I want to read more news about startups, venture capital, Silicon Valley/SF on HN - 29 news on HN frontpage are about other topics (interesting for sure, but the balance is off).
Can you give some examples of stories that you feel should be discussed on HN, but weren't?
I see a lot of startup stories here. I fear that part of the problem is that stories get posted, have good discussions, and fall off the front page before many readers see them.
> I fear that part of the problem is that stories get posted, have good discussions, and fall off the front page before many readers see them.
That's it, and I share your fear. I don't know how to solve it. Maybe it's what the majority wants on the top, maybe it's what a vocal minority with high karma points doesn't want (flagging/whatever negative news). I just see the end result. I would just like to get the big picture on the frontpage and not have to rely on algolia search for that.
One thing I realized is that HN front page has very different topics depending on which time I check HN. It shifts its focus depending when people tend to visit HN from east cost, west cost, europe, asia. A useful function would be to check out the HN frontpage how it looked at a specific time. Let's say I would like to see HN as it looked like 8am Pacific timezone yesterday. I know about https://news.ycombinator.com/lists , maybe add another filter to that list.
> A useful function would be to check out the HN frontpage how it looked at a specific time. Let's say I would like to see HN as it looked like 8am Pacific timezone yesterday.
sigh, kids these days. first of all, i'm sure this exists somewhere on the internet. start with archive.org and go from there. if not, witness:
for bonus points, version control it with github so everyone can see it. even better, send it into elasticsearch. hint: curl -X -F -H
you could implement a website that does this in literally an hour with today's tools. hell, you could even run it through some basic tools like python NLTK and matplotlib and twilio to text message you a fucking color-coded n-gram frequency pie chart every time it runs. you don't need ruby on rails, rabbitmq, redis, and a huge sql schema to do this, just a few lines of bash and python.
this would be more useful than 85.1% of startups operating today, which is probably part of the problem. feel free to steal it.
And.. no-one was really that interested. I used it every now and then to catch up but when HN moved to the new API I didn't bother updating it (although it would be trivial to do so if anyone were interested).
okay, then take it a step further. train a bayesian classifier to automatically notify you of things you teach it to find interesting. this can be done in probably ~200 lines of python and 2 or 3 dependencies -- i did it at a previous job. they are remarkably effective at simple tasks like "you might like..."
About the "fall off the front page before many readers see them" problem: that's a serious problem, as the discussion is what makes HN such a great place. Maybe reduce the options to "downvote" a news. It should be enough to upvote a news. If a news fall of the frontpage because certain members don't like it, they shouldn't be able to downvote such news in the first place.
Good point. There's clearly at least a little added value in making this info available from HN itself; I wonder how much.
Other ideas we've pondered for surfacing good content: letting users mark posts as favorites and share their lists; or letting people nominate posts as "good but overlooked" and assembling lists of those.
Yup, I use hn.algolia.com for that too plus some advanced search to filter my interest around startups and SV.
Though, if more users of HN could see insightful news, some news would have more comments. And HN is all about comments. I often find out about a news like 8 hours late, and rarely users check back the next day to follow up. (the "threads" link on top definitely helps)
