Show HN: HN Frontpage Minus Techmeme | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: HN Frontpage Minus Techmeme

lessmeme.com

74 pointsraimonds45 comments

Is there anything around that lets me "ban" domains that I've chosen? I know I personally won't get anything positive out of a link from dcurt.is or 42floors, and I don't like rediscussing links from another discussion site (i.e. stack overflow), so it would be nice to be able to construct my own set of filters.

Here's an old userscript my co-founder built: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/32404

I use filters in my RSS reader to ignore anything Apple or Microsoft related.

If you are using Google Chrome, there is Autobahn extension http://vlad.github.com/autobahn/ by vlad, discussed few months ago (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4197062).

I wrote a Safari extension a couple years ago when the number of Bitcoin stories on the home page was reaching epidemic levels. There's a link on there to a similar extension for Chrome. You should be able to hack either one to ignore specific domains pretty easily.

https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/NoBitcoin

StackOverflow is not a discussion site. It's a QnA site, and people who have had their question / answer removed or downvoted would vouch for that,

You think QnA isn't a discussion? Of course it's a discussion site.

You may think QnA == discussion, but the mods and general culture of the site say otherwise.

It's unfortunate, and the SE sites are notorious for being strict to the point of depression, but that's a discussion for another time.

At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already. - Jeff Atwood

Wow, this is such a simple and elegant idea.

Might've been a bit more practical to build it as a story-hiding extension rather than a separate site. And I just happen to have such extension and... oh, look... it's under the BSD license... hint hint :)

[0] http://swapped.cc/iip

[1] https://github.com/apankrat/internet-improvement-project/tre...

Great work! Clever and useful.

Thank you!!!

I would like to see "HN Frontpage Minus YC company announcements"

Fascinating. Given that HN has so much content nowadays, aggregators/filters like this are proving useful. (I found this link through http://www.skimhn.com/)

Hi aiurtourist! Thanks for your kind feedback! And super mega thanks for mentioning skimhn.com!

Thanks for pointer to http://www.skimhn.com/. It feels like gasp of fresh air. Sifting through list of highly diverse material, which Hacker News is, is a real cognitive load (citation need, I know). Now, this is elegant.

Also, the link you cite can help to direct attention to a broader range of HN articles than the top-page can.

This looks great. Honestly, a lot of the stuff on the front page of HN is there simply because of the domain name associated with it. It's nice to have something like this. I'm going to try and use it as a replacement.

Glad you like it! Thanks for trying it out.

Because the "visited" link color is so close to the body text, the titles may confusingly butt into the site name, i.e. "Why HN was down self"

I understand that adding another delimiter there, e.g. "Why HN was down | self" adds undesirable noise...maybe the visited-link color could be more obviously blue?

Hi danso! Thanks for your feedback! I've applied a quick fix. I'm very bad at design so please don't expect much.

My view:

The important thing is the headline. Make that blue. Make the domain grey or black and a smaller size (like on HN).

Thank you, aw3c2! That makes sense. I will try to play around with styling.

The "self" link confused me at first. My eye happened to catch it before I saw any of the other links, so I thought it meant it was linking to my reply in that thread.

I'd like to propose "news.ycombinator.com" instead of self, which would also be consistent with the other domain names listed for each article.

Yeah, I agree! "Self" is confusing indeed. Fixed! Thank you for pointing it out!

Question for the OP.

Why the privacy on the domain? If yourintent is to build things and get attention it's not to your benefit to hide your identity.

If you're worried about spam use a different email that forwards to your regular email to filter.

That said I'd like to know your reasoning for doing this (you aren't the only person that does this obviously so anyone who wants to chime in please do as always).

Hi, larrys! OP here. Thanks for your question! I just don't know domain registration that well. What information is exposed in case of "public" registration? Is it just my e-mail? Or address, phone number as well? I was scared by possible spam and some recent domain hijacking stories so I chose privacy.

Address and phone (in addition to email) are exposed. You can do a lookup on www.who.is to see what the info looks like for a domain. I'm not sure how hiding your info would have anything to do with domain hijacking concerns, unless you are easily conned by phishing emails.

Thanks for the explanation! I'm not comfortable with sharing my address and phone number yet. This information seems like a good starting point for social engineering attacks. OK, I know, I'm paranoid. Give me some time. :)

What information is exposed:

Any information you put as far as your contact info. Name, address and phone number, email.

Spam is not an issue and if you feel that's a problem simply use a gmail account that forwards to your real account. People also scrape web pages so you already have your email on your webpage anyway. Personally I own plenty of domains (for many many years) and I don't even get that much spam.

As far as domain hijacking there is nothing about your domain to indicate you have to worry about losing it (who would hijack it and why would they?) If anything if the info isn't public then nobody (but the registrar) even knows that you own it because that ownership is hidden.

And in the event it is hijacked you can get it reversed.

Bottom line is this: privacy for some people might be good in some cases. In general though I think (based on owning a registrar and many years in this business) think it's a bad business idea. Registrars push it because it's good for them (keeps competitors out) and some charge for it or if they don't they make you think you are getting something of value. I've seen cases of real businesses using privacy with business addresses who have no reason to protect anything (which shows how they are being mislead).

Bottom line: You've taken the time to create something make sure people know who you are and how to contact you (should also be on the website) maybe you will get some work or contacts etc.

Thank you very much for your thorough answer! Great thoughts and advice!

I'm not the OP, but I can think of an answer to your final question. Pragmatically speaking, there are only so many hours in the day, and attention is a finite resource too, so by automatically filtering things you are likely to find irrelevant, you can save yourself wasted time and attention.

Some may argue that this limits your ability to discover new things, cutting you off from a broader discussion, but if you continually come away from certain sites disappointed, why wouldn't you want to stop cluttering your life with their articles?

With regards to privacy I always ask the converse question; Why would you not choose privacy?

I don't understand which audience you are catering to through domain registration information.

"With regards to privacy I always ask the converse question; Why would you not choose privacy?"

Well in general if you want to attract business or benefit from something you have created you don't want privacy.

Now for example I don't want to attract business from HN (for domain registration) so I choose to be private and not offer my contact info other than a gmail account. So I've made a conscious choice to not mix this.

In other cases and in other places though (like a directory or list of registrars) I do the opposite (want to be listed and have customers come to me).

Another case is at our business location we don't have a sign because we don't want people dropping in from the neighborhood (would waste time) and we have customers in maybe 100 countries around the world so that local business isn't important. Also I don't carry a business card I'm not interested in the local business registering with us then it could end up being a time waster. Of course if I was a local attorney I would. All depends on the situation.

"which audience you are catering to through domain registration information"

Sorry meant to answer this below. I have cases where I have to find domains for people that others own. If you have privacy it makes it harder for me to make you an offer on your domain and contact you.

I think you answered the 'why privacy' question right there.

Why is there something wrong with having someone want to pay you for what you own?

No one said there was anything wrong with that. The contact info is still valid. Domain privacy only means the owner has the option of revealing their contact info once the message is forwarded to them.

At first I thought the joke was that there was nothing on the HN Frontpage that was not also posted to Techmeme. Then I realized the site does not work in IE.

Ouch! Sorry about that. I'll look into it.

Really nice. HN is (to me) way too mainstream, too many people just dump generic news here or in the case off a few major publishers spam themselves.

It does not show me the links that I've already visited. Thats the best thing I like about HN site.

Good point! Fixed! Thanks for your feedback!

Gives me the idea to make an infinite scrolling HN aggregate.

Go for it! :)

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