Hacker News Summary Service (HNSS) | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Summary Service (HNSS)

29 pointssytse9 comments

I'm Sid Sijbrandij and I love reading Hacker News. I almost always read the comment section and when there is a summary of the article in there that is frequently helpful. But most articles don't have a summary so I want to hire someone to create more summaries.

I hope that this will make Hacker News more enjoyable and efficient to use for its readers. Many times it takes a while to figure out what the article is about, a summary would allow people a quick way to see if they are interested in investing that time.

There are potential downsides: 1. People only read the summary and not the full article. 2. The summary might not be clear or correct. 3. People who already read the article don't want to see the summary.

With a one month experiment we should have a better idea if HNSS is worth it.

If it is here to stay we can also see if the summary can become an official part of HN.

The writer of the summaries should: 1. Be able to do this for a month 2. Have at least 20 comments on Hacker News 3. Be able to invoice me as a contractor

Apply via https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdmM0gvAAmuEcHmFUzN...

I like the idea. Some thoughts;

I think you'll need a threshold of when a HN post is worthy of a summary (e.g. number of points), and a way of tracking work like a backlog of posts that are awaiting a summary to ensure you don't have duplicated work and to keep track of work volume.

Once a summary is posted, any comment afterwards won't be included in the summary. You'll need to decide if a summary of comments is written a longer time after the the summary of the post is written to get a good sample of the comments.

A summary will need to be completed soon before the peak of popularity to ensure maximum exposure and effect.

1. Makes sense, I think the criteria would be hitting the homepage and updated the form to reflect that.

2. I'm not anticipating a summary of comments, just of the article.

3. I agree that getting the summary quickly (at most one hour after hitting the homepage) is essential. We can even consider looking at the top 50 and making summaries before they hit the homepage. The first person doing this might not able to make one for every homepage article but if it is a success we can scale up later.

I would like to see summary of comments posted, if possible, eliminating the filler comments, organizing comments by relevance and just pulling together comments into groups based on topic, category etc. I find voting system to be pretty ineffective in highlighting insightful comments.

That is an interesting idea outside of my proposal. The problems with summarizing comments this might be:

1. The comments might be much more text than the article.

2. The comments are probably more disjointed than the article and harder to summarize.

3. If you wait for all comments to come in before writing a summary the article exposure will probably be mostly done, few people will see your summary

What is the article selection for the summaries? IMO, the biggest problem of HN is not a "preview" of the first pages articles but a better selection on actually reaches the first pages.

Anything that (is close to) hitting the homepage.

Nice. By the way, what I also want badly is HN posts to be categorized/tagged by subject.

Tags would be so so nice.

HN SS? Just like with ExpertsExchange, whitespace matters.

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