HN Explorer

Ask HN: Can I write a recommendation engine for HN?

3 points by kvh ↗ HN
Simple item-based (hackers who upvoted this article also upvoted...) and/or user-based (hackers who upvoted similar articles to you, upvoted ... ) recommendations would be cool to see on HN, possibly as a way to access (relatively) older content that one might have missed. this assumes people are actually away from the site long enough to miss something -- unlikely. addicts!

I think as the user base of HN continues to grow this can help keep things from approaching the LCD.

8 comments

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aneesh
I like the thought of this, but you can't see who upvoted a particular article, so it'd be difficult to make any sort of recommendation.
noodle
might be able to make some sort of greasemonkey script to make that happen.
BSeward
You won't be able to use Greasemonkey to surface information that is inaccessible, like who upvoted what, unless I'm missing something?

You could write a Greasemonkey script that would would track what users who have installed it have up-voted. Although that is not very elegant (users need to be convinced to trust it and install it) nor effective (your dataset will be self-selection-biased to that segment of the community), it would be a kind of an interesting solution to play with.

noodle
yes, that second paragraph is what i was referring to.

its not the best or ideal solution, but its a solution that would make the concept possible.

TJensen
HN is open-source. You could get the source and submit a patch.
kvh
Good info. Did not know this. I'll take a look...
csomar
Thanks for the info, is it written on PHP or PERL ??
stonemetal
It is written in Arc, PG's language in development. It is in the Lisp\Scheme tradition.