I appreciate the idea, but I question the merit. Importantly, I think what it is really optimizing for are posts without experts on Hacker News.<p>As the author of <a href="https://hnprofile.com" rel="nofollow">https://hnprofile.com</a> - I've spent a long time analyzing this...<p>For example, you post something about PostgreSQL on HN it'll have a ton of discussion. That's not just because there is squabbling, it's because people are interested. Often it is a disagreement, but it could be providing additional context. Take this comment thread on PostgeSQL 11:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17962821" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17962821</a><p>The comments are significantly more interesting and helpful than the article (not that the article is bad, just the collective knowledge of HN provides more value). I often upvote items because I think they are interesting, but I comment asking questions, adding context, or providing feedback. That's the value of hacker news, IMO.<p>If you filter that out, I might as well just go to my feedly.<p>Edit: Prior discussion about hnprofile: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17942981</a>
Author here. There’s a longer description in the Github readme: <a href="https://github.com/ejamesc/go-hn-confidence" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ejamesc/go-hn-confidence</a><p>I should note that while this site is how I weaned myself off Hacker News, it’s no longer as useful as it was in the past (hnconf has existed for 6 years). I’ve a feeling dang has taken this observation into account (that upvote to comment ratio is a signal of quality) and they’ve adjusted HN’s ranking algo accordingly.<p>I still use the site, but for a different reason: a site that updates once every 30 minutes is far less addictive than a site that updates all the time.<p>Shameless plug: if you’re interested in little career optimisations like these, you might want to check out my writing at <a href="https://commoncog.com/blog" rel="nofollow">https://commoncog.com/blog</a>
Imho it's the other way around. Threads with a lot of discussion is interesting because... there is a lot of discussion meaning there are multiple views and rational arguments. I think I like HN's algorithm better than this one, but it's a very interesting idea, so it's definitely good that we have both (for algorithmic variety).
Here's the real 'less annoying' hackernews:<p><a href="https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/damng/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content</a><p>This generates an RSS feed with the contents of the articles inlined and available at <a href="https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/output.rss" rel="nofollow">https://damng.github.io/hackernews-rss-with-inlined-content/...</a><p>By-passes most soft paywalls. No Javascript. No Tracking. No 'social' media buttons. No modal dialogs. Just text you can read in a terminal based rss reader like canto.
HN itself already pushes down articles that get more comments than votes. Maybe not as aggressively as this site does it, but threads definitely drop down the rankings very quickly if the number of comments starts outpacing the score much.
I made a similar web app a while ago.<p>However, in my web app, I sort by reverse order by default to show the most heated submissions first, with the option to reverse the order.<p>As a bonus, it also has past archives. Feel free to check it out:<p><a href="https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/paradite/hn-ratio</a>
Cool site. Like a lot of folks here, I always appreciate things that are minimal and quick.<p>However, I’d like to ask:<p>1) what, to you, makes HN annoying? In my experience it is already a very minimal, light, and quick site. What problem did you aim to solve?<p>2) does this offer any advantage of the many minimal HN sites? E.g. hckrnews?
In an effort to provide a higher signal-to-noise ratio I've created a "Tech News Only" website at:<p><a href="https://techstacks.io" rel="nofollow">https://techstacks.io</a><p>As I'm more interested in reading about Technology News and announcements instead of the more political and non-technology content that's frequently appearing on HN.<p>It's a mix of HN/Reddit where anyone can create and become an "owner of a Technology" where they can moderate content posted to their own section and enlist other Moderators to help.<p>It's optimized for fast navigation and posting with a number of keyboard shortcuts to access most pages of the site. The benefit over HN / Reddit is richer metadata so you can drill into just the news you're interested in. You can "Subscribe" to different technology content and you can post full markdown so content is richer and more visually appealing (if that's what you prefer). In a way I like to think of it as a "hosted RSS" as you can customize your own news feed (in addition to the global feed) in just the content you're interested in.<p>The sites other primary purpose is to learn about the different "Technology Stacks" that popular Startups and Apps use, which is primarily where all the external contributions are going towards.<p>It's an OSS/BSD project which you can read more about its features and how it was built at:<p><a href="https://github.com/NetCoreApps/TechStacks" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/NetCoreApps/TechStacks</a><p>Previously I was posting all the interesting Tech News/Posts I've found on HN/Reddit but haven't been able to keep up in the last 3 months due to work time constraints, I'll pick it back up when everything settles back down again, but would obviously love if others could contribute Tech News/Announcements they find interesting.<p>Ultimately I'd really like to frequent a better "Tech Only News" feed of HN's expert comment quality as I feel that a lot of good Tech Content is being lost and hidden by clickbaity and political news.
From the site:<p>> the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes<p>I don't know if this is a perfect way to capture interesting things. Many times I read the headline on HN and then go straight to the discussion.<p>What HN really needs is an algo that matches interesting articles to your profile. I use hckrnews.com to filter out the most upvoted and commented top posts. But I often find that things that interest me the most may not be the most voted or commented on items.
I find this page a little hard to scan. I see that you're going for a minimal look by keeping all post info on a single line, but the varying line length means that the number of upvotes, for example, is in a very different place each time. On the HN homepage, I can glance down in a few seconds and see which posts have the most upvotes, but here I need to concentrate quite hard to do the same since my eye has to do a bit of searching.
<i>This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.</i><p>Interesting thesis. The current listing didn't convince me there's any merit to it.<p>I might check this site out more often if it included the HN front page ranking and a green/red up/down arrow showing the relative diff.
>> This site scrapes Hacker News once every 30 minutes, then sorts according to this formula, with upvotes as positive signals and comments as negative ones. In my experience, the best articles to read on HN are the ones with a high upvote-to-discussion ratio. Mostly because controversial pieces tend to produce a disproportionate number of comments compared to upvotes.<p>I seem to remember HN itself also penalises posts with a lot of comments, on the same grounds (that they're likely to be controversial) no?
To be honest I follow HN via feed (Rss2Email), have tried hackernews Emacs interface but it's simply too limited. WebUI is horrible and IMVHO can't be really improved with web-tech.<p>For me the best thing is resurrect usenet and create an hn group, eventually prox-ed to the site. It's not a matter of coding but means, websites are great if they are hypertext, if they are applications (like support comment etc) they are bad. newsgroups or mailing-lists work pretty for discussion.
I prefer the chronological order of hckrnews. Also this is more annoying to me because I cannot access it without a proxy (from Russia, probably because it's hosted on AWS).
For those that are interested, I took a slightly different approach by making a “Hacker News Cleanser service that will periodically hide articles based on title keywords, site, and user.<p><a href="https://github.com/barrowclift/hacker-news-cleanser" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/barrowclift/hacker-news-cleanser</a>
My approach is just filtering out the submissions that distract or annoy me: <a href="https://gist.github.com/ivmirx/66a0015884d44297ea05a8c54d93566d" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/ivmirx/66a0015884d44297ea05a8c54d935...</a>
It’s kind of ironic that if there is a lot of interest (comments) in this project that it will fall off the front page. But not on Hacker News itself. Only on the project page itself.
It's also less annoying because the layout makes better use of the screen space and the hotspots are larger which makes it even better for mobile and touchscreen devices.