TopHN – When you have time for only one Hacker News story

I tend to use http://hckrnews.com/ and only display the top 10 stories.

What I particularly like is the day-split, the high density of information, and the color coding: orange means "Still on the homepage" and grey means "Already visited" (which applies to both the story and the comments).

What I'd like to see is, instead of a wide range of topics displayed on the same page, unsorted and un-categorized, a tool that would only display the topics I'm interested in. For instance I don't want to read about politics on HN, only computer science, so an app that would auto-tag/filter links depending on the source/content would be welcome. To me that's the biggest flaw of HN, having to go through pages of link to only get what I'm interested in is painful.

I wish there was a service that shows HN pages with short previews of the linked stories included so that you had more info to decide whether to click the link, or go straight to the comments, or skip the story altogether.

Don't forget https://news.ycombinator.com/best

Why not just sort the topics of the last n hours by some criterion? Then you can choose how many stories you read depending on the amount of time you have.

The criterion could be simple (e.g. amount of upvotes), or it could be based on personal interests (e.g. collaborative filtering).

I actually have a use case for this: I try to ban myself from browsing websites because I think it ruins my attention span. Particularly, reading all the headlines so quickly. This is why I quit reddit entirely. But sometimes I have some time to kill and still need something to read, so going straight to the top HN story is nice. Suggestion: add a way to scroll to the next story, but still only show one at a time.

There is http://n-gate.com/ if one wants a week's worth top stories with a bit of commentary.