
A cure for Hacker News overload - epi0Bauqu
http://jmillerinc.com/2010/07/23/a-cure-for-hacker-news-overload/
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jashmenn
Privacy issues aside, I'd love a co-occurring votes / collaborative filtering
based approach to HN. The problem here is that a fixed threshold of votes is a
coarse estimation of quality and relevance.

Imagine a system where each HN vote is weighted according to your similarity
to that voter. That way a vote by people with whom I have very little in
common would also be worth very little to me.

I'd love to view a HN where I don't see the highly-voted Gruber/Apple/Facebook
posts but I still see the stuff about Clojure, Steve Blank, and patio11.

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jmillerinc
You can implement what you want with simple keyword & url filtering.

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w1ntermute
Speaking of this, does anyone know of a good RSS filter? By that I mean a
service to which you give a link to an RSS feed and provide certain filters,
and they will provide a link to a modified version of the feed that they host
themselves.

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seancron
Check out <http://feedrinse.com/>

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w1ntermute
Awesome, this is exactly what I wanted! By filtering out all the
Apple/iPhone/iPad-related crap, I'll probably be able to cut the number of new
items from tech blogs in half.

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seancron
And if it's a Gawker Media site, they allow you to filter their by changing
the URI. For example,
[http://gizmodo.com/tag/not:apple/not:iphone/not:ipad/index.x...](http://gizmodo.com/tag/not:apple/not:iphone/not:ipad/index.xml)

I wish more sites had that kind of filtering.

~~~
w1ntermute
Oh, that's even better. I don't subscribe to Gizmodo, but I do subscribe to
Lifehacker.

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samd
I'd like a Best of Hacker News that, like Best of Reddit, links to
exceptionally interesting comments. The comments on HN are usually far more
interesting than the stories, and often interesting comments are attached to
uninteresting stories.

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michael_scheibe
Well, there is a Best of Hacker News page, but it shows the best submissions
of the past few days rather than the best comments.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/best>

~~~
s-phi-nl
There is also a best comments page at
<http://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments>.

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duck
Great solution and glad to see how you expanded it to other thresholds. I
think this might be the best automated way to track the best of Hacker News
(of course I think my <http://www.hackernewsletter.com> is another great way
with more of an non-automated feel + other content.)

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ritonlajoie
Very good project. I would love to see, in the rss feed, the real article (the
HN text or the link the story points to). This would be great so that we don't
have to get out of google reader to actually read the article.

Example :
[http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://steveblank.com/2010/07...](http://toadjaw.com/article?url=http://steveblank.com/2010/07/26/you-
cant-take-it-with-you/)

Hacker News reader for mobiles, created by toadjaw, is using a scrapping
script which will extract nicely the article from the linked webpage.

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espinchi
I prefer <http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/>: that's the top 10 articles of
the previous day. Reading them one day late is not too bad for me, and it
helps procrastinate less: it has put an end on my "let's see if there's
something new".

Still this is a very good alternative, which I'll probably end up trying :)

~~~
adrianwaj
If you're not time bound to the absolute latest, also check out the new
<http://hackerbra.in> \- it will shade down the snapshots you've already seen
in its history

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Hexstream
A noprocrast of 3 days works great for me!

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thaumaturgy
This may actually prompt me to keep a Twitter client open again (for the first
time in a year). Thanks!

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photon_off
Dapper + Yahoo Pipes = Same result, allowing customizable score filter,
customizable sorting, customizable date thresholds, etc. In about 30 minutes.

If a single person replies to this comment, I'll implement it.

EDIT: T+46: As promised, but without the sorting or date threshold. Sorry.

Change the parameters to meet your needs. Supports min/max comments/points.
Sorts by points DESC. Go play with the pipe if you want :)

Apologies that it doesn't tweet you.

[http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ceb3c855a339606d3c...](http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=ceb3c855a339606d3c57489f4b0a4206&_render=rss&max_comments=10000&max_points=10000&min_comments=20&min_points=20)

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megablast
sure, why not. Not sure what dapper is required for, couldn't you doo this all
in pipes?

I use pipes for a number of my applications, great stuff yahoo.

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seanmcdonnell
This is awesome, I love it.

However, is anyone else concerned that the driver seat of HN is essentially
being handed over to new users as more advanced users switch to services like
this or "HN daily" or even the "/best" page? It seems like the people that
don't know anything exists beyond the front page will become the only ones
left to do the work of curating content.

(just speculating, nothing against new users I haven't been here that long
myself...)

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Semiapies
Part of why I like HN is that I _don't_ have a big queue of things to read,
unlike my RSS feeds. I can skim without feeling that I'm missing something.

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jacquesm
Neat, see also:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514037>

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petercooper
As long as only a minority of users use this, great. Otherwise, if everyone's
reading through things like this, WTF is voting the stories up in the first
place?

Part of what makes HN good is that most people hit the site and help with the
voting. The more people who move away to reading HN remotely or through
feeds.. the worse the voting situation gets.

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jmillerinc
Agreed, but I don't think there's much to worry about as it stands. PG said
newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of ppl
following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that.

~~~
petercooper
_PG said newsyc currently gets 60,000 unique visitors per day, and the # of
ppl following these twitter feeds is barely 1% of that._

Though that doesn't say much to what percentage of the 60,000 are even users
or logged in.. I suspect it's not a high percentage.

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jcurbo
Thanks a lot, this was bugging me the other day and I was starting to
brainstorm how I could filter things. This is perfect!

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samratjp
Diff it!

Say we snap a cache frequently either centrally or locally. It would be so
much easier to just diff the HN cache throughout each session with the last
central cache or local cache to see what has changed significantly by
highlighting or something.

~~~
adrianwaj
I was thinking of adding that as a feature to <http://hackerbra.in>.
Currently, news is every 2hrs, ask 5hrs, best 11hrs. The site tells you if
you've already viewed the current snapshot, but actually highlighting the new
items since the last snapshot would be an interesting feature. Also, when
stored, having a tweet go out with the number of new items for that snapshot
could be useful.

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mark_l_watson
Thanks, I added the 50 score filter feed to Google reader and it works well
for me so far.

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empire29
Many thanks! I've added the feeds to Pulse on my iPad and its working like a
charm!

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jonny_noog
_@newsyc20 includes links to the story itself and the Hacker News comment page
for that story._

Sold! Not having links to the comments when following @newsycombinator always
perturbed me.

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dwynings
Kudos for adding the user's Twitter username. Really impressive!

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w1ntermute
Still holding out for a version that uses Readability to include the full
linked article directly in the feed :)

