How many articles have you read this week advising you to stop talking about being an entrepreneur and start doing it? If the answer is "too many," you suffer from two problems. The first is covered in the aforementioned articles. The second is that you're spending too much time reading Hacker News. I can't do much about the first, but I'll give the second a shot.
This isn't the first post to tackle the flood of stories and discussions coming out of Hacker News. Jeff Miller covered it well a few months back in
A Cure for Hacker News Overload, and there are a
slew of alternative interfaces and visualizations on HNResources.
Rolling Time Windows There is a lot of great work on HNResources. I've tried each and every visualization, and always hit one or two things that weren't exactly what I wanted. For the point threshold-based visualizations, I constantly found myself jumping between feeds. Week days are generally the busiest, and 100-point feeds worked well for that. On weekends, I'd need to jump down to the 50-point feeds to get a good amount of content, and on holidays, it was fewer points or bust. The
Top X Stories formats resolved that issue and gave me a nice, normalized view, but it bugged me that rolling over the date mark would either lead to a bunch of low-score stories being posted, or there would be a big delay before stories were "good enough" to hit the list
My preferred approach: rolling time windows. Rather than building a list of the Top X stories by date, use windows for the past 24 hours, 24-48 hours, etc. These feeds cover what I've found to be a
good amount of articles:
HN Top 10 Stories HN Top 15 Stories HN Top 20 Stories HN Top 25 Stories Since a lot of people visit Hacker News for the discussions, I've included a couple of those, as well:
HN Top 10 Discussions HN Top 15 Discussions HN Top 20 Discussions Diamonds In the Rough If you are someone afflicted with Hacker News addiction, you've probably heard more than one person say that the community and the discussions are the reason they visit. The problem with many of these techniques for distilling HN content is that you miss out on the smaller, intimate discussions that a tight-knit community provides. To address this, I've built another set of feeds that tries to capture this diamond-in-the-rough feeling. Each feed is comprised of threads that are discussion-heavy, but pass certain filters for minimum
and maximum points and comments.
HN Top 5 Underrateds HN Top 10 Underrateds HN Top 15 Underrateds Wait a minute, aren't these going to be a bunch of vi vs. Emacs threads, that result in tons of discussion without providing any significant value? It's possible, but rare. To hit the Underrateds lists, threads need to reach the front page of Hacker News, have a minimum number of points (which vi vs Emacs rarely do), and a good discussion-to-point ratio.
Is it worth following? I think so. After using it for a few weeks, I've caught a bunch of interesting content that I would otherwise have missed:
Sparkmuse (
HN),
Tell me why I suck (
HN),
Ask HN: How would you monetize 360K people?, and
Ask HN: Dropping out of college and moving to SF.
Details Feeds are generated using
Python 3,
SQLite,
EC2, and
Google FeedBurner. Code is available on
GitHub.
Feedback Feedback and suggestions are welcome. I can be reached by
email, or on
Twitter or
GitHub.
