From the first paragraph: "people vote [links] up or down." Um... can't links only be voted up?
Past a certain karmic threshold, both are allowed.
Hacking Hacker News
31–40 of 54 posts
Re: Hacking Hacker News
#32If this is a solution to the "not enough links that I personally like" - kudos to the author. Nice to find a fun project to work on that will also solve a problem for them.
I personally despise recommendation / personalization algorithms of any kind. I still have never found one that's actually better than myself at distinguishing articles that I'd like to read, music that I want to listen to, tweets I'd like to see, etc.
When reading HN, I'm constantly surprised by links that would not normally be on my radar for things I'm interested in. I think personalization algos, in general, are good at filtering those away.
Since the author mentioned HN being too much of a firehose and this then also being a solution to the "too many links to keep up to date on" problem, the solution might be a bit simpler than the author suggested.
HN already has the "best" links at https://news.ycombinator.com/best
It's hard to find - it's in the 'Lists' section in the footer, but it's still there and I use it all the time, when I haven't been actively reading HN for a while.
Re: Hacking Hacker News
#33Interesting. This will go into today's top5HN Newsletter. Signup at top5hn.launchrock.co
Re: Hacking Hacker News
#34This is totally cool and kudos to you. But be aware there are limits of personalized hacker news. I think Bill Maher put it best when ranting just last night about facebooks customized news feeds: Newspapers may be old-fashioned, but here's what we're losing if you never see one. They are trying to tell you what's actually important, not just what's important to you. You may not read the whole paper, but you at least…
total nonsense, the classifier is just pushed upstream, from what I want to see, to what some ad-motivated editor wants me to see. newspapers reported stories to sell you something, be it papers, ads or someone's agenda, not because they believed we'd all be more rounded citizens.
But in the case of filtering Hacker News you're taking that pre-filtered list (filtered by geeks and startup folk and whathaveyou) and filtering it even more.
Whether that bubble is a subset of some other bubble, it's still a bubble.
Re: Hacking Hacker News
#35This is totally cool and kudos to you. But be aware there are limits of personalized hacker news. I think Bill Maher put it best when ranting just last night about facebooks customized news feeds: Newspapers may be old-fashioned, but here's what we're losing if you never see one. They are trying to tell you what's actually important, not just what's important to you. You may not read the whole paper, but you at least…
total nonsense, the classifier is just pushed upstream, from what I want to see, to what some ad-motivated editor wants me to see. newspapers reported stories to sell you something, be it papers, ads or someone's agenda, not because they believed we'd all be more rounded citizens.
Must be nice to have everything figured out
Re: Hacking Hacker News
#36FYI, the new Hacker News API allows easy programmatic access of story/comments and infinite chronological paging. You could download every Hacker News story in less than 2 hours without breaking the API request limit. https://hn.algolia.com/api
I have written an API for HN:
- Python module: https://github.com/karan/HackerNewsAPI
- REST API: https://github.com/karan/HNify
Re: Hacking Hacker News
#37Re: Hacking Hacker News
#38Oh jeez, who submitted this again? I learned my lesson a couple of years ago, everyone hates this. :)
Also, FYI, I don't even use this anymore, these days I just read the HN frontpage. :)
Its exactly the kind of thing I would build and abandon. So the maybe more interesting things is why you don't use it? I presume its a UI thing, or classifier is unreliable, or something?
I would love to hear why vanilla HN is better now.
Re: Hacking Hacker News
#39Oh jeez, who submitted this again? I learned my lesson a couple of years ago, everyone hates this. :)
Also, FYI, I don't even use this anymore, these days I just read the HN frontpage. :)
I found the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3602407 (498 points, 737 days ago, 82 comments)
(Note: I usually prefer the "unfiltered" version, unless there is a very special new that covers the 90% of the front page.)
Re: Hacking Hacker News
#40Oh jeez, who submitted this again? I learned my lesson a couple of years ago, everyone hates this. :)
I implemented the same thing for reddit a while back, and learned the same lesson :)
However, I haven't completely given up on the idea. The point is that while limiting news to things you've liked in the past is a terrible idea, helping you find good articles isn't.
The question is, what constitutes a good news item? I think the key is that there are many answers to this question:
1. Something very specific to your interests (your classifier should be good at detecting this)
2. Something big that everyone should hear about (the HN frontpage is good for this)
3. Something about a new concept you've never heard about. I've implemented this by keeping track of popular words on reddit and giving a boost to words not seen in the past, with some success.
4. Probably others I haven't thought about.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.