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I have a somewhat radical, sadly not novel suggestion: build what you're looking for. I now have a semi-private "HN Reader" which has completely broken my HN h
by thaumaturgy 14y ago
I have a somewhat radical, sadly not novel suggestion: build what you're looking for.
I now have a semi-private "HN Reader" which has completely broken my HN habit while still feeding me stuff I might be interested in. Because I built it, I can make it do anything I want. I've started to turn it into a slightly broader search engine so that I can find the things that I'm looking for; I got sick of seeing search engines brag about the hundreds-of-thousands or millions of search results they were returning when I was trying to find something (really, what's the point of that?), so I'm building my own. I got sick of feeding some psychological trigger in my brain that made me nervously check the HN front page numerous times throughout the day, and I'd find myself clicking on items that had lots of comments and activity even if the subject was something I wasn't interested in. I guess I was thinking, "wow, lots of people over there, I should go check that out."
What did it for me was a bit of foggy nostalgia one day. I was thinking about "the good ol' days", how I -- we, all of us if we were lucky enough to be born at the right time in the right environment -- used to modify the crap of out of programs, change their interface, tweak their colors, cheat at games even when we were the only ones playing. We used to take things we didn't like and turn them into things we did like.
But nobody, or very few people, do that for the web, even though there are piles and piles of tools that make it easy and doable.
So I did it.
And it is glorious.
It's some of the most fun I've had at programming in years. Now when I'm feeling like a wet cat, I'll just go tweak my little reader-search-engine-toy, and then I feel better. Now I never feel like I'm missing out on something on HN, because my little toy is keeping an eye on it for me and saving the stuff I might care about it.
And if you're looking for a new community ... well, build that too! It's clear from numerous threads on HN and other places that people are ready for something new. Make what you want, share it if you feel like, if enough other people like it maybe they'll join in and you'll have your community.
- anthonyb 14y agoSounds interesting, can you give us more details on how it works? I had a quick look at your homepage, but couldn't see any links for it, or a github profile.
- VMG 14y agoAnd if you build the next HN, please add an API
- polshaw 14y agoWhat are the main reasons you want an API?
- p4bl0 14y agoI guess something like the possibility to have a mobile application (either web based or native app) which would be usable (the tiny up- and down-vote arrows of HN are not easy to use using a finger on a touchscreen) and which would actually work by not relying on html-parsing or search kludge.
- blissland 14y ago>> I guess something like the possibility to have a mobile application See http://ihackernews.com/ http://ihackernews.com/
- guiambros 14y agoIf you have an iPhone, there's news:yc. Great reader. Not perfect, but the best I found so far.
- adroitec 14y agoThe best reading experience I've seen (by far in my opinion) for iPhone/iPad is http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/ http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/
- dakrisht 14y agoSounds interesting. Would love to check it out.
- sgdesign 14y agoIf anybody wants an easy way to set up their own HN, may I suggest taking a look at Telescope? http://telesc.pe/ http://telesc.pe/ It's a real-time, open source HN clone built on Meteor, with features like invite-only mode, notifications, and a lot more stuff. And since it's open source, if something is missing you can always code it yourself and contribute it back to the project.
- beshrkayali 14y agoThis is pretty cool! I've been working with Meteor for a few weeks, but haven't heard of it before. Forking!
- rickdale 14y agoHow do you install meteorite? I can't get this working! Frustrated!
- JEVLON 14y agohttp://docs.meteor.com/#quickstart http://docs.meteor.com/#quickstart
- rickdale 14y agoThanks. I got this far after posting my comment. Figured out I needed NodePackageManager. I hate when instructions say npm and dont say what npm means. Now I am getting another error when I run mrt inside the telescope folder. I am working on it.. I love this. I spent weeks trying to get newscloud going, but never did...
- muratmutlu 14y agoDoes this have karma style points for users?
- sgdesign 14y agoNot yet, but it's coming.
- zgembo 14y agohttp://www.pivoted.co/ http://www.pivoted.co/
- kungfuton 14y agoYes, I agree, build it. However, please do not make it like HN or you will fail. Be different. Brand it. Have a personality.
- heed 14y agoWould you be willing to share this tool?
- jlgreco 14y agoI've done similar. Bayesian filtering seems to work great on HN headlines. I trained mine with about two years of data scrapped from http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ (apologies to whoever runs that), then just basically wrapped that with some code that grabs hacker news's main page and displays the filtered headlines to me. It nails politics and startup crap with stunning accuracy. The only problem is that now I find myself using both that system and the website itself.
- unimpressive 14y agoAnywhere I can get that training set without DDOS'ing some poor guys mirror?
- krapp 14y agoI've thought about designing a community with script hacking in mind (a simple initial layout with an api) and then letting users be able to script it themselves through their accounts. If it could even be done safely and sanely, everyone could have the features they wanted by writing their own. In lieu of that of course there's always greasemonkey.