

HN Summary - auston
http://hnsummary.com/

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dschobel
_Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News_

What's the algorithm for what makes it to this site? Or is it some random
guy's editorial discretion?

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eam
Yeah, what is the algorithm?

What would be cool is if you implemented something like Netflix, you know like
a recommendation engine. Something that bases of your tastes and preferences
and also uses the preferences of those users that have similar tastes as you
do. Base on that you can recommend what's "worth reading." :)

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kwamenum86
And you can figure out what people have read using the (soon to be closed by
Mozilla) CSS history hack. You can easily index every story on HN by pinging
and scraping newest every 20 or minutes. Don't worry they wont block you ;)

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Zev
The problem when indexing isn't getting the _new_ content; it is getting the
~1,240,000 older posts that aren't on newest anymore.

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kwamenum86
You can grab that from searchyc.com, or just ignore it. You can get reasonable
recommendations based on the latest articles. This would not be a general
purpose recommendation engine, so you would actually need much less data.
Attempting to analyze 1 million+ articles seems like overkill in this case.
You could just scrape for a week. If you are building this I actually have
several months worth of articles indexed, and would be happy to provide the db
dump of 80,000+ articles.

I'm actually thinking about hacking this up this weekend as well.

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keyist
Not being facetious, just trying to find out if this site is for me: all the
summarized articles so far have zero technical content (ie stuff on Python,
Javascript, memcached, hardcore bit-on-bit action, etc). Is this intentional
and indicative of hnsummary's content in the future?

Now this is me being facetious: should the answer to the above be yes, I find
both hnsummary's name and its tagline of "Just the stuff worth reading from
Hacker News" to be presumptuous at best, misleading and condescending at
worst.

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covercash
Any plans/desire to do a daily audio podcast of these, release by ~5pm EST so
people can listen to it on their drive home?

I have some ideas for this, @covercash on twitter if you're interested in
chatting.

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hnsummary
I'll contact you.

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ankeshk
Can you redirect the comment link for each summary to comments over here?

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hnsummary
I include a link in each summary back to the HN comments for the article.

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johnrob
You should disclose what you consider to be "worth reading". Hopefully you
have a bias that is different then the front page, otherwise it's really no
different than that.

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jcl
On the other hand, he is contributing both a news filter and summaries.
Perhaps there is value in the summaries, even if the filter mirrored the front
page directly (sort of like Slashdot?).

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timmorgan
Cool. Can we get the story on this? Is it done by a human, e.g. will it stop
working for a week while said editor is on vacation? Is it auto-generated by
vote count? Details please.

[edit] I have to assume it's an editorial thing, since the summaries couldn't
be auto-selected like that, I don't think.

[edit 2] dschobel beat me to the question.

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hnsummary
Yes human. I summarize articles I find most interesting and would be of
interest to the HN community as a whole. As long as I'm up-voted then I'll
keep doing it.

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lotharbot
Any plans to summarize or highlight the comments you find most interesting?

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hnsummary
I've thought about that. If I see interesting comments I may work it into the
summary with a citation. My first choice would be to direct people back to HN
for the article discussion.

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jack7890
_Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News_

Isn't that the point of upvoting?

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mquander
How so? Why would the most popular stuff always be the stuff worth reading?
That's certainly not true for most media. Do you suppose that the Billboard
Top 100 is the music most worth listening to?

Not saying that having an editor pick them out is necessarily going to do a
better job, but there's certainly room to do a better job.

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dschobel
I think in a relatively niche community where the readership submits the
content and then determines what's popular, ranking probably correlates better
with quality vs billboard or other mass media where the relationship is
strictly producer -> consumer. That's just my intuition though.

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mquander
Well, I agree, of course, it's hard to say that we don't do better than
Billboard. That was a little bit of hyperbole. But consider: People upvote
things for a zillion reasons.

Because it made them chuckle. Because they agree with it. Because it shoots
down another submission they really disagree with. Because the post wasn't
very good but it had a link and the link was really good. Because the author
came and posted in the comment thread and said something interesting about it.
Because their buddy posted it. Because a minor HN celebrity posted it. Because
it's all about banana-flavored threadsafe data structures in Erlang and they
did their Ph.D. thesis on banana-flavored data structures and nobody ever
posts about them anymore.

Most of those barely correlate to what we mean when we say "quality" at all.
The people who upvote only things that are "high quality" probably upvote much
less, in fact, than people who upvote for other reasons. So that's why I would
not expect upvotes to correlate with quality.

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axod
At the moment, everyone upvotes anything containing the word 'iPad'. So
boring. I think editorial control usually works far better than voting up/down
by users. Democracy absolutely sucks.

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krainboltgreene
This is an awesome idea and could be awesomer if turned into a full news
website instead of just a blog, with multiple editorials and pictures and
shit.

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jxcole
Maybe at some point you should allow users to write their own reviews so that
your admins aren't stuck writing them all the time? Maybe some sort of social
networking utility?

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dsplittgerber
I just want to say thank you.

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diego001
Damn recursion.

