Hi,<p>I'd like to introduce, and ask feedback for, my newsletter <i>Interesting Things</i> [1][2].<p>It's a response to the notion that many interesting stories posted to HN flies past and are not seen. Maybe they could, and should, be surfaced again somehow. A newsletter seemed like a good way to do it.<p>I experimented by trawling through the 'newest' section of HN. The first few times were mind-numbing. Gosh, there's so much noise in there! . But eventually I became more selective and efficient and it became repeatable.<p>Then I evolved it and added stories from reddit, newsletters that I subscribe to, and some other places. Whilst a portion of the stories are still from HN, it's no longer only from there.<p>The criteria is 'What I find interesting' but, since I'm a typical HN reader, the interest profile ends up being similar. It's mainly tech but with splashes of startups, science, productivity, etc. I omit politics. I also try to omit product/press releases, big corp stuff, and stories that would be covered by the mainstream tech press.<p>There is little overlap with other Hacker-News-based newsletters and digests. This is intentional. They cover the top stories from HN. Mine does not. (Maybe there might be one or two 'tier 1' stories, but the majority are not.)<p>So anyway ... if you'd like to read interesting stuff (whether or not it was unnoticed by HN) please have a look at <i>Interesting Things</i>. I hope you guys like it and find it ... well ... interesting.<p>I'm also looking for criticism, feedback and suggestions for improvement. Some sample questions: Do you like the one-two liner blurbs? Are the blurbs useful? What do you think of the distribution of topics? Are there areas where you'd like to see more (or less) coverage? Please let me know. I'm happy to talk.<p>Thanks for reading!<p>[1] <a href="https://bengtan.com/interesting-things" rel="nofollow">https://bengtan.com/interesting-things</a><p>[2] <a href="https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample" rel="nofollow">https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample</a> (redirects to the latest public edition)
Edit: ouch! - it was a moderator who added "Show HN" and that was totally our mistake. I'm so sorry for scolding you for something you didn't do!<p>Newsletters can't be Show HNs. Please read the rules—they mention this explicitly: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html</a>. I've replaced "Show HN" with "Tell HN" above.<p>Also, if you're getting these stories from HN then I would ask you to link to the HN submissions.<p>We totally support the goal of bringing attention to great stories that haven't gotten significant attention yet. Other people have worked on this problem (e.g. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23392049</a>), and in fact we spend a good deal of time doing the same thing (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308</a>). But it's not good for community to sever the links to the source where you found them. In fact, at first glance it felt exploitative to me—a bit like kicking the ladder out from under you—but on reflection I'm sure that's not what you intended.<p>If you include the HN sources the way that polote has done here: <a href="https://hnblogs.substack.com/p/hn-blogs-24121" rel="nofollow">https://hnblogs.substack.com/p/hn-blogs-24121</a>, that would suffice.<p>p.s. It looks great and I'm going to subscribe!
Clickable links;<p>[1] <a href="https://bengtan.com/interesting-things" rel="nofollow">https://bengtan.com/interesting-things</a><p>[2] <a href="https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample" rel="nofollow">https://bengtan.com/newsletter/sample</a> (redirects to the latest public edition)
Why, newsletters?<p>I never sign up of extra emails... But I do occasionally add stuff to my RSS reader..<p>Which is what I read when HN frontpage has nothing interesting.
I do something similar, daily, with Plurrrr: <a href="https://plurrrr.com/" rel="nofollow">https://plurrrr.com/</a> . It comes with both a JSON feed and RSS feed.
This is great ! In fact, this got me thinking about what a simple ML model for automating HN's 2nd-look could look like. One could assume that the log odds of user_a' upvoting an article, after visiting it off the 'new' page, is a linear function of<p>* the article's quality (denoted by x) and<p>* user_a's click happiness.<p><i>P(upvote_a | seen_a) = exp(a + λₐ x) / (1 + exp(a + λₐ x))</i><p>Both a and λₐ are unknown parameters that can be estimated from past data given some prior over x, say centered at 0 with a high variance.<p>One can grant a new articles a 2nd look if the posterior probability of x crossing a gate keeping threshold is sufficiently high.
Here is a feature that I'd like: curate articles by a user. Meaning if I were to, for example subscribe to all articles posted by "bengtan", then I should be able to get a list of posts that he has written, along with posts form other users that I may have subscribed to.
The newsletter/sample page has a broken link:
"I hope you find the following stories interesting. If you don’t, you can [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}) and I won’t pollute your inbox again."<p>Is supposed to be substituted when it is send as an email?
Wow. Super interesting. I am doing something very similar, but with way less articles per newsletter. I cover 3 "snippets", which I often find on the "new" page on HN. (shoto.io)
This looks pretty good. In regards to your Substack / Buttondown comparison I would also take a look at Revue which seems to excel at curated newsletters.