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HN Summary

53 points by auston 17y ago

dschobel 17y ago
Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News What's the algorithm for what makes it to this site? Or is it some random guy's editorial discretion?
- eam 17y ago
  Yeah, what is the algorithm? What would be cool is if you implemented something like Netflix, you know like a recommendation engine. Something that bases of your tastes and preferences and also uses the preferences of those users that have similar tastes as you do. Base on that you can recommend what's "worth reading." :)
  - kwamenum86 17y ago
    And you can figure out what people have read using the (soon to be closed by Mozilla) CSS history hack. You can easily index every story on HN by pinging and scraping newest every 20 or minutes. Don't worry they wont block you ;)
    - Zev 17y ago
      The problem when indexing isn't getting the new content; it is getting the ~1,240,000 older posts that aren't on newest anymore.
      - kwamenum86 17y ago
        You can grab that from searchyc.com, or just ignore it. You can get reasonable recommendations based on the latest articles. This would not be a general purpose recommendation engine, so you would actually need much less data. Attempting to analyze 1 million+ articles seems like overkill in this case. You could just scrape for a week. If you are building this I actually have several months worth of articles indexed, and would be happy to provide the db dump of 80,000+ articles. I'm actually thinking about hacking this up this weekend as well.
timmorgan 17y ago
Cool. Can we get the story on this? Is it done by a human, e.g. will it stop working for a week while said editor is on vacation? Is it auto-generated by vote count? Details please. [edit] I have to assume it's an editorial thing, since the summaries couldn't be auto-selected like that, I don't think. [edit 2] dschobel beat me to the question.
- hnsummary 17y ago
  Yes human. I summarize articles I find most interesting and would be of interest to the HN community as a whole. As long as I'm up-voted then I'll keep doing it.
  - lotharbot 17y ago
    Any plans to summarize or highlight the comments you find most interesting?
    - hnsummary 17y ago
      I've thought about that. If I see interesting comments I may work it into the summary with a citation. My first choice would be to direct people back to HN for the article discussion.
  - nfnaaron 17y ago
    "As long as I'm up-voted then I'll keep doing it." I'm not sure this is a good trigger. I think you should keep doing it as long as you like doing it, regardless of upvotes. I would think your server logs would be enough of an indicator of interest.
  - andreshb 17y ago
    Maybe you can get some help from http://timesvr.com http://timesvr.com
dsplittgerber 17y ago
I just want to say thank you.
jxcole 17y ago
Maybe at some point you should allow users to write their own reviews so that your admins aren't stuck writing them all the time? Maybe some sort of social networking utility?
jack7890 17y ago
Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News Isn't that the point of upvoting?
- mquander 17y ago
  How so? Why would the most popular stuff always be the stuff worth reading? That's certainly not true for most media. Do you suppose that the Billboard Top 100 is the music most worth listening to? Not saying that having an editor pick them out is necessarily going to do a better job, but there's certainly room to do a better job.
  - dschobel 17y ago
    I think in a relatively niche community where the readership submits the content and then determines what's popular, ranking probably correlates better with quality vs billboard or other mass media where the relationship is strictly producer -> consumer. That's just my intuition though.
    - mquander 17y ago
      Well, I agree, of course, it's hard to say that we don't do better than Billboard. That was a little bit of hyperbole. But consider: People upvote things for a zillion reasons. Because it made them chuckle. Because they agree with it. Because it shoots down another submission they really disagree with. Because the post wasn't very good but it had a link and the link was really good. Because the author came and posted in the comment thread and said something interesting about it. Because their buddy posted it. Because a minor HN celebrity posted it. Because it's all about banana-flavored threadsafe data structures in Erlang and they did their Ph.D. thesis on banana-flavored data structures and nobody ever posts about them anymore. Most of those barely correlate to what we mean when we say "quality" at all. The people who upvote only things that are "high quality" probably upvote much less, in fact, than people who upvote for other reasons. So that's why I would not expect upvotes to correlate with quality.
      - 17y ago
covercash 17y ago
Any plans/desire to do a daily audio podcast of these, release by ~5pm EST so people can listen to it on their drive home? I have some ideas for this, @covercash on twitter if you're interested in chatting.
- hnsummary 17y ago
  I'll contact you.
johnrob 17y ago
You should disclose what you consider to be "worth reading". Hopefully you have a bias that is different then the front page, otherwise it's really no different than that.
- jcl 17y ago
  On the other hand, he is contributing both a news filter and summaries. Perhaps there is value in the summaries, even if the filter mirrored the front page directly (sort of like Slashdot?).
ankeshk 17y ago
Can you redirect the comment link for each summary to comments over here?
- hnsummary 17y ago
  I include a link in each summary back to the HN comments for the article.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
keyist 17y ago
Not being facetious, just trying to find out if this site is for me: all the summarized articles so far have zero technical content (ie stuff on Python, Javascript, memcached, hardcore bit-on-bit action, etc). Is this intentional and indicative of hnsummary's content in the future? Now this is me being facetious: should the answer to the above be yes, I find both hnsummary's name and its tagline of "Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News" to be presumptuous at best, misleading and condescending at worst.
krainboltgreene 17y ago
This is an awesome idea and could be awesomer if turned into a full news website instead of just a blog, with multiple editorials and pictures and shit.
diego001 17y ago
Damn recursion.

53 points by auston 17y ago

Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News What's the algorithm for what makes it to this site? Or is it some random guy's editorial discretion?

eam 17y ago
Yeah, what is the algorithm? What would be cool is if you implemented something like Netflix, you know like a recommendation engine. Something that bases of your tastes and preferences and also uses the preferences of those users that have similar tastes as you do. Base on that you can recommend what's "worth reading." :)
- kwamenum86 17y ago
  And you can figure out what people have read using the (soon to be closed by Mozilla) CSS history hack. You can easily index every story on HN by pinging and scraping newest every 20 or minutes. Don't worry they wont block you ;)
  - Zev 17y ago
    The problem when indexing isn't getting the new content; it is getting the ~1,240,000 older posts that aren't on newest anymore.
    - kwamenum86 17y ago
      You can grab that from searchyc.com, or just ignore it. You can get reasonable recommendations based on the latest articles. This would not be a general purpose recommendation engine, so you would actually need much less data. Attempting to analyze 1 million+ articles seems like overkill in this case. You could just scrape for a week. If you are building this I actually have several months worth of articles indexed, and would be happy to provide the db dump of 80,000+ articles. I'm actually thinking about hacking this up this weekend as well.

timmorgan 17y ago

Cool. Can we get the story on this? Is it done by a human, e.g. will it stop working for a week while said editor is on vacation? Is it auto-generated by vote count? Details please. [edit] I have to assume it's an editorial thing, since the summaries couldn't be auto-selected like that, I don't think. [edit 2] dschobel beat me to the question.

hnsummary 17y ago
Yes human. I summarize articles I find most interesting and would be of interest to the HN community as a whole. As long as I'm up-voted then I'll keep doing it.
- lotharbot 17y ago
  Any plans to summarize or highlight the comments you find most interesting?
  - hnsummary 17y ago
    I've thought about that. If I see interesting comments I may work it into the summary with a citation. My first choice would be to direct people back to HN for the article discussion.
- nfnaaron 17y ago
  "As long as I'm up-voted then I'll keep doing it." I'm not sure this is a good trigger. I think you should keep doing it as long as you like doing it, regardless of upvotes. I would think your server logs would be enough of an indicator of interest.
- andreshb 17y ago
  Maybe you can get some help from http://timesvr.com http://timesvr.com

dsplittgerber 17y ago

I just want to say thank you.

jxcole 17y ago

Maybe at some point you should allow users to write their own reviews so that your admins aren't stuck writing them all the time? Maybe some sort of social networking utility?

jack7890 17y ago

Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News Isn't that the point of upvoting?

mquander 17y ago
How so? Why would the most popular stuff always be the stuff worth reading? That's certainly not true for most media. Do you suppose that the Billboard Top 100 is the music most worth listening to? Not saying that having an editor pick them out is necessarily going to do a better job, but there's certainly room to do a better job.
- dschobel 17y ago
  I think in a relatively niche community where the readership submits the content and then determines what's popular, ranking probably correlates better with quality vs billboard or other mass media where the relationship is strictly producer -> consumer. That's just my intuition though.
  - mquander 17y ago
    Well, I agree, of course, it's hard to say that we don't do better than Billboard. That was a little bit of hyperbole. But consider: People upvote things for a zillion reasons. Because it made them chuckle. Because they agree with it. Because it shoots down another submission they really disagree with. Because the post wasn't very good but it had a link and the link was really good. Because the author came and posted in the comment thread and said something interesting about it. Because their buddy posted it. Because a minor HN celebrity posted it. Because it's all about banana-flavored threadsafe data structures in Erlang and they did their Ph.D. thesis on banana-flavored data structures and nobody ever posts about them anymore. Most of those barely correlate to what we mean when we say "quality" at all. The people who upvote only things that are "high quality" probably upvote much less, in fact, than people who upvote for other reasons. So that's why I would not expect upvotes to correlate with quality.
    - 17y ago

covercash 17y ago

Any plans/desire to do a daily audio podcast of these, release by ~5pm EST so people can listen to it on their drive home? I have some ideas for this, @covercash on twitter if you're interested in chatting.

hnsummary 17y ago
I'll contact you.

johnrob 17y ago

You should disclose what you consider to be "worth reading". Hopefully you have a bias that is different then the front page, otherwise it's really no different than that.

jcl 17y ago
On the other hand, he is contributing both a news filter and summaries. Perhaps there is value in the summaries, even if the filter mirrored the front page directly (sort of like Slashdot?).

ankeshk 17y ago

Can you redirect the comment link for each summary to comments over here?

hnsummary 17y ago
I include a link in each summary back to the HN comments for the article.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

keyist 17y ago

Not being facetious, just trying to find out if this site is for me: all the summarized articles so far have zero technical content (ie stuff on Python, Javascript, memcached, hardcore bit-on-bit action, etc). Is this intentional and indicative of hnsummary's content in the future? Now this is me being facetious: should the answer to the above be yes, I find both hnsummary's name and its tagline of "Just the stuff worth reading from Hacker News" to be presumptuous at best, misleading and condescending at worst.

krainboltgreene 17y ago

This is an awesome idea and could be awesomer if turned into a full news website instead of just a blog, with multiple editorials and pictures and shit.

diego001 17y ago

Damn recursion.