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Ughh... I wish there was a HN feature: custom filters, i.e. a regexp one could use to filter out irrelevant (to him/her) news: twitter, facebook, .+ionaire - al

Ughh... I wish there was a HN feature: custom filters, i.e. a regexp one could use to filter out irrelevant (to him/her) news: twitter, facebook, .+ionaire - all these would be in my filter: I'm an engineer and I'm not interested in media/entertainment/advertisement business, yet sometimes they occupy well over half of the front page. I assume this happens due to a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days. Twitter, Walt Disney, Austin American Statesman or AutoTrader - there is no difference and all of them are of no interest to a programmer: they're not "high-tech" companies. Sure, they employ programmers and can't be run without computers, but that applies to every business in 2009 Custom filtering would also allow me to see promising submissions to bubble up to my start page, taking the spots of killed media/hype/iphone/getrich-with-3-lines-of-javascript stories. I wanted to write such UI myself and just let it be - i.e. I'd crawl HN and generate my own front page but I suspect Paul wouldn't be happy about it.

mixmax 18y ago
a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" - I've noticed that too, and I think it's bollocks. It's much smarter to go after a niche market where you can easily make milliions instead of shooting for the one in a million chance that you'll make the next facebook. Chances are you won't.
- wallflower 18y ago
  I'd love to read a book styled along the lines of "The Millionaire Next Door". Call it "The Entrepreneur in the Woodwork" - profiles/statistics on eBook sellers, ISVs (especially niche business apps), niche site owners, niche iPhone app studios, the mythical highly profitable subscription sites (salsabootcamp.com is one), the gadget blogs that make mint from affiliate links (coolest-gadgets.com), maybe even some non mainstream blogs. Cap the success level though - no outliers - Leave out the JohnChow.com Adwords or Dooce.com anomalies. I think it might be hard to find these people to interview though. Domain records and traffic stats and presence can be false starts.
- krschultz 18y ago
  Especially a niche enterprise market. Consumers are fickle and frugal. Companies are looking for a way to do more while paying less. A lot of times, what is "less" to them is a huge amount to you.
tlrobinson 18y ago
Use GreaseMonkey/UserScripts. You wouldn't have to crawl Hacker News, just visit it normally, remove the offending posts with JavaScript. I think there's already some out there, just search.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
froo 18y ago
I assume this happens due to a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days. Yes in part, but there are also some coders out there who take genuine interest in these things. Take, for example, me - I'm not the best coder in the world by any stretch of the imagination but I've had a unexplainable passion for animation for about as long as I can remember. I originally thought the way to "make it" was to follow in other's footsteps, make a web app, flip it etc, but I wholly believe that for this kind of thing to work your heart really needs to be in it. For me this wasn't the case. This is why I'm following a path that I'm genuinely interested in. The kind of thing that makes me jump out of bed with excitement in the morning and keeps me going until the wee hours in the evening. It's not a case of thinking about the payoff at the end of day as the only motivation for me to do what I'm doing (although its never too far from my mind) but it's the process I'm obsessed with and the potential of changing the game that keeps me intrigued. There's just so much ground that has yet been unexplored and I think really, this is the most exciting part of the whole process.
vorador 18y ago
What about an HN API ? For instance, the user may define a cgi perl script that gets called with the name of each submission every time the front page is loaded...
dejb 18y ago
Actually I'm just the opposite. I prefer hacking media and business to code. I'm more interested in how twitter will fight spam than how erlang can scale. Each to their own but I see this as a kind of 'Business for (ex)coders'.
Tichy 18y ago
My impression is that you have no idea what Twitter actually is. Maybe you should read one of the articles about it once in a while?

mixmax 18y ago

a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" - I've noticed that too, and I think it's bollocks. It's much smarter to go after a niche market where you can easily make milliions instead of shooting for the one in a million chance that you'll make the next facebook. Chances are you won't.

wallflower 18y ago
I'd love to read a book styled along the lines of "The Millionaire Next Door". Call it "The Entrepreneur in the Woodwork" - profiles/statistics on eBook sellers, ISVs (especially niche business apps), niche site owners, niche iPhone app studios, the mythical highly profitable subscription sites (salsabootcamp.com is one), the gadget blogs that make mint from affiliate links (coolest-gadgets.com), maybe even some non mainstream blogs. Cap the success level though - no outliers - Leave out the JohnChow.com Adwords or Dooce.com anomalies. I think it might be hard to find these people to interview though. Domain records and traffic stats and presence can be false starts.
krschultz 18y ago
Especially a niche enterprise market. Consumers are fickle and frugal. Companies are looking for a way to do more while paying less. A lot of times, what is "less" to them is a huge amount to you.

tlrobinson 18y ago

Use GreaseMonkey/UserScripts. You wouldn't have to crawl Hacker News, just visit it normally, remove the offending posts with JavaScript. I think there's already some out there, just search.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

froo 18y ago

I assume this happens due to a widespread belief that building a media company is how a programmer can "make it" these days. Yes in part, but there are also some coders out there who take genuine interest in these things. Take, for example, me - I'm not the best coder in the world by any stretch of the imagination but I've had a unexplainable passion for animation for about as long as I can remember. I originally thought the way to "make it" was to follow in other's footsteps, make a web app, flip it etc, but I wholly believe that for this kind of thing to work your heart really needs to be in it. For me this wasn't the case. This is why I'm following a path that I'm genuinely interested in. The kind of thing that makes me jump out of bed with excitement in the morning and keeps me going until the wee hours in the evening. It's not a case of thinking about the payoff at the end of day as the only motivation for me to do what I'm doing (although its never too far from my mind) but it's the process I'm obsessed with and the potential of changing the game that keeps me intrigued. There's just so much ground that has yet been unexplored and I think really, this is the most exciting part of the whole process.

vorador 18y ago

What about an HN API ? For instance, the user may define a cgi perl script that gets called with the name of each submission every time the front page is loaded...

dejb 18y ago

Actually I'm just the opposite. I prefer hacking media and business to code. I'm more interested in how twitter will fight spam than how erlang can scale. Each to their own but I see this as a kind of 'Business for (ex)coders'.

Tichy 18y ago

My impression is that you have no idea what Twitter actually is. Maybe you should read one of the articles about it once in a while?