Categories are too generic in my opinion. I would love to have smaller categories like "programming", "unix" and etc.
Thanks for your suggestion! We'll add more topics in the future.
Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
21–30 of 39 posts
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Got it. We'll set a background color in the body. 2. I agree. We will think about ways to handle it. As a last resort we may blacklist those kind of publishers. 3. Sign in is only needed to favorite stories (using the little bookmark icon below each line). I agree that it is not clear what the sign in is for, we will fix that. 4. Yup, we will increase the contrast a little. Thanks for the feedaback!
On #2, using binary block/allow lists for sites works, but long term, it can be problematic in the sense of maintenance effort (i.e. your time ;). A less common but more interesting approach is to use site-based weighting. There will still be some manual wrangling involved, but you might be able to automate some of it eventually (analysis of content on the site, dns, linked-from analysis, google page-rank lookup, etc…
We already have mechanisms like weighting, whitelisting, blacklisting, etc. in place. We generally trust a good quality source (site domain) to produce good quality content, but there are exceptions. Since our popularity scoring algorithm relies heavily on social signals, it trusts the crowd to reward good content, and ultimately good content will rank higher.
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#23Thank you for making this, this is exactly what I ever wanted to have and started few times making and did a half assed effort. So thank you. Exactly what I need. Perfect.
Glad you liked it! Thanks!
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#241.) You never set background-color. Not setting background-color results in unintended consequences on any browser configured to have a default other than the expected white background. A good example in your case is visited links become grey on grey (assuming a browser with grey default background). 2. You need to be cautious of and properly handle notorious webspam/blogspam regurgitation sites like "recode.net": "W…
2) And if you follow the links and you end up at a Gawker site, probably best to forget the whole thing.
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#25How do you define "relevance"?
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#26How do you define "relevance"?
It could be "popularity" or "trending factor" instead. Basically the same way stories are ranked on HN (http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574), but instead of upvotes it uses our popularity score system.
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#27The quality of the curation, at least for my taste and at least at this moment, is exceptional. Maybe the best algorithmic curation I've seen.
I'm curious what inspired you. There are many algorithmically curated news feeds; why add another? Is it because you believe your algorithm is a leap forward? Elsewhere you say it's mostly the same one used by HN.
Regardless, it works well for me. Thank you!
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#281.) You never set background-color. Not setting background-color results in unintended consequences on any browser configured to have a default other than the expected white background. A good example in your case is visited links become grey on grey (assuming a browser with grey default background). 2. You need to be cautious of and properly handle notorious webspam/blogspam regurgitation sites like "recode.net": "W…
>notorious webspam/blogspam regurgitation sites like "recode.net"
Actually recode.net does a lot of original reporting in addition to regurgitation. Disclosure: some of my former CNET/CBS colleagues are reporters there.
The problem (and I've seen this when building http://recent.io/ as well) is that every news organization does this to some extent. If organization X has a scoop, Y and Z will "follow" it by summarizing and rewriting it. This has been going on for over a century; the AP, founded in the 1840s, does it very well.
In the most egregious cases like the one above it's just a theoretically fair-use excerpt from the original story followed by a "read more" link. But sometimes it serves your users to link to the followup coverage instead. That's when the original article (FT, WSJ, Economist, etc.) may be behind a paywall, or when the followups have more context or additional details.
TL;DR: This is a non-trivial problem.
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#291.) You never set background-color. Not setting background-color results in unintended consequences on any browser configured to have a default other than the expected white background. A good example in your case is visited links become grey on grey (assuming a browser with grey default background). 2. You need to be cautious of and properly handle notorious webspam/blogspam regurgitation sites like "recode.net": "W…
>notorious webspam/blogspam regurgitation sites like "recode.net" Actually recode.net does a lot of original reporting in addition to regurgitation. Disclosure: some of my former CNET/CBS colleagues are reporters there. The problem (and I've seen this when building http://recent.io/ as well) is that every news organization does this to some extent. If organization X has a scoop, Y and Z will "follow" it by summarizin…
Even Google News only mostly gets this right: it tries to group stories on the same topic, but sometimes it has multiple buckets for the same topic, and sometimes an unrelated story gets thrown into the wrong bucket.
Re: Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news
#30I did something similar at http://yaxero.com