Hacker News Reader

Comment by niyazpk | Hacker News Reader

cperciva, I really appreciate the effort you put into this.

One thing I find a bit depressing is that even though this scheme hugely reduces the time one spends on HN by filtering the articles according to votes, the top voted articles are not the ones that I would want to read. I usually come here for that "hacker" hacker news (hackerhackernews.com used to be something like this, but now the domain name has expired it seems). Anyway I am sure there will be people who find your service really useful.

View on HN

That's exactly why I created http://www.hackerblogs.com if you check HN frontpage right now, there are zero posts by hackers, all come from PR blogs like techcrunch, readwriteweb, thenextweb, etc.

I highly recommend you giving it a try, it is still growing and I hope someday it may become the new source of real hacker news.

* I dare you to find an article like "Flipping arrows in coBurger King" on the news sites right now.

Nice site, just added my blog. Only problem I see is that if it does keep growing and becomes popular, then people could add feeds of irrelevant blogs, and like most social news sites it would turn into a digg/reddit.

I am the curator, I check it every ten minutes (I am that addict) and believe me, I hate fud, payperpost and propaganda to death.

If I see one blog incurring in a fault, they're banned for life.

I tried to register http://deadpanic.com/blog/ , but apparently didn't make the cut. Any suggestions for improvement, or insight into the criteria you use?

Sure it did. I checked the logs and it is registered and ready to serve your posts as soon as you publish them.

wow good work! I just registered my blog after browsing for a few seconds and being able to click lisp and see my screen filled with goodness.

Useful web site, added to bookmarks. But, regarding "Flipping arrows in coBurger King", I saw that entry as first news in Haskell category, submitted probably shortly after your comment :) Here is link: http://www.hackerblogs.com/post/rsfepzwv

Yeah, I tend to find the really interesting stories are not the top of the page ones. Love in the age of the pickup artist? Sorry, couldn't care less.

Remember that being at the top of the front page at some point during the day does not necessarily mean that an article is in the top 10 links for the day.

I think looking at scores -- without looking at how long it took for those scores to be reached -- probably weights in favour of more "interesting" stories and against link-bait stories, simply because the link-bait tends to accumulate most of its votes very quickly.

So the derivative in respect to points over time of the link bait story would be much higher than non link bait story?

I think link-bait stories probably peak earlier.

Out of curiosity, I just ran the numbers for Love in the age of the pickup artist. Right now, at 15:00, it's in 6th place; I suspect that by the end of the day it will fall past 10th place, since these last 9 hours are probably when the most votes are cast and that link isn't getting many votes any more.

So that story is probably a perfect illustration of when sorting by highest score alone is better than HN's score-per-time measure.

> "the top voted articles are not the ones that I would want to read."

Then, how about using the top 10 from the classic view? http://news.ycombinator.com/classic Would that help?

Very interesting. How come that view is hidden? How does it work?

I think it ranks, or at least it did when the feature was added, items only by people who have had accounts for at least a year. (I may be wrong or it may have been longer than a year)

If that is the case, then HN Classic is very good proof of the change seen in the submitted stories. I loved seeing the HN Classic homepage and might keep it as my goto page (if it is still updated).

It's not perfect, certainly -- over the past 3 days I've still only read about half of the top-ten links. This is about avoiding the situation where an interesting highly-voted article gets drowned out by all the noise rather than an attempt to find "good" articles which don't get lots of votes.

I started http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ last week. The selected articles I pick are based on a combination votes, comments, and items that I found valuable. I received similar feedback from a couple HN members and thought of splitting up the newsletter based on the article "types". I will be trying that out for the next edition. I think some weeks it will work better than other since the quantity/quality vary a good bit week to week.

Perhaps "Top 10 most-commented posts" would be interesting as well?

I think this would be great, especially as an option. The posts that generate the most discussion are often interesting, and curiously aren't always the top voted.

That's a lot harder to do -- I can get away with scraping the front page right now because highly voted posts are likely to be on the front page for most of their vote-getting lifetime, but that argument probably doesn't hold about highly commented posts.

You could maybe check /active ? Maybe the highly commented sit on there for most of their comment-getting lifetime.

Hm, this is true. Perhaps you could scrape /newcomments and keep track of which stories are getting new comments?

This would hinge on the frequency of all comments to the site and having your scraping interval be less than the difference of the most recent comment and last comment displayed on /newcomments.

I think it'd just be really great to have another view into "Most active discussions".

I've taken lots of downvotes lately to say that HN is becoming less hacker and far more generalist.

That happened to virtually every other site: Slashdot, Digg, Reddit. As the site gets attention (because of its core strength of great hacker content) it starts drawing in a non-core audience. Because it's a voting system the non-core articles will start to grow in influence. It loses what drew people in in the first place.

Ah well. It's the circle of sites.

You're probably getting downvoted because of the age of your account. (Not that I think you're wrong)

Possibly. I've of course lurked for much longer. Even had a couple of other accounts at some point but lost the credentials an..meh. Easy set up.

I second this! I would gladly pay 5-10 bucks a month for a daily digest of top hacking-related articles (no business, no politics and no Apple rumours/speculations). HN used to be 80% programming and 20% business-related, now it's the opposite.

maybe we need categories? Biz&politics, social, apple, math, IT, programming, and other as an initial set?

then, before you know it, you're Slashdot!

or worse, reddit/digg

It would be horrible for the guys at YC to have created a $200m+ business, right? http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/22/google-in-final-negotiation...

I have to say that's surprising. I'm relatively new here, but I thought most people would get here through Paul Graham/YCombinator, which has more to do with business than programming.

personally I came here because I would randomly check paulgraham.com ever since his articles relating to lisp were being posted on slashdot. One day the YC link appeared which in turn had a link to hacker news. While I have gained an appreciation for start up culture(definitely the hacking approach to business) since then I still primarily hang around for articles on programming.

Paul Graham also used to be 80% programming and 20% business.

I'm the only one the remembers when this was called Startup News?

Business is a lot wider than startup, though. There has been a huge number of articles about Apple - I seriously don't understand how such a massive quantity of (often gossipy) articles about the ipad/iphone and friends got upvoted, especially considering their hacker-unfriendliness. Then also a lot about Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the RIAA, general politics...

If you are looking for something that is 100% programming then http://news.usethesource.com/news is a good choice. It is built on the same platform as HN

Disclaimer - I have no affiliation with the amazing peeps at usethesource

Thanks! That's more or less what I was looking for.

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