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Hacking Hacker News

joelgrus.com

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Re: Hacking Hacker News

#41

Post by smoyer »

"The model can only get better with more training data, which requires me to judge whether I like stories or not. I do this occasionally when there’s nothing interesting on Facebook. Right now this is just the above command-line tool, but maybe I’ll come up with something better in the future."

If you let your program log into HN using your account, it should be able to tell which of the stories you've up-voted there. If you use that as the input to your classifier, as you read stories on HN, simply mark those that interest you by up-voting them.

I'm also curious to know whether the stories are weighted by age to account for changes in what you find interesting.

Re: Hacking Hacker News

#43

Post by davidw »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #38
joelgrus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I would love to hear why vanilla HN is better now.

Probably because it has more politics and less 'hacker news' these days.

Re: Hacking Hacker News

#44

Post by joelgrus »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #38
joelgrus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know that vanilla HN is better now. I abandoned it for two main reasons:

1. The Hacker News API I was using was very unreliable and would go down for days / weeks at a time, which made the whole pipeline unreliable.

2. I was consuming this as an RSS feed, but when Google Reader shut down I abandoned my RSS habit cold turkey, so now I pretty much only read sites that I visit directly, or things people link to on FB / Twitter.

Re: Hacking Hacker News

#45

Post by j2kun »

It seems there is a small but very strong subculture of HackerNews readers who enjoy reading and discussing mathematical things. I would love to have a separate feed of those stories (and then after I'm done I could browse the HN front page), and I have often thought about the possibility of writing a program to do that.

DataTau (the HN for data mining) seems to have failed, so I imagine a filter is the way to go rather than make a new website.

Re: Hacking Hacker News

#46

Post by jt2190 »

j2kun wrote: post #45

It seems there is a small but very strong subculture of HackerNews readers who enjoy reading and discussing mathematical things. I would love to have a separate feed of those stories (and then after I'm done I could browse the HN front page), and I have often thought about the possibility of writing a program to do that. DataTau (the HN for data mining) seems to have failed, so I imagine a filter is the way to go rat…

I think one of the challenges of hosting a "sub-HN" is that the hosting costs are hard to justify.

This raises the question: How does YC justify hosting costs? My completely-off-the-cuff-assumption-take-this-with-a-huge-grain-of-salt is that YC benefits by having a huge audience to make announcements to, like job postings at YC funded companies, various pg essays, or just investing in overall goodwill from the HN audience. Probably the most likely reason is to increase deal-flow to YCombinator itself, though.

Re: Hacking Hacker News

#47

Post by icebraining »

joelgrus wrote: post #44
tlarkworthy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know that vanilla HN is better now. I abandoned it for two main reasons: 1. The Hacker News API I was using was very unreliable and would go down for days / weeks at a time, which made the whole pipeline unreliable. 2. I was consuming this as an RSS feed, but when Google Reader shut down I abandoned my RSS habit cold turkey, so now I pretty much only read sites that I visit directly, or things people link to…

Why did you use the API instead of consuming the HN RSS feed itself? They even offer a big feed for such usage: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Re: Hacking Hacker News

#48

Post by [deleted] »

davidw wrote: post #43
tlarkworthy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I would love to hear why vanilla HN is better now. Probably because it has more politics and less 'hacker news' these days.

[deleted]

Re: Hacking Hacker News

#49

Post by icebraining »

jt2190 wrote: post #46
j2kun wrote: post #45

It seems there is a small but very strong subculture of HackerNews readers who enjoy reading and discussing mathematical things. I would love to have a separate feed of those stories (and then after I'm done I could browse the HN front page), and I have often thought about the possibility of writing a program to do that. DataTau (the HN for data mining) seems to have failed, so I imagine a filter is the way to go rat…

I think one of the challenges of hosting a "sub-HN" is that the hosting costs are hard to justify. This raises the question: How does YC justify hosting costs? My completely-off-the-cuff-assumption-take-this-with-a-huge-grain-of-salt is that YC benefits by having a huge audience to make announcements to, like job postings at YC funded companies, various pg essays, or just investing in overall goodwill from the HN aud…

Why does it need to have some justification beyond being a fun hobby? HN is hosted on a single server, and it probably uses less than 1TB/month, so it's not that expensive for someone with a Bay Area tech salary, let alone the whole YC.

Re: Hacking Hacker News

#50

Post by joelgrus »

icebraining wrote: post #47
joelgrus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that vanilla HN is better now. I abandoned it for two main reasons: 1. The Hacker News API I was using was very unreliable and would go down for days / weeks at a time, which made the whole pipeline unreliable. 2. I was consuming this as an RSS feed, but when Google Reader shut down I abandoned my RSS habit cold turkey, so now I pretty much only read sites that I visit directly, or things people link to…

Why did you use the API instead of consuming the HN RSS feed itself? They even offer a big feed for such usage: http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

Ha, mostly because I didn't know about it. The big feed is not all that discoverable.
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