Hacker News Reader

I agree adding the comments would be great, but without html scraping Hacker News it's not possible. I didn't want to reproduce HN only show that adding more context around a link will change a user's behavior around that link.

I would disagree that the first paragraph is meaningless. The title alone is generally not enough to make an accurate guess on whether a link is useful.

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I disagree about the first paragraph bit. In every case where showing something like that works, it's setup so the poster can add such a description. Examples would be Slashdot, which is often a long form summary, and Digg, which is short form. Here on HN there is no summary. This encourages short, accurate, descriptive subjects. The base argument I'm trying to express is that either model works well, as long as it's human edited. However, automatically grabbing a semi-random chunk of text and displaying that as the descriptive paragraph isn't useful and makes reading the headlines difficult.

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