Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xbadcafebee | Hacker News Reader

Articles like these are rare, but there's 30 years of them scattered around the internet. There's got to be a way to catalogue them in a single index somewhere. Like a Wiki, but just articles that are hard to find and extremely interesting.

I'd like an index because HN's articles are often not this caliber of "interesting". If I look back 1 month to the top of HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2023-08-12), there's pontifi-posting (editorials), news and editorials from large media companies, blogspam from tech companies and OSS projects, and basic tech How Tos. I don't want to read any of that; I come back hoping there's a single one of this kind of article, and maybe find one a month.

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I have to agree with you. While I do enjoy the OSS projects/physics-/math-related topics (and a lot of the Show HN), these are my absolute favorite things to read.

Curious if you've found other resources that provide more of this sort of content?

I've found the Hackaday blog[0] tends to have a lot of this kind of content (often summarized/linked to the original source) and sometimes it's tagged in a way that makes surfacing others from their archives possible, but I've not found any other sites that are reasonably organized to help surface write-ups of this kind[1].

[0] https://hackaday.com/blog

[1] There are subreddits where this sort of thing can be found, but "deep-dive but accessible technical articles" tend to be placed in a sub-reddit that's dedicated to more narrow topics and a lot are lower quality (there's similar content to this in /r/Optics from 2022, but I'd never have a reason to end up there)

Manually curated list could be crowdsourced via an OSS project, e.g.

  1. Criteria for articles in list.
  2. Example and anti-example articles.
  3. Tag via HN comment with short, unique and human-meaningful phrase.
  4. Query Algolia periodically, triage, PR submission/review/merge.
  5. Syndicate list as RSS feed.

Sounds like you want a curated feed. There are some email mailing lists that aim to achieve this, usually for a specific domain (like stock market, or AI, etc)

Maybe a group chat or discord of like minded people who casually share things they come across that pass a high standard

One way or another it seems like you're going to need to rely on another person to sift through all the daily published content and mark potentially interesting ones

I wonder if you could just feed HN titles with more than ~30 upvotes to an LLM and ask it to bring out similar topics. Not perfect, but I think it could work as a start.

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