Show HN: Find Hidden Gems on HN | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Find Hidden Gems on HN

pj4533.com

118 pointspj453319 comments

Hey HN. I created this website.

https://pj4533.com/hn-overlooked/

It's just a simple web app that discovers overlooked posts on Hacker News. I created it because I was often coming to Hacker News and realizing that I was missing a lot of stuff, and there just didn't seem to be an easy way to surface content that was interesting to me but just didn't bubble up to the top of the page. So I built this.

I got the idea a while back, one night when I was recording (you can watch it here, it's pretty funny: https://youtu.be/FDyDb4sX30w?si=E3rby-DaGWA6gy0R ). But I never really did anything with the idea. So I decided just to make it into a little single-page web app.

The Hacker News API is pretty cool because it doesn't require an API key, so you can just vibe code against it super easy. I just loaded up Claude Code and started talking to it. That first night when I was recording, it was just me with this repo, that I call 'thefuture' and I just put everything in there: scripts, whatever. Then i'll have Claude Code use OpenAI to talk to me and I'll just get bored and explore different APIs and see what I can come up with. That's all inside a single repo that Claude Code knows about, and just set it in YOLO mode and just go to town - it's super fun. It's kind of slow though, so that's the only downside. But if you put a script in there for Claude to talk to you, it can be pretty fun just to explore things.

This website is just one idea extracted from that one session of messing around with a Claude Code last month. I open sourced it, you can look at the repo here: https://github.com/pj4533/hn-overlooked

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Nice!

What I want is a /random endpoint that randomly shuffles through posts from the following "unofficial" endpoints:

https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew

https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

https://news.ycombinator.com/best

https://news.ycombinator.com/asknew

https://news.ycombinator.com/bestcomments

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobcomments

https://news.ycombinator.com/noobstories

https://news.ycombinator.com/newest

And https://news.ycombinator.com/invited ("Overlooked links, invited to repost") maybe. The lists are on https://news.ycombinator.com/lists (link in the footer of every HN page)

This is great, I use the Second Chance Pool quite but I like this also. https://news.ycombinator.com/pool

For those unfamiliar: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 ... It's basically a bunch of posts that 'dang and 'tomhow (others too? idk) think are underrated, so it tends to be potent hacker-catnip stuff.

Text length? So this is focused on Show HN:'s and Asks? That's cool to find missed projects people have submitted, but considering a majority of posts interesting and not are just links, seems like a lot of 'gems' are gonna be missed. Look to the Pool (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool) for that I suppose.

Yeah, I think a true hidden gems finder might have to use an LLM that has been trained on what does or doesn't succeed here to properly categorize the results.

I tried it and it's just a list of posts about AI

Looks like you need to sanitize the titles. There's a post on the 8th page now that has an <input> tag that's getting rendered and is clickable.

So "passion score" just finds long posts that were not interacted with? I'm not sure it's a proxy for quality.

LLMs are also notoriously verbose. Don't know if that's the case here, but not sure how "Passion" protects against that

I wonder if the reason why those posts were overlooked was because people couldn't quickly decide whether they want to spend more time reading more text. Put it a different way, the number of comments is a function of text length (among other things), and there might be a particular text length threshold that would maximize number of comments.

If a lot of people use this tool and comment on previously overlooked posts, the number of comments will even out (because the passion score will drop), and maybe we will get better variety of posts.

It does seem like the "passion score" is a rule-of-thumb estimate at best. A lengthy post could just be someone rambling, and a short post could be from a timid dev sharing their project on HN for the first time.

I imagine you could get the post author's reputation score from the API and factor that in to the passion score, but reputation is really just another proxy.

I really like this idea. Every so often I’ll come across a weeks, months or years old thread that I’d like to have been able to participate in at the time or that has interesting or useful information.

I guess you haven’t figured out the time travel issue yet, but being able to find quality older threads is definitely something I like.

Perhaps a filter option to help people find specific kinds of topic could be added? :)

Cool, found this gem with it.

Boom!

Maybe add a search/filter to the results. I had to browse through 4 whole pages to make sure your post is actually there!

Just watch new. Most of the time only the bullshit articled gets upvoted and you miss the nifty ones if checking the frontpage only.

very cool

can you add a "find controversial comments" feature? controversial posts would be nice, but I don't think downvoting posts is available

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