I think this is a great idea. One suggestion would be a process for nominating or voting on speakers from the HN community. If you send someone an email saying you've got 100 people who've said they would love to hear them do a podcast, that could be a great way to get them involved. It could be nice to have a mix of regulars who do well and guests (especially guests who have some relevance to a big story from that week).
I am more attracted to the idea that it’s simply based on HN activity, without a separate vote. Decide on the # of guests, say 2-3, go down the list of top stories, and reach out to the OP’s until there is a “quorum” of those who agree to participate.
I think a method like this would be more likely to expose lesser-known folks.
They discuss HN stories, but mostly talk very honestly about working on their startups and have great interviews with people like Patrick Collison (Stripe founder), Anthony Goldbloom & Jeremy Howard (Kaggle founders), Alex MacCaw, etc.
I absolutely agree with this. Hopefully with different guests each week it becomes easier to start with who people are, rather than some inane nonsense.
Great point. I get that people want to inject some personality, but listener's time is precious and there's enough "what did you have for breakfast" shows out there! I like podcasts which leave the chitchat to the pros and let their personality and views shine through the content you're covering. (With the exception of those where they can actually pull off banter and comedy well. IMO The Verge is one such podcast.)
This could definitely be an interesting podcast. My only bit of feedback is that the chosen topics seem to be the events and topics that have already been discussed to death already. How are the featured topics being decided upon?
There have been some other very interesting topics I'm sure people would like at least an overview of within the week you based the outline on. There have even been some Show HN posts with peak scores higher than the Instagram acquisition. If this is going to be an HN based podcast I think it'd be very important to include some things like this directly from our community.
Good idea. Half an hour on 3 different subjects may not be the right format. I'd rather listen to ONE subject I am interested in for 20 minutes with the right participants, than 3 subjects with less depth and less relevant members.
It's probably one of the technically more in-depth podcasts out there. It's a weekly mix of news and topics and usually covers the top x hacker news items seeing as we're all avid HN readers. It also sounds a bit unorganized and might not be politically correct from time to time, just a fair warning :)
You might think about reaching out to @jason, I bet he'd love to partner on a "This Week in Hacker News" for the This Week In network. Who knows, it could turn into a real job.
Awesome! Social news podcasts are actually surprisingly interesting. I hosted 6 episodes of a Stumble Upon podcast like 6 years ago; we got a few hundred users or so before SU banned me for using their name in our title.
I lose too much stories on HN, sometimes because of lack of time, sometimes because I check HN without paying attention. A podcast would be a great idea, I would be the first to subscribe. Too bad I can't help.
Thanks. I've been doing nothing with this domain for months. This morning I finally got down to something and got this up. So many things that I could have procrastinated on but I thought I'd just get it up and out there.
You are only a couch and some beer away from being the next Diggnation :P Seriously though, have you thought about instead of having a few guests talking about stories, make it open mic so everyone listening to the show could also participate, open mic style? That could be fun.
I'm also writing a tool that helps podcasters organize sound clips and coordinate broadcasting with multiple guests: https://github.com/jiakeliu/Cobra
Please excuse the svn to git transfer mess, but maybe this tool would come in handy one day.
By associating speakers with HN accounts, you could filter out below a certain karma. Not to make it a clique, but more to just stop junk callers to some extent. Not too sure what I think of the open concept, but thought I should point it out.
Thanks for working on this!