Hacker News with a points threshold | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News with a points threshold

news.ycombinator.com

46 pointsColinWright18 comments

If people actually start doing this, it'll make getting anything off the new page even more difficult.

Besides, I don't think the articles on the front page are a problem here. And if they are, it's often the highly voted ones! Really interesting technical posts often don't catch eyes quite as well as controversial posts about news or politics, so I think a threshold like this would filter them out disproportionately.

I agree, though my HN bookmark is for points over 3 points so at least a three other people thought the article wasn't totally useless:

https://news.ycombinator.com/over?points=3

Solution to increasing the ranking of interesting technical posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613260

However what I really want is the ability to follow those stories that are read and upvoted by a basket of overs whom I've come to respect via their insightful comments (e.g. michaelochurch, cperciva, nostrademons, tptacek, pg, fogus, raganwald, yummyfajitas, etc. etc. etc.)

A front page based on the stories upvoted by those users whose comments I most want to read would be awesome,

However it will prolong interesting discussions.

In case anyone here hasn't seen it yet: I'm producing a couple digests by scraping the site.

Hacker News Daily (10 highest scoring stories appearing on the front page each day, which have not previously appeared on Hacker News Daily): http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/

Ask Hacker News Weekly (10 highest scoring stories appearing on https://news.ycombinator.com/ask each week, which have not previously appeared on Ask Hacker News Weekly): http://www.daemonology.net/hn-weekly-ask/

Hrm. /under doesn't seem to work. I think that might actually be more interesting. I've probably seen most of the 'over' stories already, and I'd rather have new stuff bubbling up quicker.

For "/under" you may as well just go to the "/newest" page. Can you think of any significant practical difference?

Stories with, say, somewhere between 10 and 99 votes are clearly of interest to people - they are "filtered", whereas the newest page contains a lot of junk that no one has bothered to sort through. I do look at the newest page from time to time in order to "do my part", but it's different from having a look to see if there's anything new and interesting.

You've also got https://news.ycombinator.com/best

These are great! Any chance they'll be added to the FAQ so more people can learn about them?

You can see more at https://news.ycombinator.com/lists (linked at the bottom of every page)

There are a decent number of hidden pages, such as https://news.ycombinator.com/classic (only counts votes by users > 1 year old IIRC) and https://news.ycombinator.com/topcolors (most popular top bar colors). I figured most of these pages were hidden because 1. They weren't amazingly useful. 2. One should expect them to disappear at any time.

Is /best sorted strictly by score?

Yes, I think so but it seems to limit the results to last 8 days.

Now if you could add a filter like this to the 'newest' page that would be really useful!

Then you would be able to see new posts, but filter them by say 5 points so that you know they were found interesting by 5 others.

It might make new posts more discoverable.

The problem there is that many posts will never even get votes because people don't see them. This is the tragedy of the commons. If everyone enjoys this same convenience, then nothing gets discovered.

What we really need is a relationship between points and number of click throughs / views.

If a post has 100 views and 4 votes, it should be roughly equal in value to a story that has 25 views and 1 vote.

In fact this ratio approach might help bring more attention to the really high quality technical articles that are esoteric but high value.

Take a tech-focused BBC article for example, which often hit the front page. They are typically pablum with low value content, but they receive lots of votes relative to everything else because of their popular appeal. Since they appeal popularly, I would expect that they get an order of magnitude more views than an blog article exploring the minutiae of LXC containers. Those number of views should serve to devalue each vote that the article received.

This might cause a tragedy of the commons though. If everyone thought in that way, no new posts would get any upvotes.

It would be great if you could set the points threshold on the RSS feed link too. That would allow all the stories that only make it onto the front page for a tiny amount of time to be skipped from the feed.

I knew it the whole time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com