Show HN: Spot hyped news at a glance on Hacker News and Reddit

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hyped-news-amplifier/jaapjannjfdcklcgadbhiddhbelhhnkp

by aercolino • 12 years ago

30 28 12 years ago

chrome.google.com

KiwiCoder• 12 years ago

What does "hyped" mean (precisely) in this context?

aercolino8• 12 years ago

Google definition for Hype: Promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits.

In this case, "hyped news" could be: News intensively promoted (many points) or discussed (many comments).

The nuance about exaggeration is optional.

ttctciyf• 12 years ago

"intensively discussed" would for the most part indicate that the item is of some interest or importance to the people discussing.

I think it would only indicate hype if it were also true that most of the discussion was disingenuous in some way. The distinction underlying this thought is that discussion is not (usually) promotion or deliberate publicizing of the thing discussed. Usually, it's just plain, honest discussion.

Micand• 12 years ago

Hype has almost universally negative connotations to me. Based on the name, I expected your extension would hide "hyped" stories (where hype is perhaps defined by a high comment-to-upvote ratio for a story), since hype is usually bad. You may wish to consider a new name.

nikolak• 12 years ago

Sorted by sum of comments and votes, age is ignored.

aercolino8• 12 years ago

Not really "sorted by sum of comments and votes" nor really "age is ignored". The former only affects horizontal offset of the start of a title, and the latter is preserved, so that the order (and fluctuation) of the titles is as usual too.

kavabean• 12 years ago

Interesting. I like the idea, but I'm not fond of the chaotic layout. I'd prefer that the hype dimension be color or text size rather than x-dimension of text location.

Also the word hyped has a negative connotation in my mind, in particular that of exaggeration and b.s. As you mention perhaps this meaning is optional but for me the connection is strong.

I'd prefer another word. I thought the word hyper, for example hyperHN, might be better but anyway something else.

parktheredcar• 12 years ago

Do chrome extensions allow you to enter javascript functions that get executed via settings? I could see something like a 'custom hype formatter' callback option that passes a dom reference to the news item along with its hype ranking being pretty neat.

Kiro• 12 years ago

Do chrome extensions allow you to enter javascript functions that get executed via settings?

Maybe I misunderstand you but isn't that what an extension does?

Mahn• 12 years ago

Chrome extensions are pretty much Javascript+HTML bundles in fact. Something like what you suggest is not only possible but very easy to accomplish.

aercolino8• 12 years ago

Yes, the result is a bit unexpected but it works much better than other "more traditional" approaches. I mean, it's really "at a glance" that I can find the strongest news.

As for the "Hyped News" name, I don't think negative is inappropriate, take "Git" for example. Instead, amount of points and comments can be at the same time an indicator of importance (mostly points) and controversy (mostly comments). In either case, the leftmost news end up being those which people are more excited about.

cm-t• 12 years ago

Y u no do Mozilla Firefox addons ?!

(do want)

aercolino8• 12 years ago

Fork me on GitHub: https://github.com/aercolino/Hype-Amplifier

toomuchtodo• 12 years ago

Replace "hyped" with "trending". "Hyped", as others have mentioned, has a negative connotation.

mmcwilliams2• 12 years ago

This is true but there are generational differences with that connotation. To a subset of younger people "hyped" means something is good and popular.

EDIT: For reference https://twitter.com/search?q=hyped the self-referenced use of "hyped" to mean excited about something is pretty popular

bcoates2• 12 years ago

It is good for a person to be hyped about a thing, to hype something (≈ to trick other people into being hyped about it) is bad.

mlex• 12 years ago

People getting caught up on the name of something rather than discussing the thing itself, it's like bro[1][2] all over again.

[1] http://bropages.org/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7121268

resu_nimda• 12 years ago

Names are important. If everyone's talking about the name, it's probably a bad one. Choosing a good name requires an understanding of the context of your product/service and your audience (i.e. don't name a developer-centric product "bro" in 2014, unless you're looking for some drama). I honestly thought this was a tool that highlighted overhyped substance-less links.

Obviously, for a non-commercial browser extension, it's not a big deal. But in any case I wouldn't blame the people for reacting to the name, I would blame the creator for choosing a bad one.

aercolino8• 12 years ago

It seems this worked out quite well though: http://www.wine-searcher.com/merchant/50429 :D

_xhok• 12 years ago

It's interesting that this uses points + comment count as the test of importance; doesn't HN use comment count as one indicator of a flamewar IIRC?

mjwhansen• 12 years ago

It would seem so. I posted a link a few weeks back (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7983060) that was on the front page for a bit but was booted off when the conversation spiraled a bit out of control.

rm999• 12 years ago

Almost all my stories are on the very right side, with one or two on the very left, and not much in the middle. You should either use percentile score to determine the location (so the median scoring story is right in the center) or apply some sort of transformation to the score (log is probably reasonable, I'm guessing scores tend to be approximately log-normally distributed).

aercolino8• 12 years ago

I didn't look into an even distribution. I only allotted the golden ratio part of the content width to the maximum sum of points and comments on a given page.

sgWannabe• 12 years ago

Love the idea, but it breaks a fundamental rule of design by not allowing my eyes to scan down a list.

Perhaps color might be a good alternative as an indicator? Make the text fade away a bit if it is less relevant..etc...

aercolino8• 12 years ago

Actually, the reason I wrote the extension was exactly to avoid scanning down the list with my own eyes. This extension does it for me, so that, if I don't have much time, I can just read the few leftmost news.

Thanks for the kind words, anyway.

Show HN: Spot hyped news at a glance on Hacker News and Reddit

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