HN Explorer

Ask HN: Filters for HN?

12 points by mikhailfranco ↗ HN
Feature enhancement request...

Would you like settings in your HN profile to filter in/out:

- article title keywords

- article formats (e.g. [pdf], [video])

- domains (e.g. github, youtube, twitter, theguardian)

- submitter username

Seems like the admirably minimal features of HN have been minimal and stable for some time, but do you want an upgrade?

9 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 88.1 ms ] thread
Jason_Protell
I do not want an upgrade, I really appreciate the minimalism of the Hacker News website.
LinuxBender
Most if not all of this can already be done in uBlock Origin. uBlock is available for most browsers AFAIK [1] I should probably document some of the common filters since this comes up from time to time. There is a site that was going to host a lot of filters [2] but it does not appear to get updated. I will add documenting some filters to my TO-DO list. A git repo that everyone could contribute to might be even better.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBlock_Origin

[2] - https://letsblock.it/filters/tag/hackernews

usgroup
A bit adjacent to the topic but I'd personally like to see the ratio of points to comments taken into consideration when ranking posts. I.e. higher ratios of points:comments should rank higher, with points:comments < 1 being the start of some kind of exponential down-ranking.
pestatije
please get rid of karma, superfluous feature completely at odds with the "we are grown-ups" philosophy of HN
AnimalMuppet
Well, you still need upvotes and downvotes, because you still want the good stuff rise to the top.

And maybe you still want karma, too. Yeah, it leaves people chasing the dopamine hit of watching their score rise, but it also serves at least two useful purposes. It provides negative reinforcement for off-topic, flamebait, and other undesirable posts. And it provides a signal about which users are more trustworthy to provide valuable content.

brudgers
Each of those sounds like ideas for improving efficiency.

Personally, I am very wary of ideas for improving efficiency because:

A. They are ideas rather than solutions. They sound good on paper and have a long reverberation time in my head, but if there really was a problem there, I would do something about it not just think about it. [0]

B. Local efficiency is often globally inefficient...e.g. the bank teller problem in queuing theory. [1] Or hill climbing in optimization. I think about it as "reality is NP hard."

C. These things can be implemented locally and seasoned to taste on my own laptop. [2]

D. I come to HN to get things I did not know I wanted and every hard and fast rule about what I know I like turns out to have exceptions. [3]

YMMV and that's fine.

[0]: I am particularly wary of ideas about what other people should do because they are not in my control.

[1]: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2008/10/21/what-happens-when-...

[2]: "Hacker" is on the tin. There's an RSS feed and myriad ways to automate a browser using user scripts and other tools.

[3]: Because it's aesthetics grate my day, I work hard to avoid Twitter and curse myself whenever I click a link . But occasionally due to statistics there has been something I was glad I saw.

eimrine
I would like to have a browser extension for that.