TopHN – When you have time for only one Hacker News story

by montystar • 8 years ago

80 23 8 years ago

amelius2• 8 years ago

Why not just sort the topics of the last n hours by some criterion? Then you can choose how many stories you read depending on the amount of time you have.

The criterion could be simple (e.g. amount of upvotes), or it could be based on personal interests (e.g. collaborative filtering).

jventura• 8 years ago

Something like https://hn.algolia.com?

rayascott• 8 years ago

This is what I use. It's such a useful tool. I'm surprised Ycominator don't add it as a feature.

Most popular over the last 24 hours? https://hn.algolia.com/?query=&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page...

amelius2• 8 years ago

Yes, although it's still missing the personalization (collaborative filtering) part.

ClassyJacket• 8 years ago

I actually have a use case for this: I try to ban myself from browsing websites because I think it ruins my attention span. Particularly, reading all the headlines so quickly. This is why I quit reddit entirely. But sometimes I have some time to kill and still need something to read, so going straight to the top HN story is nice. Suggestion: add a way to scroll to the next story, but still only show one at a time.

latte• 8 years ago

I wish there was a service that shows HN pages with short previews of the linked stories included so that you had more info to decide whether to click the link, or go straight to the comments, or skip the story altogether.

newscracker• 8 years ago

The preview should ideally be a summary for it to be useful. Many articles nowadays seem to stretch the topic a lot more than is necessary, with the paragraphs at the beginning being a lot of fluff.

ivanfon• 8 years ago

There’s a bot on Reddit that automatically posts summaries of long articles (/u/autotldr). Looks like it uses the smmry.com API, and it works quite well. Something similar for HN would be interesting.

mateja• 8 years ago

This may suit your needs http://hn.premii.com/

Flimm• 8 years ago

Don't forget https://news.ycombinator.com/best

bringtheaction3• 8 years ago

What’s the difference between that and the front page? Is it like the difference between the “top” and “best” algorithms that Reddit use? How do these algorithms differ specifically on HN?

ChrisSD• 8 years ago

A cursory observation suggests "Top" prioritises the last 24 hours so has low rated but new items. "Best" seems to look at what's been popular in the last three days.

nostalgeek• 8 years ago

What I'd like to see is, instead of a wide range of topics displayed on the same page, unsorted and un-categorized, a tool that would only display the topics I'm interested in. For instance I don't want to read about politics on HN, only computer science, so an app that would auto-tag/filter links depending on the source/content would be welcome. To me that's the biggest flaw of HN, having to go through pages of link to only get what I'm interested in is painful.

bringtheaction3• 8 years ago

Alternatively it could cross-reference posts with Reddit and see what subreddit they’re posted in and filter based on that.

megous• 8 years ago

I have a simple userscript that filters by the domain and by article title - blacklisting articles.

You can get more technical hacker new by filtering out all news websites. It's quite effective.

jaseemabid• 8 years ago

You just described subreddits.

leadingthenet• 8 years ago

So then why are you on HN instead of Reddit?

nullp0tr• 8 years ago

check out https://lobste.rs it is usually just computer science.

hawski• 8 years ago

There is http://n-gate.com/ if one wants a week's worth top stories with a bit of commentary.

bringtheaction3• 8 years ago

Their security check captcha doesn’t load for me.

Kiro• 8 years ago

The comment explaining why is dead so I'm pasting it here:

"If you visit from HN, the site displays a webshit parody. Otherwise it's text only and loads very fast."

bbx• 8 years ago

I tend to use http://hckrnews.com/ and only display the top 10 stories.

What I particularly like is the day-split, the high density of information, and the color coding: orange means "Still on the homepage" and grey means "Already visited" (which applies to both the story and the comments).

TopHN – When you have time for only one Hacker News story

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