Show HN: Your personal Hacker News reader - Skim HN

http://www.skimhn.com/

by raimonds • 13 years ago

43 20 13 years ago

skimhn.com

james-singh• 13 years ago

No login? That means I have to personalize it everytime I use it on a different laptop?

Btw, I wish there was a google chrome extension for this as well.

raimonds7• 13 years ago

Sorry about that! And thanks for your feedback! Good point. I will look into implementing logins.

traeblain• 13 years ago

Don't need to worry about logins. Nothing is stored here. Best thing to do is to create a custom URL that will always bring the same lists.

i.e. When I setup my personalized options, I have:

http://www.skimhn.com/djWH3hS5

That way you don't have to operate with logins and everyone's setup is share-able. (Then you can look in the future of letting the creator define the url.)

dmart• 13 years ago

I like it, but I wouldn't mind an option to customize the line spacing and font colors (alternating colors, maybe?) - it's pretty dense to skim through.

raimonds7• 13 years ago

Thanks for your feedback! That's a good idea!

rumberg2• 13 years ago

I used a chrome extension called StyleBot to do a little styling: http://cl.ly/image/3w1y3G0p083J

raimonds7• 13 years ago

Wow, that looks gorgeous! Could I use it as a style guide? Could you share specific things you changed?

jmias• 13 years ago

Cool! using as standalone for now as it evolves no plugins needed (http://hidra.koding.com/ripskimhn/)

klapinat0r2• 13 years ago

I appreciate the categories, even if it wasn't personalized.

One idea for future development might be to add a point score based on Naive Bayes (which has been discussed previously). Not as a filter per say, but just as an indicator.

E.g. http://joelgrus.com/2012/02/16/hacking-hacker-news/

Sure, you can use a bookmarklet or write your own thing, but I've always thought it'd be an interesting idea to have a centralized like/hate server, where you could add different sources, say HN. That might be a different project, but adding a score based on the likelihood of "I'd read this" (not recommendation as I should note) would be a interesting in terms of skimming.

Let's say one of your users is in a hurry, he might want to skim the most (homogenous) likely news that'd interest him/her, whereas if it's late at night in leisure time, one might be more interested in new/abnormal stories.

Just a though. Good job.

raimonds7• 13 years ago

Wow, that's an awesome feedback and great link! Thanks for your kind words! That's a pity there's no API access to user's saved stories (as far as I know). This would be great source for Bayes training. Maybe a chrome extension could train Bayes on HN visited links.

klapinat0r2• 13 years ago

I agree that it's a difficult issue, as some might feel it's an intrusion of privacy if that data is used. Other might feel it's annoying to have to up/downvote stories both on HN and on your site. That's a trade-off. Perhabs both, or allow import of saved data, so users can make a dump from HN and import it in your site.

I think the other HN api used to have that (if people trust them to pass their user/pw to HN safely), but seems to be disabled: http://api.ihackernews.com/.

So yeah, the easiest way to start it would be to have people up/down vote on your site, or use a heuristic measure such as: if you click a link, you "like" it, if you're shown a link, but don't click a link you "ignore" it (which should be less negative than hate, as there can be a number of reasons for not clicking a link).

As in:

I get a list of 10 items from each category, of those 10, which do I click, which don't I. So once an item is shown to me - save it as "bad" by default in the DB. If I click it, change it to a good result.

You'd might have to change the weight more than this, but it should be a good start, and requires the least amount of effort for the user.

StavrosK2• 13 years ago

I'm doing this now as a side-project. I need quite a lot of data, unfortunately, and Scikit-Learn is giving me some trouble, but hopefully I'll have something I can show you guys soon.

raimonds7• 13 years ago

Cool! Can I be a beta-tester?

moconnor• 13 years ago

I played with machine learning and HN stories a while ago. All my classifiers only managed to predict stories I would click on with around 60% accuracy.

When I tried to classify stories I would click on myself on two different occasions I also only managed around 60% accuracy.

So I figure what I feel like reading depends on a lot of internal context too.

In the end I got good enough results feeding stories with more than X points into my instapaper automatically. Few false hits and I never know about the near misses!

davidjhall• 13 years ago

Really like this -- good job.

Do you have "not" syntax? I would love to have a skim feed that removes certain news items that overload the front page.

raimonds7• 13 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! For "not" syntax prepend keyword with "-". E.g. -title:facebook. Unfortunately there's no syntax for front-page only posts.

Show HN: Your personal Hacker News reader - Skim HN

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