Hacker News Reader

Comment by harry8 | Hacker News Reader

Why is this on the front page? Not very interesting, not very useful, a footnote for the windows vc++ dev team maybe at best. Probably a fair way down footnotes to their list of priorities though.

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I recently stopped regularly visiting Slashdot, and started regularly visiting HN.

Besides regularly finding more appealing content, I have found that typically HN comments are less hateful, disparaging and isolating.

One (minor) version of this distinction is the constant debate on Slashdot about what should be published, and what should not. There, an assumed standard is expected for something to be considered "news for nerds" or whatever. For the most part I haven't seen that here. I've appreciated that fact.

Because fuck me, if you can't just pass by a link among thirty or so, give up and stop using the web. It's full of shit you don't think belongs there. Just stop shitting on things I want to read just because you don't want to read it too.

[Edited because upon re-reading, I really wished it had line breaks.]

I recently returned to HN, having read it a little a few years back. I remembered it as a low-volume, high-quality feed, where I was hesitant to speak, because all the other comments were so full of knowledge.

Now, HN seems to have become like any other place, full of noise like politics, social commentary, and just regular news. I guess the commenters are still knowledgeable about technological subjects, though.

The inevitability of every good site is that it will eventually grow, and with it, the diversity of the interests of the user-base. While I come to HN mainly for the technical news, I find it convenient that it also keeps me in the loop about a wider variety of topics I would surely miss otherwise. Your preference may obviously vary.

I browse here with a greasemonkey script to hide links from mainstream news sites, aggregators, etc. That cuts down to mostly just the tech content.

    var links = document.links;
    var boring = [
      'adage.com',
      'arstechnica',
      'bbc',
      'discovermagazine',
      'bloomberg',
      'bloombergview',
      'buzzfeed',
      'businessinsider',
      'californiasunday',
      'cnn',
      'csmonitor',
      'dailymail',
      'digg',
      'economist',
      'engadget',
      'esquire',
      'fastcompany',
      'forbes',
      'ft.com',
      'fortune',
      'fusion',
      'geekwire',
      'gizmodo',
      'harvard.edu',
      'huffingtonpost',
      'inc.com',
      'longreads',
      'medium',
      'mondaynote',
      'nature',
      'nautil.us',
      'newscientist',
      'newstatesman',
      'newyorker',
      'npr.org',
      'nybooks',
      'nymag',
      'nytimes',
      'pando',
      'psychologytoday',
      'qz.com',
      'reddit',
      'reuters',
      'sciencedaily',
      'scientificamerican',
      'slate',
      'techcrunch',
      'telegraph',
      'theatlantic',
      'theguardian',
      'thenation',
      'theparisreview',
      'theverge',
      'theregister',
      'time',
      'usatoday',
      'vancouversun',
      'vice',
      'vimeo',
      'vogue',
      'washingtonpost',
      'wired',
      'wsj',
      'yahoo',
      'youtube',
      'zdnet'
    ];
    matcher = new RegExp('\\b(' + (boring.join('|').replace(/\./g, '\\.')) + ')\\b');
    for (i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
      hostname = links[i].hostname.replace(/^www\./, '');
      if (hostname.match(matcher)) {
        links[i].style.setProperty('display', 'none');
        links[i].parentNode.insertBefore(document.createTextNode('[removed]'), links[i]);
      }
    }

It's not that I wouldn't read those sites, they're just not what I'm interested in reading when I come here.

Cool! I've been wondering if there is a feed of only the good stuff. If HN itself doesn't provide one, maybe there should be a separate site that does that filtering. I was thinking it would be manually curated, but maybe a list like yours would work as well.

Maybe you should set up such a site. All it would have to do is link to the articles and to the corresponding HN discussions.

Most but not all politics and social commentary gets flagged pretty quickly. Some tech news also gets flagged. It would actually be interesting to have a page for flagged stories for transparency.

Getting responses from people actually involved in making tech decisions (like Gratilup here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12113571, and recently one of the original authors of Excel CSV export) is part of the appeal of this site to me.

you can enable showdead in the settings, flagged articles will show up as [dead] in /newest.

Thanks. Some show up as flagged, some show up as dead, but lots of live stories in between. I'm more interested in the ones where they had lots of votes in a short time but didn't make it past the flag process.

Then maybe http://hnrankings.info/ is what you're looking for? Front page articles which get "flagged off the front page" don't end up [flagged] or [dead], instead they drop in rank quickly. You can often see that quite well from the charts on that site.

That would probably be closer and I suspect they have the data to get what I want, which is more like a list of flagged stories to understand some of the inherent bias in the site.

Out of interest, where would you go for news that was like the old HN?

I used to really enjoy ArsTechnica but the quality of the journalism seems to have dropped slightly.

Perhaps https://lobste.rs/ might be an addition to your reading habits?

Is michaelochurch still getting upvoted there? I used to enjoy lobste.rs, but seeing yet another heavily upvoted rant about "open-plan agile mouthbreathing drones" or similar would ruin my whole morning.

Judge for yourself: https://lobste.rs/threads/michaelochurch

Maybe I should have phrased it, "what am I missing?" Which was the actual purpose of the question.

Maybe I'm not missing much. Cool.

Best all.

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