HNSummaries.com - algorithmically summarized HN articles to your inbox

The NLP is pretty basic and takes a ratio of the original article, so you do get some longer listings.

Big thanks to Wayne Larsen of hckrnews.com for providing me with some insight on tracking top stories and letting me use his ranking data. Also, I recommend http://www.hackernewsletter.com/ for a human-curated version.

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Count how many times each word appears in the document into a dictionary or map structure

Also make sure you track the total words.

document |> splitBySpace |> if dictionary has word then +1 else 1; totalwords++

Then split the document into sentences.

Okay, now for each sentence

==========================================

score = 0.

split sentence by space and

for each word score+= -(dictionary[word]/sum) * log(dictionary[word]/sum)

dictionaryScore.Add(sentence, score)

==========================================

So now each sentence has a score. You can sort by best and lose order. Or if you want to limit (0 - 1) based on score:

findbestScore and filter each sentence by if limit < docscore / bestscore.

As I said this is only a start off point and is susceptible to list of random words (guess why) there are many ways to make it better. Here is a portion of code I dug up from a while ago:

  let inline sumMap m = m |> Map.fold (curryfst (+)) 0. 

  let inline internal countsAndSum n doc =
    let counts = splitstr [|" "|] doc |> filterStop n |> Array.fold mapAdd Map.empty
    counts, sumMap counts

  let ent m sum k = 
    let p = (mapGet m k 0.)/sum
    if p = 0. then 0. else -p * log2 (p)

  let eScore doc =      
    let counts , sum = countsAndSum 0 doc    
    splitSentenceRegEx doc |> Array.map (fun str -> str, splitstr [|" "|] str |> Array.fold (flip ((+) << (ent counts sum))) 0.)

Would love to get an index of headlines on top of the email with anchors to actual stories below.

Would love to see shorter summaries and maybe some of the top comments for each story (summarized, if possible).

Quality feels at least as good as an open source summarizer I played around with a while back; good work!

"9 year old Caine sets up an arcade in his father’s used car parts store in East L.A., using only cardboard boxes his dad had lying around and a ton of ingenuity. Watch his dreams come true when this filmmaker sets up a flash mob to come and play. Just watching this may make you a better person. $82,000 has already been raised for Caine’s scholarship fund! little behind on the bandwagon, but...film just had me in tears."

Ideally I think you would do it client-side, so readers could adjust the shrinkage to the amount of time they have to peruse. I was also thinking about a scenario where you could browse at say 100-words and then dive-deep if you found anything that interests you. A more interactive approach. You might want to consider this.

But I really like the idea. Would love to hear how the project goes!

You should make sure that the summaries don't scale linearly with the size of the content--just because an article is 10x as long, doesn't mean I want a summary to be 10x longer. Maybe scale logarithmically?

I didn't find any of the summaries to be high quality or any better than I could get from briefly skimming HN myself.

I've unsubscribed.

One small suggestion...could you make the "76 comments" under the title clickable through to the HN comments?

One other option (maybe a user preference), include some noteworthy excerpts from the HN comments in the email as well?

It would be great to get a weekly or monthly summary.

Nice work.