stuff
for elsewhere ;-)

------
chrisaycock
I like Hacker News Daily, created by @cperciva:

[http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/](http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/)

It lists the 10 highest-rated stories each day. I added the RSS feed to my
news reader so I can see the biggest items even if I don't happen to read HN
that day.

~~~
whenchamenia
I perfer the 'unlinkable' digest myself.

Most know what I mean.

------
gfo
I'm confused about the mention of filter bubbles in this context. Generally,
they're only bad when they're highly customized to what the individual user
wants to see (because it will heavily bias toward their current beliefs).

Maybe it's the negative connotation I have to them due to Facebook so I'm
wondering why this is mentioned here. I would expect the "proper" use of a
filter bubble to be the application mentioned: not tailored to each individual
user but rather highlighting what the entire community will find relevant, in
this case based presumable on votes (though we wouldn't know if clicks are
also a factor given the proprietary algorithm).

Of course, I suppose an entire community like HN could develop a macro bubble
but one might presume an entire community should already have diverse
perspectives which could keep it more balanced.

------
oriolgg
I am on HN mainly for the comments.

The way I usually learn about interesting threads (which I mostly like to read
after a while so they have enough comments) is the HackerNewsletter[0].

Also (shameless plug), I built AskHN Digest[1], a weekly recap of the top
threads of AskHN with their top comments, to make sure I don't miss any good
content from the section. Many times the comments there have been insightful
and made it worth visiting the thread after a while, when most people had the
chance to comment on it.

[0] [https://hackernewsletter.com](https://hackernewsletter.com)

[1] [https://askhndigest.com](https://askhndigest.com)

Edit: formatting

------
kebert
The RSS feed
([https://news.ycombinator.com/rss](https://news.ycombinator.com/rss)) comes
into FreshRSS
([https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS](https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS))

Usually just skim the comments to gather insight as quickly as possible, if
there seems to be a strong signal with depth, I'll add the HN page to Pocket
([https://getpocket.com](https://getpocket.com)) and check back later when I
clear through all the backlog of interesting things

HN has replaced Reddit for me. I'm still reading Slashdot, two decades later,
it usually just dupes HN.

Also Lobsters ([https://lobste.rs](https://lobste.rs)) has some decent
content, similar position in that it often dupes HN, but interesting
regardless

------
twic
_Recently, I’ve been hearing about Skimfeed, which aggregates 12-or-so
articles from a bunch of news sources including HN._

The top link in Skimfeed's HN section is that post itself!

------
canada_dry
I use an old FF version running greasemonkey just to browse HN. My GM script
concats two pages of posts, filters out any posts that have less votes than
x/hr since being posted, and highlights ones that have a list of keywords I'm
interested in.

I love FF, but it's a constantly shifting target esp wrt greasemonkey! I gave
up trying to convert my old scripts.

~~~
hkai
Sounds like a lot of work. There's a Telegram channel that posts all links
when they hit a score of 50, so you don't need to filter and you know what
you've read and what you haven't (@news_ycombinator on Telegram).

It's basically the same idea as the good old Google Reader.

------
bredren
Did not know about AlerHN but signed up and added some search terms relevant
to my main personal work project.

------
sys_64738
I use RSS to see the latest news stories. No need for any other third party
webpage, IMO.

------
artur_makly
there was a ML experiment back in 2015 to categorize the posts:
[https://monkeylearn.com/blog/hacker-news-categorizer-with-
ma...](https://monkeylearn.com/blog/hacker-news-categorizer-with-machine-
learning/)

sadly it is no longer live. Could be a great side-project!

------
seany
No mentions of n-gate?

~~~
bobm_db
What do I need to google to understand this reference?

~~~
icebraining
"n-gate", which should lead you to
[http://n-gate.com/hackernews/](http://n-gate.com/hackernews/)

------
octosphere
I wrote a script which opens a bunch of random HN links in new tabs. In
firefox you have to over-ride the default amount of tabs you can open and
change it to something like 9999. I once shared the script on HN under a
different account, and it got no interest at all. The idea behind the script
is that it presents random articles, so there is no bias behind the webpage
you are reading. I use the script all the time and it's great to be presented
with articles you otherwise would not have clicked. It's not hard to write
such a script, but it gets trickier when you start to add filters to it. So
for example, you may want to omit opening links with 'Soylent', 'Drone' or
'Trump' in the title.

