7 ms·

really, guys? In less than a week it'll be back to normal. I don't understand why people are all "not in MY HACKER NEWS" - this is what people are talking abou

really, guys? In less than a week it'll be back to normal. I don't understand why people are all "not in MY HACKER NEWS" - this is what people are talking about. In 3 days we'll be back to Clojure and Haskell and "rate my startup" and "I built <clone of popular site> using <new technology> in <some trivial number of hours>."

mike-cardwell 17y ago
3 days? I think even 3 months would be an optimistic claim.
- petercooper 17y ago
  About 24 hours after the launch, only 20% of the FP items mention the iPad: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n78ty/ipadreality http://skitch.com/petercooper/n78ty/ipadreality If you fancy matching a wager, I'll put down $50 to a charity of your choice that 10% or fewer of the front page items on July 4, 2010 have "iPad" in the title :-)
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
raganwald 17y ago
Well, the great thing about this is that it is a welcome change from the "HN is being overrun, please stop posting/upvoting articles about X or from site Y" complaint. This makes a point by distributing a tool, that seems very hacker-ish. I'm upvoting it for the spirit even though I probably will remove it after seeing whether it works in Chrome.
- mike-cardwell 17y ago
  It does. Works under GreaseKit on Safari too.
petercooper 17y ago
Some people like to put their heads in the sand and ignore things they don't like. Heck, that's why Fox News manages to maintain its entire audience share.
- mike-cardwell 17y ago
  Silly analogy. If I wrote an app which removed all celebrity and sport related news from my favorite news site, leaving just politics and business, would that also be classified as me sticking my head in the sand? Filtering out stuff you don't want to read != sticking your head in the sand.
  - petercooper 17y ago
    Filtering out stuff you don't want to read != sticking your head in the sand. Except you don't know you don't want to read it if you're using something as crude as looking for a string in a headline. I maintain that blindly ignoring content that has a single mention of a particular term is sticking your head in the sand (but everyone's entitled to interpret the situation as they like!). Your fictional app would likely rely upon categorization as an indicator. On news sites, content managers determine the interest areas for a story and you can then filter them. Stories that are really important will spill over to other categories (such as, on most news sites, the "main"/general category) and stories that seem to be about one topic but are really about another should, ideally, be categorized appropriately (e.g. "iPad Designer Jonathan Ive Dies" isn't an iPad story - crude example, but just to make a point). Filtering out items based on a string of letters in a headline (as suggested in this case) is not as elegant or robust. You might filter out "football" but still be interested if the plane carrying the Dallas Cowboys went down wiping out the team. You might filter out "health care" to avoid political discussions on HN but miss out on a story about a healthcare entrepreneur. It's as crude as early spam filtering. (And like spam filtering, could be improved by software that analyzed the content of the destination pages.. but relying on the headline alone is too flaky.) As a temporary measure to filter out a glut of stories (as with the iPad affair), it can work, but as a mid/long term strategy, filtering by headline is crude and prone to covering up stories you might actually find interesting. The quickest and most precise filtering device out there is the one connected to your eyes.

mike-cardwell 17y ago

3 days? I think even 3 months would be an optimistic claim.

petercooper 17y ago
About 24 hours after the launch, only 20% of the FP items mention the iPad: http://skitch.com/petercooper/n78ty/ipadreality http://skitch.com/petercooper/n78ty/ipadreality If you fancy matching a wager, I'll put down $50 to a charity of your choice that 10% or fewer of the front page items on July 4, 2010 have "iPad" in the title :-)
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

raganwald 17y ago

Well, the great thing about this is that it is a welcome change from the "HN is being overrun, please stop posting/upvoting articles about X or from site Y" complaint. This makes a point by distributing a tool, that seems very hacker-ish. I'm upvoting it for the spirit even though I probably will remove it after seeing whether it works in Chrome.

mike-cardwell 17y ago
It does. Works under GreaseKit on Safari too.

petercooper 17y ago

Some people like to put their heads in the sand and ignore things they don't like. Heck, that's why Fox News manages to maintain its entire audience share.

mike-cardwell 17y ago
Silly analogy. If I wrote an app which removed all celebrity and sport related news from my favorite news site, leaving just politics and business, would that also be classified as me sticking my head in the sand? Filtering out stuff you don't want to read != sticking your head in the sand.
- petercooper 17y ago
  Filtering out stuff you don't want to read != sticking your head in the sand. Except you don't know you don't want to read it if you're using something as crude as looking for a string in a headline. I maintain that blindly ignoring content that has a single mention of a particular term is sticking your head in the sand (but everyone's entitled to interpret the situation as they like!). Your fictional app would likely rely upon categorization as an indicator. On news sites, content managers determine the interest areas for a story and you can then filter them. Stories that are really important will spill over to other categories (such as, on most news sites, the "main"/general category) and stories that seem to be about one topic but are really about another should, ideally, be categorized appropriately (e.g. "iPad Designer Jonathan Ive Dies" isn't an iPad story - crude example, but just to make a point). Filtering out items based on a string of letters in a headline (as suggested in this case) is not as elegant or robust. You might filter out "football" but still be interested if the plane carrying the Dallas Cowboys went down wiping out the team. You might filter out "health care" to avoid political discussions on HN but miss out on a story about a healthcare entrepreneur. It's as crude as early spam filtering. (And like spam filtering, could be improved by software that analyzed the content of the destination pages.. but relying on the headline alone is too flaky.) As a temporary measure to filter out a glut of stories (as with the iPad affair), it can work, but as a mid/long term strategy, filtering by headline is crude and prone to covering up stories you might actually find interesting. The quickest and most precise filtering device out there is the one connected to your eyes.