I think aggregators like SkimFeed miss an important point, often made on HN: for a lot of people, including me, a lot of the value of HN is in the comments. In fact, going to the extreme, some posts have little learnable content other than TIL. First example that comes to mind is a post I recently upvoted: Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946989" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946989</a>) which had a small number of information-rich comments. Or there are pots where the content is obvious from the title, where I go directly to comments to see people's assessment, e.g. Federated Learning (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19944510" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19944510</a>). On average I would say value of comments to post is 80 to 20 percent for me.<p>So, rather than tools for submission-based skimming/alerts, I'd like to see advanced tools based on comments: Some ideas:<p>* Number of comments divided by submission points is a rough measure of contentious topics in the HN community, esp. if this is > 1. Recent example: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970544" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19970544</a>. Sort front page by this score. Another obvious measure would be the number of grayed out and flagged comments.<p>* Identify comments leading to discussions and highlight them. Since comment scores are hidden this has to be done trough analysis of replies (maybe keywords "good reply" or number of replies).<p>* Identify comments that are informational, simple measure would be to count the number of links; harder to do would be to analyze the "factfullness".<p>Just some random thoughts.<p>P.S. I offer myself as a cautionary example of getting too much into HN: This is the first site I skim on my phone when I get up (to get awake, you know) and I easily spend more than an hour every day (who am I kidding, more like two hours). <i>This is idiotic!</i> Don't let your idea debt (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11027684" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11027684</a>) accumulate.
Another website is hckrnews.com, which is an aggregate of all HN posts by time. It’s really useful if you want to capture all items, as it has a feature that shows you where left off
> <i>We like to think about filter bubbles with respect to political divisions on Facebook. Users are relentlessly profiled and marketed-against there. However, they are a natural consequence of the HN algorithm too.</i><p>No way, there's just one ranking algorithm for everyone.
I like Hacker News Daily, created by @cperciva:<p><a href="http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/" rel="nofollow">http://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/</a><p>It lists the 10 highest-rated stories each day. I added the RSS feed to my news reader so I can see the biggest items even if I don't happen to read HN that day.
I'm confused about the mention of filter bubbles in this context. Generally, they're only bad when they're highly customized to what the individual user wants to see (because it will heavily bias toward their current beliefs).<p>Maybe it's the negative connotation I have to them due to Facebook so I'm wondering why this is mentioned here. I would expect the "proper" use of a filter bubble to be the application mentioned: not tailored to each individual user but rather highlighting what the entire community will find relevant, in this case based presumable on votes (though we wouldn't know if clicks are also a factor given the proprietary algorithm).<p>Of course, I suppose an entire community like HN could develop a macro bubble but one might presume an entire community should already have diverse perspectives which could keep it more balanced.
I am on HN mainly for the comments.<p>The way I usually learn about interesting threads (which I mostly like to read after a while so they have enough comments) is the HackerNewsletter[0].<p>Also (shameless plug), I built AskHN Digest[1], a weekly recap of the top threads of AskHN with their top comments, to make sure I don't miss any good content from the section. Many times the comments there have been insightful and made it worth visiting the thread after a while, when most people had the chance to comment on it.<p>[0] <a href="https://hackernewsletter.com" rel="nofollow">https://hackernewsletter.com</a><p>[1] <a href="https://askhndigest.com" rel="nofollow">https://askhndigest.com</a><p>Edit: formatting
The RSS feed (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/rss" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/rss</a>) comes into FreshRSS (<a href="https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS</a>)<p>Usually just skim the comments to gather insight as quickly as possible, if there seems to be a strong signal with depth, I'll add the HN page to Pocket (<a href="https://getpocket.com" rel="nofollow">https://getpocket.com</a>) and check back later when I clear through all the backlog of interesting things<p>HN has replaced Reddit for me. I'm still reading Slashdot, two decades later, it usually just dupes HN.<p>Also Lobsters (<a href="https://lobste.rs" rel="nofollow">https://lobste.rs</a>) has some decent content, similar position in that it often dupes HN, but interesting regardless
<i>Recently, I’ve been hearing about Skimfeed, which aggregates 12-or-so articles from a bunch of news sources including HN.</i><p>The top link in Skimfeed's HN section is that post itself!
I use an old FF version running greasemonkey just to browse HN. My GM script concats two pages of posts, filters out any posts that have less votes than x/hr since being posted, and highlights ones that have a list of keywords I'm interested in.<p>I love FF, but it's a constantly shifting target esp wrt greasemonkey! I gave up trying to convert my old scripts.
there was a ML experiment back in 2015 to categorize the posts: <a href="https://monkeylearn.com/blog/hacker-news-categorizer-with-machine-learning/" rel="nofollow">https://monkeylearn.com/blog/hacker-news-categorizer-with-ma...</a><p>sadly it is no longer live. Could be a great side-project!
I wrote a script which opens a bunch of random HN links in new tabs. In firefox you have to over-ride the default amount of tabs you can open and change it to something like 9999. I once shared the script on HN under a different account, and it got no interest at all. The idea behind the script is that it presents random articles, so there is no bias behind the webpage you are reading. I use the script all the time and it's great to be presented with articles you otherwise would not have clicked. It's not hard to write such a script, but it gets trickier when you start to add filters to it. So for example, you may want to omit opening links with 'Soylent', 'Drone' or 'Trump' in the title.