Hacker News Reader

Comment by bazmattaz | Hacker News Reader

This is awesome. I can imagine you likely are not interested in building one but this site could hugely benefit from a recommendations algorithm.

For example an algorithm could understand how much a user really enjoys a certain article and then starts sending the users down a rabbit hole of similar and tangential content. Designing, building and maintaining an algorithm like this though is no small feat.

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I would not be surprised if Claude + Openai's reasoning models could develop a simple rudimentary algorithm that would work. Of course it wouldn't be as sophisticated as something like TikTok and would require a lot of fine tuning, but it's definitely possible.

Or even use an LLM directly "user liked articles with these titles, what others might they like"

+ keeping it in the front end with local storage

You are joking right?

why would it be a joke?

echo chambers bad

Personalization is not inherently bad and I believe personal feeds can be engineered in a way that doesn’t result in echo chambers but in communities.

The problem is capital incentives are not aligned with making these interfaces which is why we have the feeds we have today on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I look forward to the innovations happening on bring-your-own-algo Bluesky.

As a side note, I’m currently building a personalized Hacker News service. I might throw it at Show HN once it gets closer to completion.

Why is it bad if it learns that I like to read about medieval fortresses, and that it should skip showing me rocket ships, for instance?

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