Hacker Hacker News - see just the programming/math/science links from HN

by sqs • 17 years ago

164 56 17 years ago

sqs11• 17 years ago

I made this in a few hours for my own personal use and thought that other people might want to use it, too. It uses a Python Bayesian classifier trained on about 200 hand-labeled links and outputs a static HTML file. It's not perfect (and the technical/non-technical distinction is arbitrary), but I'll give it some more training data and see if it improves. Also, I don't mean to disparage non-technical topics with this; sometimes I just want to read about programming, though

I'd appreciate any feedback on this.

jrockway2• 17 years ago

Excellent work; I am worried that I am going to have to start my own social news site to get away from all the time-wasting general interest stuff here. This will save me from having to do that for a while.

ersi• 17 years ago

That doesn't sound very social. Aren't most programming/math/science also "time-wasting", so to speak?

thomaspaine• 17 years ago

This sounds pretty awesome. Would you mind posting some of the code?

I'd be curious to know how you're formatting the input data. If you're just using the title, all of the text parsed through BeautifulSoup, some parsing algorithm to obtain the body of the article, etc.

Not too long ago, I wrote a python script to automatically extract the bodies of articles, which you may find useful: http://blog.davidziegler.net/post/122176962/a-python-script-...

sqs11• 17 years ago

Thanks. I'll definitely post the code soon. I'm using the title, the submitter's name, the URL, and the page content without tags (only looking at <p> and similar tags would probably help). Including the content of the HN comments pages might help, too. Thanks for the link; I'll check it out.

sosuke• 17 years ago

I'd love to see a threshold setting. Something like "show only above 50%" so that your visitors can adjust the visible links even further. Otherwise I love the site :)

patio11• 17 years ago

I worked in Bayesian spam filters for a while at the last day job. Wonderful things, aren't they?

I've got to say, your classifier looks like it is amazingly accurate for those distinctions. I'd be really interested in seeing some of the very determinative words. (There are some obvious candidates like "Erlang" and "Twitter" but every time I do a natural language processing project I'm amazed by how our distribution of "little meaningless words" changes markedly between FeatureA and FeatureB.)

sqs11• 17 years ago

Yeah, it's amazingly accurate for now only because the training data consists of a high percentage of the actual data set, and so it's probably classifying based on those insignificant differences. We'll see how it holds up...

paraschopra• 17 years ago

Why don't you provide a flag kind of button for each article that lets user train the classifier online?

sqs11• 17 years ago

That's a great idea. Right now it's just spitting out a static HTML file, so that'd require some significant changes to the code. I'll see how it's doing tomorrow and consider making it into something like what you describe.

magv• 17 years ago

> Page generated automatically at 23:49 on 05 July 2009

Can you specify the timezone?

Also, how often is the page updated?

sqs11• 17 years ago

I'll add the timezone (PDT). It's updated whenever I run a command to update the HTML and scp that to the server. Nothing automated about the process yet.

markbao• 17 years ago

Now we need Startup Hacker News.

jlees2• 17 years ago

What about a generic My Hacker News with a classifier trained on each person's personal "I want to see / I do not want to see" preferences? :>

prakash2• 17 years ago

This is really cool. Maybe you can use these links to train: (http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive)

prakash2• 17 years ago

Have you considered applying to the YC program with this/variant of this idea?

dgallagher• 17 years ago

I think you've stumbled on something that Hacker News needs: Categories.

vaksel• 17 years ago

as long as the same story can't be submitted by 2 different people by submitting it into different catetgories

astine• 17 years ago

I think that we'd be better with tagging than categories per se. Give people a finate list of tags to choose from and people could customize their views pretty easily.

mattmaroon• 17 years ago

Could you make a page that is the exact opposite? Non Hacker Hacker News?

rms2• 17 years ago

Might as well throw up Non Hacker News while you're at it.

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

The reason hacker news sucks less than other places is cause when people come up with cool mashups that could be interpreted negatively (you don't like all the news chosen by the community, whaaatttt?!), no one gets pissy or flamey.

It's almost like "the way society should work" or something...

I_got_fifty• 17 years ago

I love that the announcement of Hacker Hacker News on Hacker News is on Hacker Hacker News!

...so meta!

kristiandupont• 17 years ago

Really, it should be posted on Hacker News News.. (Sorry, I'll go out of Reddit mode now.)

rms2• 17 years ago

http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html

swombat• 17 years ago

Surely an announcement about Hacker Hacker News is not Hacker Hacker News itself, so it should not be on there.

mkyc• 17 years ago

A big problem with these tools is that very few will abandon this place for a slightly ugly replacement, even if it does offer something somewhat useful. If you provide an API, someone might write a script/bookmark that added the percentages to the posts here, or color coded them.

Are you training on comments as well? My bet is that the comments section will be more useful for this than the actual article.

Incidentally, I really wish that upvotes and the like were publicly visible. This would surely result in a similar tool, but for a recommendation system.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

This is just an indicative that HN should go back to the roots.

alex_c• 17 years ago

Startup news?

Frocer• 17 years ago

Agreed, but I am not sure why. A couple of years ago, I would read almost every article / discussion posted on the front page of HN. But now days, I click through at most 10-20% of the content. Dunno if it's a shift in culture, or just the larger community has diluted the quality of content. Regardless, HN is still my favorite source of tech / startup news.

gabrielroth• 17 years ago

One possible next step would be a userscript (for Greasemonkey, Chrome, Fluid, etc.) that removes any story not on Hacker Hacker News from Hacker News itself. That way HHN fans could continue to use all the features of the main site.

Oompa• 17 years ago

Make one that just filters out celebrity news and other "Not HN" articles.

ckunte• 17 years ago

I'd love a rss/feed link for this.

catone• 17 years ago

I'd like two. ;)

sqs11• 17 years ago

Here's the source: http://hackerhackernews.com/hhn-20090706.tgz

The classifier is already struggling. It doesn't seem that this is a sustainable way of classifying links, especially since the classification of technical/non-technical is arbitrary itself. I'll be trying out some other things to improve it today; email me if you want to chat about it.

bts• 17 years ago

FYI I'm having problems decompressing this file. Could you re-post it? or alternatively throw the code up on something like github?

sqs11• 17 years ago

Hmm...tar xzfv hhn-20090706.tgz doesn't work for you?

zackattack• 17 years ago

Would somebody please skin News.YC so that we can click on the "comments" link without having to squint and be super precise? I would like a big square to the right of the up/down arrows, and to the left of the Title/Score (spanning both, vertically).

Hacker Hacker News - see just the programming/math/science links from HN

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