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Tell HN: I curate HN stories which didn't reach the front page
Hi,
I'd like to introduce, and ask feedback for, my newsletter Interesting Things [1][2].
It's a response to the notion that many interesting stories posted to HN flies past and are not seen. Maybe they could, and should, be surfaced again somehow. A newsletter seemed like a good way to do it.
I experimented by trawling through the 'newest' section of HN. The first few times were mind-numbing. Gosh, there's so much noise in there! . But eventually I became more selective and efficient and it became repeatable.
Then I evolved it and added stories from reddit, newsletters that I subscribe to, and some other places. Whilst a portion of the stories are still from HN, it's no longer only from there.
The criteria is 'What I find interesting' but, since I'm a typical HN reader, the interest profile ends up being similar. It's mainly tech but with splashes of startups, science, productivity, etc. I omit politics. I also try to omit product/press releases, big corp stuff, and stories that would be covered by the mainstream tech press.
There is little overlap with other Hacker-News-based newsletters and digests. This is intentional. They cover the top stories from HN. Mine does not. (Maybe there might be one or two 'tier 1' stories, but the majority are not.)
So anyway ... if you'd like to read interesting stuff (whether or not it was unnoticed by HN) please have a look at Interesting Things. I hope you guys like it and find it ... well ... interesting.
I'm also looking for criticism, feedback and suggestions for improvement. Some sample questions: Do you like the one-two liner blurbs? Are the blurbs useful? What do you think of the distribution of topics? Are there areas where you'd like to see more (or less) coverage? Please let me know. I'm happy to talk.
Thanks for reading!
[1] https://bengtan.com/interesting-things https://bengtan.com/interesting-things
[2] https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample (redirects to the latest public edition)
- bengtan 5y agoClickable links; [1] https://bengtan.com/interesting-things https://bengtan.com/interesting-things [2] https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample (redirects to the latest public edition)
- mtreis86 5y agoRSS feed https://bengtan.com/index.xml https://bengtan.com/index.xml
- bengtan 5y agoUh, this feed is for the website as a whole. Yes, the feed does include the newsletter but it's (currently) delayed by a week. Whereas subscribers get it non-delayed.
- ohyeshedid 5y agoWhy are you delaying the content to newsletter subscribers? Considering the source of your content, and lack of attribution; now it's looking shifty.
- bengtan 5y ago> Why are you delaying the content to newsletter subscribers? I'm not. It's only delayed when it gets posted to the web archive. Newsletter subscribers get it straight away. And ... (Full transparency mode) it's to encourage readers to subscribe. > Considering the source of your content, and lack of attribution; now it's looking shifty. Please see comments above, particularly https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27493014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27493014.
- ohyeshedid 5y agoRight. You're talking about incentivizing a subscription to your newsletter. You have no TOS, nor PP, for it. You're providing scraped content while either time-gating it, or putting it behind a subscription. Everything together appears questionable to me. Here's a question: If this isn't to be monetized, and this isn't about lead capture; why are you incentivizing subscriptions with current content instead of adding it to your feed?
- bengtan 5y agoI think it's fairly obvious. I'm gonna build a massive mailing list. When I get enough numbers, I'll include a link to a malicious website. Then people click on it and it'll download malware onto their computer. That will seed my botnet and then I can do bad things with it.
- vincentmarle 5y agoThis looks pretty good. In regards to your Substack / Buttondown comparison I would also take a look at Revue which seems to excel at curated newsletters.
- bengtan 5y agoNoted. I'll add to my to-do list. Thanks!
- nojs 5y agoCool collection of articles. One thing I’d like is a link to the HN discussion, for the articles taken from here.
- bengtan 5y agoHmmm ... I thought a lot about this ie. whether to include the HN link. Problem is ... when I write the newsletter, most HN links are empty or only have one or two comments. Later on, the story reaches the front page on HN but it's a new HN link. So if I include the 'original' HN link, it's not useful to the reader, and may even mislead them into thinking there was insignificant HN discussion. For example, I linked this story: [Web Applications from the Future: A Database in the Browser](https://stopa.io/post/279 https://stopa.io/post/279) in early May but it only recently garnered significant discussion a month later in early June (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424496 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424496). So I'm not entirely sure how to resolve this.
- codetrotter 5y agoYou could use the “past” link that leads to Algolia search for the story. In the case of your example https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Web%20Applications%20from%20the%20Future%3A%20A%20Database%20in%20the%20Browser&type=story&dateRange=all&sort=byDate&storyText=false&prefix&page=0 https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Web%20Applications%20from%20th... But not sure if that’s a good idea or not. Just suggesting it as one alternative to consider
- bengtan 5y agoI'm gonna think on how to solve this conundrum in a way that satisfies everyone. This is one data point I'll think about. Thanks for bringing it up.
- jacquesm 5y agoBut then your traffic would drive that HN discussion and then comments would appear.
- Sr_developer 5y agoI like it, but it is so much information that you it would be cool to have a systematic way to archive it and search it.
- bengtan 5y agoHmmm ... it would be extra work that would, over the long run, end up being a lot of work. I'm doubtful whether readers would search my 'archive' vs. searching google (for example).
- creamynebula 5y agoIt seems that I'm only allowed to read if I subscribe...
- bengtan 5y agoHi, This only applies to the latest issue which is subscriber-only for 1 week. If you subscribe, the latest issue is emailed to you a few minutes later. Earlier issues are publicly available in the archives.
- gus_massa 5y agoPerhaps this should be clear in the main page. Something like: > 11 Jun 2021 - Interesting Things #8 — Meta-/beta-stability (available only for subscriber until ??/??) > 4 Jun 2021 - Interesting Things #7 — Don't read everything > 28 May 2021 - Interesting Things #6 — Esoteric languages and sleep sort I guess most people click in the first link and if it doesn't work assume that all the other will not work.
- bengtan 5y agoNoted. Thank you.
- shoto_io 5y agoWow. Super interesting. I am doing something very similar, but with way less articles per newsletter. I cover 3 "snippets", which I often find on the "new" page on HN. (shoto.io)
- 0des 5y agoSweet, as someone who's never reached the front page, or the second page, I applaud this effort.
- bengtan 5y agoThank you.
- dennis_jeeves 5y agoHere is a feature that I'd like: curate articles by a user. Meaning if I were to, for example subscribe to all articles posted by "bengtan", then I should be able to get a list of posts that he has written, along with posts form other users that I may have subscribed to.
- lonk11 5y agoYou can subscribe to articles posted by a user as an RSS feed: https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=bengtan https://hnrss.org/submitted?id=bengtan The problem though is that it is hard to find users you want to subscribe to. You need to inspect their past submissions to see if the signal-to-noise ratio of that user is high enough for you. If you oversubscribe to too many users then your subscriptions will be full of noise. In my hobby project https://linklonk.com https://linklonk.com I want to solve this problem of discovering users and feeds that have a high signal-to-noise ratio for you. It works similar to HN - users submit links and upvote/downvote them. But the way your ratings are used is different. When you upvote something - you get connected to other users that upvoted the same article/post. The more shared upvotes you have with someone => the stronger you are connected to them => the more weight their other upvotes have for you. If you downvote something - your connections to those who upvoted that item become weaker, their other upvoted have less weight for you. Your connections to other users capture how useful their previous recommendations have been for you. And over time you get connected to the best content curators for you. All this done automatically as you rate content. You do not need to manually manage who to subscribe to/unsubscribe from. The above mechanism works not only for users but also for RSS feeds that posted the content you upvoted. This way LinkLonk works as an RSS reader that prioritizes based on your content ratings.
- jjjbokma 5y agoI do something similar, daily, with Plurrrr: https://plurrrr.com/ https://plurrrr.com/ . It comes with both a JSON feed and RSS feed.
- skinnymuch 5y agoYou don’t link to any discussion either? Already said this. Both personally and on principle, it doesn’t seem right.
- jjjbokma 5y agoI do link to discussions if there are any and if they add to the link itself, for example: https://plurrrr.com/archive/2020/05/13.html https://plurrrr.com/archive/2020/05/13.html
- welder 5y agoSome of those featured stories did reach the front page.
- yitchelle 5y agoPerhaps it was curated prematurely for the newsletter?
- bengtan 5y agoI don't set out to only curate stories which don't reach the front page. That's just a side effect, not a criteria. Also, sometimes a story reaches the front page after it appears in my newsletter because it got re-submitted. Correlation? Don't know.
- suramya_tomar 5y agoThis is a very interesting collection of stories/links. I found most of the links to be very useful & thought provoking.
- bengtan 5y agoThanks!
- srean 5y agoThis is great ! In fact, this got me thinking about what a simple ML model for automating HN's 2nd-look could look like. One could assume that the log odds of user_a' upvoting an article, after visiting it off the 'new' page, is a linear function of * the article's quality (denoted by x) and * user_a's click happiness. P(upvote_a | seen_a) = exp(a + λₐ x) / (1 + exp(a + λₐ x)) Both a and λₐ are unknown parameters that can be estimated from past data given some prior over x, say centered at 0 with a high variance. One can grant a new articles a 2nd look if the posterior probability of x crossing a gate keeping threshold is sufficiently high.
- ammar_x 5y agoWe need more things like this: tools that extract valuable info from the overcrowded internet.
- wdencker 5y agoAgreed. I’m working on one such tool: https://trove.to/ https://trove.to/
- lonk11 5y agoThe newsletter/sample page has a broken link: "I hope you find the following stories interesting. If you don’t, you can [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}) and I won’t pollute your inbox again." Is supposed to be substituted when it is send as an email?
- bengtan 5y ago> Is supposed to be substituted when it is send as an email? Yes. I copy-and-paste directly from the newsletter content into the web archives. That's how this artefact gets transferred across.
- jopsen 5y agoWhy, newsletters? I never sign up of extra emails... But I do occasionally add stuff to my RSS reader.. Which is what I read when HN frontpage has nothing interesting.
- ohyeshedid 5y agoMost of the time, because they can't capture leads with a freely accessible rss feed.
- bengtan 5y ago> Why, newsletters? Amongst other things, I'd like to build up a mailing list. But I realise newsletters don't work for everyone, which is why I also post to a freely available web archive. > Which is what I read when HN frontpage has nothing interesting. Well, the next time you have nothing interesting to read, feel free to peruse my newsletter archives. :)
- rognjen 5y ago> I'd like to build up a mailing list Just FYI that's why I (and I assume the OP) don't sub to newsletters.
- skinnymuch 5y agoIt is annoying, but different sides and people are merging newsletters and rss. You’ll still get the mailing lists’ new normally unwanted different emails, but at least it will be contained so easier to squash and won’t hit your actual email.
- jopsen 5y ago> Just FYI that's why I (and I assume the OP) Exactly, whenever I see "newsletter" I think spam. Because clearly your content isn't good enough that people will come back on their own.
- seumars 5y agoIs this the positive alternative to n-gate?
- dang 5y agoEdit: ouch! - it was a moderator who added "Show HN" and that was totally our mistake. I'm so sorry for scolding you for something you didn't do! Newsletters can't be Show HNs. Please read the rules—they mention this explicitly: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. I've replaced "Show HN" with "Tell HN" above. Also, if you're getting these stories from HN then I would ask you to link to the HN submissions. We totally support the goal of bringing attention to great stories that haven't gotten significant attention yet. Other people have worked on this problem (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049), and in fact we spend a good deal of time doing the same thing (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308). But it's not good for community to sever the links to the source where you found them. In fact, at first glance it felt exploitative to me—a bit like kicking the ladder out from under you—but on reflection I'm sure that's not what you intended. If you include the HN sources the way that polote has done here: https://hnblogs.substack.com/p/hn-blogs-24121 https://hnblogs.substack.com/p/hn-blogs-24121, that would suffice. p.s. It looks great and I'm going to subscribe!
- thurn 5y agothis page should probably be linked to on https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, I had no idea there were specific rules for the 'Shown HN' prefix
- dang 5y agoIt's in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html, as well as at the top of https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show. Btw, it's been on our list for a good 7 years to ask people to confirm that they've read the rules before posting a Show HN, but I always hold back because it would break a certain precedent. HN doesn't tend to use nag screens and so on.
- petercooper 5y agoat first glance it felt exploitative to me Exploitative? Of who? The submitters? I only ask because as both a submitter and content creator I have zero problem with anyone finding items through /newest and sharing them wherever they like, credit back to HN or not, and am unsure who benefits from dissuading this.