Hacker News Reader

Comment by markkat | Hacker News Reader

>Here's something I prepared earlier:

I'm working on a site based on news.arc that has tags. They can be followed, and used to sort stories. http://hubski.com

However, hubski is a general news site. Since HN has a focus to begin with, I am not sure how helpful it would be. I would be interested in a custom feed that follows people on HN though. -I have that implemented on my version.

There are some people on Hacker News, where I would like to keep tabs on everything they submit, whether it hits the front page or not.

View on HN

"Since HN has a focus to begin with, I am not sure how helpful it would be."

HN has focus... in theory.

But even according to the guidelines, what's on topic is:

  "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than
  hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might
  be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

In practice that allows for a very wide range of stories, even when those submitting and voting on the stories bother to read or follow the guidelines.

And that leads to the very problem tags are intended to solve.

Yes, you might be right. In fact, it might be a good way for the site to provide both with a little bit less competition between tech and non-tech posts.

The tough part is getting tags right. I went the organic route, as I assumed that I would either overlook topics that might be needed, or create redundancies. My site is still too small to see if it works well. I'm not a big fan of the subreddit approach, as I think it divides submissions and attention to a large extent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com