Show HN: Your personal Hacker News reader - Skim HN

I agree that it's a difficult issue, as some might feel it's an intrusion of privacy if that data is used. Other might feel it's annoying to have to up/downvote stories both on HN and on your site. That's a trade-off. Perhabs both, or allow import of saved data, so users can make a dump from HN and import it in your site.

I think the other HN api used to have that (if people trust them to pass their user/pw to HN safely), but seems to be disabled: http://api.ihackernews.com/.

So yeah, the easiest way to start it would be to have people up/down vote on your site, or use a heuristic measure such as: if you click a link, you "like" it, if you're shown a link, but don't click a link you "ignore" it (which should be less negative than hate, as there can be a number of reasons for not clicking a link).

As in:

I get a list of 10 items from each category, of those 10, which do I click, which don't I. So once an item is shown to me - save it as "bad" by default in the DB. If I click it, change it to a good result.

You'd might have to change the weight more than this, but it should be a good start, and requires the least amount of effort for the user.

Cool! Can I be a beta-tester?

Wow, that looks gorgeous! Could I use it as a style guide? Could you share specific things you changed?

Cool! using as standalone for now as it evolves no plugins needed (http://hidra.koding.com/ripskimhn/)

Don't need to worry about logins. Nothing is stored here. Best thing to do is to create a custom URL that will always bring the same lists.

i.e. When I setup my personalized options, I have:

http://www.skimhn.com/djWH3hS5

That way you don't have to operate with logins and everyone's setup is share-able. (Then you can look in the future of letting the creator define the url.)