Ask HN: Is there a way to see only technical posts on HN? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is there a way to see only technical posts on HN?

28 pointsmcnamaratw18 comments

I wrote a greasemonkey userscript for Firefox to reduce the number of non-technical articles. It works alright, I never meant it to be perfect, just get rid of the stuff that never is fun for me to read or is about topics that come up too often.

https://github.com/ErikHarmon/hncleanse/blob/master/hncleans...

I did something very similar with dotjs before I realized it was introducing a 1-5 second delay in the loading of every webpage. How's the performance of this script?

It's imperceptible to me. The number of search terms is pretty low. My regex isn't as sophisticated as it could be because the script started as a simple terms list using indexof, so it could be improved a little bit as more terms are added.

Mainly I filter by entire sites, which helps a lot. I won't miss many technical articles by filtering nytimes, and if I do, I can live with that.

I'll take PRs or suggestions, this was a ten minute project to scratch an itch.

Thanks for the link! I'll take a look!

Your honesty made me giggle (and I do not mean that in a derogatory manner)...

      'npr.org', // depressing
      'nytimes.com', // will probably annoy me

This patch also makes for an amusing HN experience and might answers the inverse "Ask HN: Is there a way to see only non-technical posts?"

    --- a/hncleanse.user.js
    +++ b/hncleanse.user.js
    @@ -148,7 +148,7 @@ while ((elem = result.snapshotItem(i)) != null) {
       if (shouldRemove || crap != null) {
         var reason = shouldRemove?('site '+sitebit):('terms '+crap);
         console.log(reason+': '+title);
    -
    +  } else {
         var subtext = athing.nextSibling;
         subtext.parentNode.removeChild(subtext);

The political and current-events stuff is very interesting, and I tend to get distracted!

Yeah, there's so much great content here, sometimes I too seem to not get to the purely tech stuff. You may be interested in lobste.rs. I've found that they have nearly the same tech content, but lobste.rs is tech only.

Thanks for reminding me about lobste.rs. Last time I checked it out there weren't many comments which didn't inspire me to leave a comment. My favorite part of HN was the potential discussions to be had and its great to see lobste.rs now has more comments than what I used to remember.

Odd, I was sure I had a lobste.rs account but it says my username is invalid. Do you have an invite available?

This is my first time hearing about lobste.rs - care to explain what it's purpose is (aside from a tech spin on HN)

I guess it wouldn't be too hard to implement a basic app that would allow you to do this. HN has an API, fetch data, then filter by keywords or links. If I have some time,i'll hack something.

Yes, but it takes effort and cooperation: flag the political stories.

I wonder if this would be needed if you could tag stories and posts with space-delimited strings, such as "python css oss", which upon being sent to the server would get converted into "python", "css", and "oss" tags.

From there, you could blacklist the stories tagged with subject matters you dislike. Folksonomic tagging (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy) sounds complicated but when implemented as a wiki-style system, it can actually work quite well.

The Danbooru-like image board systems (e.g., http://danbooru.donmai.us) likely are the best examples of this approach.

I've flagged this comment because I disagree with it.

EDIT: Let me elaborate: This use of flagging, like the suggested flagging of political articles is an abuse of the HN flagging system. If you do not feel that a story is upvote-worthy, don't upvote it. I, and most other users, have never flagged anything. Using flags as some sort of ersatz downvote to enforce your personal preferences is abuse of the system.

What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I also flagged it because it's egregious. Sure, most stories on politics can be off-topic but that doesn't mean you should organize voting rings to flag all political stories like tptacek suggests.

Also even if 99% of political stories are off-topic that still leaves some gigantic number on-topic, and some handful of them are part of something more interesting that would gratify one's intellectual curiosity.

I think it would be more pragmatic to just submit stories you want to see and regularly read the New page to upvote stories you like.

Why would you flag the political stories? I'm tired of Javascript articles, should I flag those?

See the guidelines, linked to the bottom of this page.

Tags would be useful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com