A newsletter that curates stories which didn't make the frontpage | Hacker News Reader

A newsletter that curates stories which didn't make the frontpage

bengtan.com

4 pointsbengtan5 comments

Hi,

I'd like to introduce, and ask feedback for, my newsletter Interesting Things .

It's a response to the notion that many interesting stories posted to Hacker News flies past and are not seen. Well, if they don't get seen, but deserve to be, then maybe they could be surfaced again somehow. A newsletter seemed like a good way to do it.

I experimented by trawling through the 'newest' section of Hacker News. The first few times were mind-numbing. Gosh, there's so much noise in there! . Eventually I learnt to be more selective and efficient and it became repeatable.

Then I added some other sources of content. Now, whilst a large portion of the stories are still from Hacker News, it's not only from there.

The criteria is 'What I find interesting' but, since I'm a typical Hacker News reader, the interest profile ends up similar to Hacker News. It's mainly tech but with splashes of startups, science, productivity, etc. Like Hacker News, I omit politics. Unlike Hacker News, I try to omit product/press releases, big corp stuff, and stories that would be covered by the mainstream tech press.

Whilst the interest profile is similar to other Hacker-News-based newsletters and digests, there is little overlap in stories. This is intentionally so. They cover the top stories from Hacker News. My newsletter does not. (Well, maybe there might be a few 'tier 1' stories, but the majority are not.)

So anyway ... if you'd like to read interesting stuff that went unnoticed by Hacker News, please have a look at Interesting Things. I hope you guys like it and find it good for some weekend reading.

I'm also looking for criticism, feedback and suggestions for improvement. Some sample questions: What do you think of the (boring) name? Do you like the one-two liner blurbs? Are the blurbs useful? What do you think of the distribution of topics? Are there areas where you'd like to see more (or less) coverage? Please let me know. I'm happy to talk.

Thanks for reading!

Yeah, I'd say blurbs are useful and I like the categories.

I'd suggest tags so that one can click/search based on say, a particular programming language.

I found the title for each edition confusing. For example, "The Last CPU" - at first I thought the entire edition is related to it. Once I clicked through the url, I understood that it is one of the articles linked.

Hi,

Thanks for the comment.

> I'd suggest tags so that one can click/search based on say, a particular programming language.

It's an email newsletter so there's no interactivity possible. Unless you mean just displaying relevant keywords and the user can do a 'find in page'? If so, then, yes, that makes sense.

> I found the title for each edition confusing. For example, "The Last CPU" - at first I thought the entire edition is related to it. Once I clicked through the url, I understood that it is one of the articles linked.

Noted. I'll consider changing the way I title the editions then.

>It's an email newsletter so there's no interactivity possible.

Oops, good point. I was thinking only of the web archive pages, so that hashtags can be clicked.

I think it's an interesting idea, worth chasing for a while, at least. I would, however, like to see more than 2 headlines per page. (i.e. I found the large-blocks annoying in that I couldn't get a decent overview quickly.) It would imho be a virtue to go for a more minimalist styling, like HN itself does. Lots of luck (really!) with the project; I do think curation is one of the ways we can all make the Internet an interesting place again.

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