News.YC Greasemonkey script to hide iPad articles (secure.grepular.com)
A greasemonkey script to hide all of the annoying iPad articles when viewing news.ycombinator.com. You can modify the regular expression in the script to hide other articles as well if you know regex.
44 comments
[ 78.2 ms ] story [ 2171 ms ] thread/\bi-?pad\b/i
I don't understand why people are all "not in MY HACKER NEWS" - this is what people are talking about. In 3 days we'll be back to Clojure and Haskell and "rate my startup" and "I built <clone of popular site> using <new technology> in <some trivial number of hours>."
If you fancy matching a wager, I'll put down $50 to a charity of your choice that 10% or fewer of the front page items on July 4, 2010 have "iPad" in the title :-)
I'm upvoting it for the spirit even though I probably will remove it after seeing whether it works in Chrome.
Filtering out stuff you don't want to read != sticking your head in the sand.
Except you don't know you don't want to read it if you're using something as crude as looking for a string in a headline. I maintain that blindly ignoring content that has a single mention of a particular term is sticking your head in the sand (but everyone's entitled to interpret the situation as they like!).
Your fictional app would likely rely upon categorization as an indicator. On news sites, content managers determine the interest areas for a story and you can then filter them. Stories that are really important will spill over to other categories (such as, on most news sites, the "main"/general category) and stories that seem to be about one topic but are really about another should, ideally, be categorized appropriately (e.g. "iPad Designer Jonathan Ive Dies" isn't an iPad story - crude example, but just to make a point).
Filtering out items based on a string of letters in a headline (as suggested in this case) is not as elegant or robust. You might filter out "football" but still be interested if the plane carrying the Dallas Cowboys went down wiping out the team. You might filter out "health care" to avoid political discussions on HN but miss out on a story about a healthcare entrepreneur. It's as crude as early spam filtering. (And like spam filtering, could be improved by software that analyzed the content of the destination pages.. but relying on the headline alone is too flaky.)
As a temporary measure to filter out a glut of stories (as with the iPad affair), it can work, but as a mid/long term strategy, filtering by headline is crude and prone to covering up stories you might actually find interesting. The quickest and most precise filtering device out there is the one connected to your eyes.
There are countless articles on countless news sites that you would love to read, and by not attempting to filter out the articles which you don't want to read, you're missing out on them. You should stop sticking your head in the sand and start trying to read the news more efficiently.
That's always my goal, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a cavalier sort of "efficiency." As I previously discussed, context is crucial in filtering news and a regex on headlines is a poor way to infer it.
Our discussion, though, has missed that HN is a filter already - a contextual, human-powered one. I like what HN users vote up and find it an efficient way to get tech news. If HN users frequently voted up items I was not interested in, I should not frequent it.
Apart from this it also adds a searchYC box and has support for split view.
Link: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039
http://gist.github.com/355697
To install, click the 'raw' link at the top right of the source.
i think i'd be bumping into a few things :-)
Now if we can have one that filters the functional programming posts, and the "I'm stupid enough to think I achieved something by cloning this trivial, yet major web service with this terribly unscalable new web tool" posts.
I'm all for the random tech news and bitching about DRM and software patents though. :)