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Hacker News for Hackers

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Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#31

Post by TeMPOraL »

danso wrote: post #17
laurent123456 wrote: post #4

> Off-Topic: ... If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. That would be nice but unfortunately in practice all the big news make their way to the top of HN, despite the fact that we've already read and heard about them from countless other sources. For example some of the top posts at the moment are: - Catalan parliament declares independence from Spain - New Zealand to ban foreigners from buying exist…

“All the big news”? That’s quite a stretch. If it were true, it would mean the most of the other 27 stories on the HN front page could conceivably be found on a newspaper front page, which is clearly untrue. I don’t think it’s unreasonable that some news is so big — such as the potential creation of a new European country — that HN users want to discuss it.

Indeed. For years now I've been using HN as a proxy news filter, based on the assumption that if something actually important happens - like a war or a deadly earthquake - it'll get on HN, and all the rest of the news can be safely discarded. It generally works pretty well for me.

Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#32

Post by grzm »

CPLX wrote: post #27
grzm wrote: post #16

Impressive. The aspect I find of particular interest is dog piling. When I first heard about Prismatic[0] (RIP), I thought that would be a great way of discovering articles on topics I was in interested from sources I didn't already know. I ended up being overwhelmed by articles dog piling without a useful way to filter them for either (a) the original source of the news or (b) articles written on the topic from sour…

Perhaps off-topic but I was quite fond of Prismatic. Is there a good replacement out there you've found?

No, unfortunately. I haven't really searched much. My patience for trying out new tools isn't all that high. The only two I've really used have been NetNewsWire (which I stopped using I think back around the time NewsGator acquired it) and Prismatic, which I never really found useful. The closest thing I use now is HN. I think likely the next tool I'll use in this space is roll-my-own as the author has or some app that provides the building blocks or plugin architecture for customization along those lines.

Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#34

Post by jasonkostempski »

I've been using newsbeuter with filters for the undesirable domains and I probably don't spend more than 1 minute a day skipping over stuff I don't want. The biggest win is using RSS just so I don't have to rescan things I've already skipped.

Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#35

Post by jasonkostempski »

jpl56 wrote: post #9

Pop-ins : here is what I do 1) I found here, on Hacker News, a nice "kill sticky" javascript function to put in my shortcuts 2) In Firefox, I gave it a shortcut keyword 3) In my AutoHotKey script, I assigned a key to "type the shortcut keyword in the address bar" to run it quickly 4) when a pop-in occurs, I reflexively press my kill key The script is javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%…

I find it's much better to just blacklist and never see a link to those sites again.

Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#36

Post by PaulHoule »

pmoriarty wrote: post #29
crznp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, that I'd have to manually scan through all the articles anyway, just in case the classifier made a mistake and maybe dumped an article I found intensely interesting in the uninteresting pile. But I'm sure there are interesting articles that didn't get classified at all. It doesn't seem like the end of the world if you lose a little wheat with the chaff. > overall what I found interesting or not changed from…

"It doesn't seem like the end of the world if you lose a little wheat with the chaff." But is it losing a little or a lot? No way to tell without looking. Even if it misses just a little, that little bit might have been crucial. If it misclassifies "NYC NUKED!!!" as uninteresting that's a single mistake that could make me oblivious to a hugely consequential event. Of course, as a human classifier, I'll doubtlessly ma…

If NYC got nuked, I'd probably hear about it some other way.

Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#37

Post by Nomentatus »

11thEarlOfMar wrote: post #13

I don't have time to read the whole thing, so maybe it's already there, but, .... I'd like to be able to credit comments that got me to re-think or even change my position on a topic. Upvotes basically say, 'that's a good point', or 'I agree with you'. But I'd like to see a way to gauge 'influence', in terms of affecting what people think in a positive way. Can that be worked in?

I don't think we're there, yet.

Sadly, I begin to conclude that right now most downvotes mean: "I really, really hope that isn't true, even though you have a bibliography and I just have an emotional reaction."

Maybe a Markov-chain based reputation system (a la Google for search) that makes downvotes unequal is in order.

Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#38

Post by Nomentatus »

I'm a bit more interested in business (although a programmer first); so my article choices would have been somewhat broader. One of the things I value about Hacker News is that it helps introduce people who might be coders right now to business, market and management info; which will prepare them for the future, but also help ensure their coding decisions fit the business that hired them. I know that's not the primary mission of Hacker News, but I do think it's a valuable contribution.

There's an historical pendulum with a cycle of many decades re monopoly/market power regulation which seems to be reversing itself right now. IMHO, this will likely be the most important shaping factor shaping the tech industry over the next decade, especially re small startups. So I don't turn up my nose at "Big Tech Companies Behaving Badly" articles, although I know there's a fair bit of repetition. I do want to know where that pendulum is, and whether it's really swinging back. Yes, it's law that will be the instrument of that change, but it's public perception that will necessitate changes in the law (say re patent misuse) and its implementation.

Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#39

Post by lj3 »

jpl56 wrote: post #9

Pop-ins : here is what I do 1) I found here, on Hacker News, a nice "kill sticky" javascript function to put in my shortcuts 2) In Firefox, I gave it a shortcut keyword 3) In my AutoHotKey script, I assigned a key to "type the shortcut keyword in the address bar" to run it quickly 4) when a pop-in occurs, I reflexively press my kill key The script is javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%…

Using stylish is easier and automatic.

  .overlay {
     display: none;
  }

Re: Hacker News for Hackers

#40

Post by lj3 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #15
garysieling wrote: post #7

That's an interesting project. I've been exploring this from a different angle, in the form of generated email newsletters ( https://www.findlectures.com/form?type=alert ). This uses the contents of the articles as well - I'm crawling links on programming subreddits. If you start from keywords you can use NLP (Word2vec) to measure how close articles are to your interests, so for instance "python, machine learning" gi…

Many years ago, back when Bayesian spam filtering was the hot new thing, I wrote up a little program that would classify articles in RSS feeds based on whether I found similar articles to be interesting or not interesting in the past. The ultimate goal was to save me time and effort in manually classifying them, as I and everyone else do when we scan through what we come across on a daily basis. Instead of manually d…

> My interests were constantly changing.

That's exactly what I found out a few years back when I tried to do something similar with modern machine learning techniques. The article we're commenting on even mentioned that, for this kind of classification to work, you need to maintain a stable viewpoint over time. I do know some people who maintain stable viewpoints over time, but they don't need fancy ML techniques to find things that are of interest of them. They tend to talk to (and be well known to) other people who have similar interests.

I can't help but feel that a better solution to this problem has already been envisioned and enacted about a dozen times already. Myspace, Twitter, Livejournal, and tumblr all did a great job of showing you things you find interesting by following people who post things you find interesting. The only reason I'm still on hacker news is there's a small group of people who always post things I find interesting. I have an RSS feed set up for each of them. I also positively filter posts and comments on a few topics I always find interesting (like RSS).

The downside to the method I use above is there are dry spells where there's nothing interesting to read. Is that a bug? Or a feature? A decade ago, I would have said bug, but not now. I've never had a fear of missing out, but I have been addicted to the novelty of getting a steady feed of interesting articles, essays and posts to read. I came to the conclusion I was addicted when I would spend hours reading and absorbing information that never gets used and is completely irrelevant to the tasks I need to get done and the goals I want to accomplish with my life. These days, I'm happy reading less and doing more.

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