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I made this in a few hours for my own personal use and thought that other people might want to use it, too. It uses a Python Bayesian classifier trained on abou
by sqs 17y ago
I made this in a few hours for my own personal use and thought that other people might want to use it, too. It uses a Python Bayesian classifier trained on about 200 hand-labeled links and outputs a static HTML file. It's not perfect (and the technical/non-technical distinction is arbitrary), but I'll give it some more training data and see if it improves. Also, I don't mean to disparage non-technical topics with this; sometimes I just want to read about programming, though
I'd appreciate any feedback on this.
- jrockway 17y agoExcellent work; I am worried that I am going to have to start my own social news site to get away from all the time-wasting general interest stuff here. This will save me from having to do that for a while.
- ersi 17y agoThat doesn't sound very social. Aren't most programming/math/science also "time-wasting", so to speak?
- jrockway 17y agoPeople want to read about programming. Right now, there are three options: * News.YC, which rarely has articles about programming anymore (perhaps one or two a day). * Programming Reddit, whose commentators think every article is a jab at The One True Idea, which they seem to think is PHP. * Lambda the Ultimate, which only covers a small area of programming; language design and implementation I want a site like LtU but with a broader appeal.
- jules 17y ago> * Lambda the Ultimate, which only covers a small area of programming; language design and implementation Implementation (!= Programming Language Theory) is off topic for LTU, unfortunately.
- scott_s 17y agoOn the front page right now, there are eight programming submissions, and nine web development submissions. (There is overlap with the programming and web development, but something like usability guidelines fits in web development but not programming. By my definition, anyway.)
- Andys 17y agoI came to news.yc because I wanted to read about startups. There are very few % of articles about startups now. (I am sticking around because of the general interest articles which is what I used to visit reddit for before it became too popular)
- thomaspaine 17y agoThis sounds pretty awesome. Would you mind posting some of the code? I'd be curious to know how you're formatting the input data. If you're just using the title, all of the text parsed through BeautifulSoup, some parsing algorithm to obtain the body of the article, etc. Not too long ago, I wrote a python script to automatically extract the bodies of articles, which you may find useful: http://blog.davidziegler.net/post/122176962/a-python-script-to-automatically-extract-excerpts-from http://blog.davidziegler.net/post/122176962/a-python-script-...
- sqs 17y agoThanks. I'll definitely post the code soon. I'm using the title, the submitter's name, the URL, and the page content without tags (only looking at <p> and similar tags would probably help). Including the content of the HN comments pages might help, too. Thanks for the link; I'll check it out.
- sqs 17y agoOK, the source is here: http://hackerhackernews.com/hhn-20090706.tgz http://hackerhackernews.com/hhn-20090706.tgz
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- sosuke 17y agoI'd love to see a threshold setting. Something like "show only above 50%" so that your visitors can adjust the visible links even further. Otherwise I love the site :)
- patio11 17y agoI worked in Bayesian spam filters for a while at the last day job. Wonderful things, aren't they? I've got to say, your classifier looks like it is amazingly accurate for those distinctions. I'd be really interested in seeing some of the very determinative words. (There are some obvious candidates like "Erlang" and "Twitter" but every time I do a natural language processing project I'm amazed by how our distribution of "little meaningless words" changes markedly between FeatureA and FeatureB.)
- sqs 17y agoYeah, it's amazingly accurate for now only because the training data consists of a high percentage of the actual data set, and so it's probably classifying based on those insignificant differences. We'll see how it holds up...
- paraschopra 17y agoWhy don't you provide a flag kind of button for each article that lets user train the classifier online?
- sqs 17y agoThat's a great idea. Right now it's just spitting out a static HTML file, so that'd require some significant changes to the code. I'll see how it's doing tomorrow and consider making it into something like what you describe.
- iamelgringo 17y agoAre you using the reverend thomas library? http://www.divmod.org/trac/wiki/DivmodReverend http://www.divmod.org/trac/wiki/DivmodReverend I've been wanting to use that library for something just like this. I would love to read a write up of this, or see the code at some point. Thanks
- sqs 17y agoYeah, that's exactly the Bayesian classifier library that I'm using. I'll have the code up in a few hours. edit: source at http://hackerhackernews.com/hhn-20090706.tgz http://hackerhackernews.com/hhn-20090706.tgz
- sqs 17y agoand mercurial at http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/overview/ http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/overview/
- magv 17y ago> Page generated automatically at 23:49 on 05 July 2009 Can you specify the timezone? Also, how often is the page updated?
- sqs 17y agoI'll add the timezone (PDT). It's updated whenever I run a command to update the HTML and scp that to the server. Nothing automated about the process yet.
- markbao 17y agoNow we need Startup Hacker News.
- jlees 17y agoWhat about a generic My Hacker News with a classifier trained on each person's personal "I want to see / I do not want to see" preferences? :>
- mahmud 17y agoHN doesn't need subreddits.
- diN0bot 17y agowhy? I notice you've received (18) upvotes, which in this case probable means agreement, so there's obviously some support for not having this feature. Is it specifically subreddits to avoid? I completely agree that subreddits are a terrible implementation of user-content customization because they force items into a single-parent hierarchy. However, categories that filter content according to different weights would be quite useful. By pre-selecting these categories and thus pre-computing them, it would even be reasonable to implement (actual per-user filters might not work so well in real-time).
- scott_s 17y agoThe fear I have is it would splinter the community.
- coconutrandom 17y agoBut HN has become so big. It not logical to think that everyone will be interested by everything now.
- scott_s 17y ago
- prakash 17y agoThis is really cool. Maybe you can use these links to train: (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive)
- prakash 17y agoHave you considered applying to the YC program with this/variant of this idea?
- dgallagher 17y agoI think you've stumbled on something that Hacker News needs: Categories.
- vaksel 17y agoas long as the same story can't be submitted by 2 different people by submitting it into different catetgories
- astine 17y agoI think that we'd be better with tagging than categories per se. Give people a finate list of tags to choose from and people could customize their views pretty easily.
- zimbabwe 17y agoNewsvine is a good example of tags making a community more focused and easier to handle.
- mattmaroon 17y agoCould you make a page that is the exact opposite? Non Hacker Hacker News?