5 ms·

Ask HN: Create custom, personal Hacker News email digests

5 points by jchmura 12y ago

I've had this idea swirling in my head for a while that there should be a service that allows you to setup custom filters of Hacker News submissions and then receive a digest of them either daily or weekly. You could make something similar to a where clause (i.e. `title contains "javascript" or text contains "javascript"`). This would define the list of links you would receive. Is this something you guys might find useful? I'm thinking of throwing something together as a weekend hack project.

tacon 12y ago
I like the serendipity of Hacker News, so I don't want to filter out or in specific topics. But if you filter for quality, I love that. Using machine learning to pick out the "best" items was the subject of a discussion recently: http://pyvideo.org/video/2612/enough-machine-learning-to-make-hacker-news-reada http://pyvideo.org/video/2612/enough-machine-learning-to-mak... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297 The author is nice enough to keep that app going here: http://hn.njl.us/ http://hn.njl.us/ It is an opinionated filter, but with ADD I can get caught reading most things on the front page. This guides me to some important links that don't initially seem all that interesting. I asked the author if he would share his training set, or open source the app, but apparently not. If you can turn that web app into an RSS feed or a digest, that would help. As for your idea to filter on keywords, you can get that working as an RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes without writing any code.
- jchmura 12y ago
  Interesting. I had not seen that discussion. I'll take a look.
gus_massa 12y ago
I also like the mix of stories and subject in HN, but when one subject saturate the front page I use hnapp to filter the other stories. For example you can subscribe to the rss of http://hnapp.com/?q=javascript%20type%3Astory%20score%3E1 http://hnapp.com/?q=javascript%20type%3Astory%20score%3E1
sraquo 12y ago
I personally prefer RSS over email, so I've built https://github.com/raquo/hnapp https://github.com/raquo/hnapp for the task. Just thought you might want some code to get started.
- jchmura 12y ago
  That's almost what I had in my head. That's a cool little utility. You did a lot of hard work already :P
zhte415 12y ago
This would be useful, particularly in a use-case where I'm interested in a niche topic that I wouldn't like to miss anything in. A filter, like 'hit the front page', 'in ask', 'above XX points', 'above XX comments' would also be useful as a simple, well, filter.

5 points by jchmura 12y ago

tacon 12y ago

I like the serendipity of Hacker News, so I don't want to filter out or in specific topics. But if you filter for quality, I love that. Using machine learning to pick out the "best" items was the subject of a discussion recently: http://pyvideo.org/video/2612/enough-machine-learning-to-make-hacker-news-reada http://pyvideo.org/video/2612/enough-machine-learning-to-mak... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297 The author is nice enough to keep that app going here: http://hn.njl.us/ http://hn.njl.us/ It is an opinionated filter, but with ADD I can get caught reading most things on the front page. This guides me to some important links that don't initially seem all that interesting. I asked the author if he would share his training set, or open source the app, but apparently not. If you can turn that web app into an RSS feed or a digest, that would help. As for your idea to filter on keywords, you can get that working as an RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes without writing any code.

jchmura 12y ago
Interesting. I had not seen that discussion. I'll take a look.

gus_massa 12y ago

I also like the mix of stories and subject in HN, but when one subject saturate the front page I use hnapp to filter the other stories. For example you can subscribe to the rss of http://hnapp.com/?q=javascript%20type%3Astory%20score%3E1 http://hnapp.com/?q=javascript%20type%3Astory%20score%3E1

sraquo 12y ago

I personally prefer RSS over email, so I've built https://github.com/raquo/hnapp https://github.com/raquo/hnapp for the task. Just thought you might want some code to get started.

jchmura 12y ago
That's almost what I had in my head. That's a cool little utility. You did a lot of hard work already :P

zhte415 12y ago

This would be useful, particularly in a use-case where I'm interested in a niche topic that I wouldn't like to miss anything in. A filter, like 'hit the front page', 'in ask', 'above XX points', 'above XX comments' would also be useful as a simple, well, filter.