Show HN: Spot hyped news at a glance on Hacker News and Reddit | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Spot hyped news at a glance on Hacker News and Reddit

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30 pointsaercolino28 comments

Interesting. I like the idea, but I'm not fond of the chaotic layout. I'd prefer that the hype dimension be color or text size rather than x-dimension of text location.

Also the word hyped has a negative connotation in my mind, in particular that of exaggeration and b.s. As you mention perhaps this meaning is optional but for me the connection is strong.

I'd prefer another word. I thought the word hyper, for example hyperHN, might be better but anyway something else.

Do chrome extensions allow you to enter javascript functions that get executed via settings? I could see something like a 'custom hype formatter' callback option that passes a dom reference to the news item along with its hype ranking being pretty neat.

> Do chrome extensions allow you to enter javascript functions that get executed via settings?

Maybe I misunderstand you but isn't that what an extension does?

Chrome extensions are pretty much Javascript+HTML bundles in fact. Something like what you suggest is not only possible but very easy to accomplish.

Yes, the result is a bit unexpected but it works much better than other "more traditional" approaches. I mean, it's really "at a glance" that I can find the strongest news.

As for the "Hyped News" name, I don't think negative is inappropriate, take "Git" for example. Instead, amount of points and comments can be at the same time an indicator of importance (mostly points) and controversy (mostly comments). In either case, the leftmost news end up being those which people are more excited about.

Replace "hyped" with "trending". "Hyped", as others have mentioned, has a negative connotation.

This is true but there are generational differences with that connotation. To a subset of younger people "hyped" means something is good and popular.

EDIT: For reference https://twitter.com/search?q=hyped the self-referenced use of "hyped" to mean excited about something is pretty popular

It is good for a person to be hyped about a thing, to hype something (≈ to trick other people into being hyped about it) is bad.

I'm still not convinced there isn't a generational difference. I work part time with students and have heard "hype" as a positive adjective ie, "This thing is so hype". I also think the negative connotation people are mentioning comes from the term "over-hyped" which is closer to your second definition.

Ah, there it is: https://twitter.com/search?q="so+hype"

Looks like that one can apply to both someone's emotional state in general and the thing they are hyped about without the negative connotation.

What does "hyped" mean (precisely) in this context?

Google definition for Hype: Promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits.

In this case, "hyped news" could be: News intensively promoted (many points) or discussed (many comments).

The nuance about exaggeration is optional.

"intensively discussed" would for the most part indicate that the item is of some interest or importance to the people discussing.

I think it would only indicate hype if it were also true that most of the discussion was disingenuous in some way. The distinction underlying this thought is that discussion is not (usually) promotion or deliberate publicizing of the thing discussed. Usually, it's just plain, honest discussion.

Hype has almost universally negative connotations to me. Based on the name, I expected your extension would hide "hyped" stories (where hype is perhaps defined by a high comment-to-upvote ratio for a story), since hype is usually bad. You may wish to consider a new name.

There is an option (the only one, really) to boost more comments or points. That is up to you. Initially it's 50 / 50.

Sorted by sum of comments and votes, age is ignored.

Not really "sorted by sum of comments and votes" nor really "age is ignored". The former only affects horizontal offset of the start of a title, and the latter is preserved, so that the order (and fluctuation) of the titles is as usual too.

Almost all my stories are on the very right side, with one or two on the very left, and not much in the middle. You should either use percentile score to determine the location (so the median scoring story is right in the center) or apply some sort of transformation to the score (log is probably reasonable, I'm guessing scores tend to be approximately log-normally distributed).

I didn't look into an even distribution. I only allotted the golden ratio part of the content width to the maximum sum of points and comments on a given page.

Love the idea, but it breaks a fundamental rule of design by not allowing my eyes to scan down a list.

Perhaps color might be a good alternative as an indicator? Make the text fade away a bit if it is less relevant..etc...

Actually, the reason I wrote the extension was exactly to avoid scanning down the list with my own eyes. This extension does it for me, so that, if I don't have much time, I can just read the few leftmost news.

Thanks for the kind words, anyway.

It's interesting that this uses points + comment count as the test of importance; doesn't HN use comment count as one indicator of a flamewar IIRC?

It would seem so. I posted a link a few weeks back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983060) that was on the front page for a bit but was booted off when the conversation spiraled a bit out of control.

People getting caught up on the name of something rather than discussing the thing itself, it's like bro[1][2] all over again.

[1] http://bropages.org/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268

Names are important. If everyone's talking about the name, it's probably a bad one. Choosing a good name requires an understanding of the context of your product/service and your audience (i.e. don't name a developer-centric product "bro" in 2014, unless you're looking for some drama). I honestly thought this was a tool that highlighted overhyped substance-less links.

Obviously, for a non-commercial browser extension, it's not a big deal. But in any case I wouldn't blame the people for reacting to the name, I would blame the creator for choosing a bad one.

It seems this worked out quite well though: http://www.wine-searcher.com/merchant/50429 :D

Y u no do Mozilla Firefox addons ?!

(do want)

Fork me on GitHub: https://github.com/aercolino/Hype-Amplifier

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