Hacker News Reader

Comment by tkainrad | Hacker News Reader

Great thread! I sometimes wish there was a variant of Hacker News that only had blog posts written by individuals.

I think you should read my blog because I invest a lot of effort into my posts. Not sure why I do that, as there is no reward except growing Google Analytics numbers.

My three most successful articles have been

- Managing my personal knowledge base: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/managing-my-personal-knowledge-ba...

- Setting up a Linux Workstation for Software Development: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/

- Using Hugo, GitLab Pages, and Cloudflare to create and run this Website: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/using-hugo-gitlab-pages-and-cloud...

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a side project that uses Django, VueJS, and has to do with the use of key combinations. So in the future, you can expect technical posts about these technologies and posts about this domain.

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> I sometimes wish there was a variant of Hacker News that only had blog posts written by individuals

I agree I tried to do it here : http://luap.info:4000/links

Basically I'm taking all the links published into HN and I'm filtering the domains which are news domains or appear too frequently, but that is still a lot of links, so I'm not calling it a success yet

That's cool! At some point, I myself thought about making a clone of HN that just filters out everything that is not a blog post. However, I couldn't come up with a solid filter criteria.

I agree that your method is not quite there yet, still a lot of large domains (airbnb.com, spiegel.de, spectator.co,...), but you started and that is already more than I ever did ;)

I would suggest including the HN metadata, such as the number of upvotes and comments. These are, in combination with the title, important criteria for me whether I click on something or not.

That's an interesting problem. Aside from HN, I frequent TechMeme alot for the more news-y side of tech. They have a leaderboard section [1], that has all of the biggest tech publications ranked. That could be a good starting filter?

[1]:https://www.techmeme.com/lb

I think the problem is AI-complete and human curation would go a long way. Admittedly it's more expensive and doesn't scale as well.

Thank you, the filtering is the issue, and as you I haven't found a way to filter all big sites.

The filters I'm using are :

- the same user who post too often

- domain too frequent

- a list of blacklist words in the title

- a list of blacklisted domains

I already filter about 80% of links I would say (which is few enough to go through the list every day, about 200 posts)

About the HN meta data, I don't think it is a good idea to keep the upvotes, because this is exactly where the issue is, if you see a post with low upvotes people tend to not read it, doesn't mean it is not interesting, and for the comments same for not displaying the number, but you can still access the hn comment page by clicking on 'hn link'

Alexa rankings might be helpful. Small websites have low rankings

A link is to a blog post if and only if a) the linked-to page contains a feed autodiscovery tag and b) the autodiscovered feed contains an entry for the same page and c) that feed entry is at least half as long as the page (in words).

That test isn't quite right. The false negatives include links to old blog posts, and the false positives include the honourable few sites that provide full-textish feeds of something other than a blog. But it's pretty good if you want to filter away content marketing and read tech blogs.

You might want to try and filter for pages that offer an RSS feed.

> I sometimes wish there was a variant of Hacker News that only had blog posts written by individuals.

I’ve been thinking about the same thing. Something styled along the likes of HN (Eg super minimal), but focussed on technical/HN-crowd topics and every post on the front page is a blog post, and every user profile shows all those user’s posts.

Akin to Medium or Wordpress.com but minimal and very technical.

Of course it’s easy to make such a site, but getting enough people to contribute and get it going will always be the hard part.

There's dev.to, which is like Medium for tech writers.

For me, part of the excitement is to see personal blog sites.

So anything like Medium, dev.to, InfoQ, DZone, etc. is not really what I was getting at. It would have to be a link aggregator like HN that either has an army of editors, a disciplined community that flags invalid posts, or a technical way to filter for personal blogs.

> It would have to be a link aggregator like HN that either has an army of editors, a disciplined community that flags invalid posts, or a technical way to filter for personal blogs.

Oh boy, do I have a blog post for you (and anyone who wants to build such a thing)!

(Sadly it's on Medium, but still...)

https://medium.com/@soatok/defeating-coordinated-inauthentic...

Thank you for the link! Definitely a good read for somebody who wanted to tackle this problem.

Theres always a relevent xkcd comic :)

https://xkcd.com/810/

Good post! I enjoy the idea of whitelisting for positive consensus rather then trying to black list bad actors

I’d be careful about wholesale dismissal of Medium. It has many, many personal blogs; some, rather badly-written. The platform may be slick and polished, but the content is a different matter.

Some of the best tips and techniques that I’ve learned, have come from "scruffy" Medium posts.

My own presentation tends to be highly-polished, but that’s because I’ve been writing all my life (never professionally). Not many folks read my writing, but it’s something in which I take some pride, so it comes across in a fairly slick manner.

You may be interested in https://able.bio

This is something myself and a partner are working on. Clean UI with a focus on techincal content written in a markdown editor. Any writing about hardware or software is welcome, dev spam gets moderated. We've had a some decent contributors so far but getting the content flywheel going is definitely the hardest part. We're busy fine-tuning a release with updated import/export features and markdown editor updates which will hopefully help attract more people.

>> I sometimes wish there was a variant of Hacker News that only had blog posts written by individuals

I may be older than most on HN, but when I think back to the internet of the late 90's if you squint a bit and remove all the brochure websites, the internet was essentially exactly this!

After all what is a geocities page but a blog that replaces longform content with animated "under construction" gifs?

"as there is no reward except growing Google Analytics numbers." = there's a feeling of importance that comes with sharing the things you may know, so basically you do it for the ego (and not in a bad way).

I would prefer a way to filter, not necessarily to blog posts, but just links to original content created by HN users, including blog posts.

>I sometimes wish... Hey, I'm building a thing like that right now.

Oh. I love the way your site is designed. Did you do that yourself?

Thank you very much! The base template is from here: https://github.com/luizdepra/hugo-coder/

Over time, I made small changes, added side menus and re-designed the landing page.

> Great thread! I sometimes wish there was a variant of Hacker News that only had blog posts written by individuals.

on lobste.rs around 20% of the content or more seems to be submitted by the authors. They have a separate tag which tells if the submission is added by the author or by somebody else.

Thank you for the tip. I stumble upon lobste.rs from time to time but did not notice that they visualize whether a post was submitted by its author.

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