Ask HN: Create custom, personal Hacker News email digests | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Create custom, personal Hacker News email digests

5 pointsjchmura6 comments

I've had this idea swirling in my head for a while that there should be a service that allows you to setup custom filters of Hacker News submissions and then receive a digest of them either daily or weekly. You could make something similar to a where clause (i.e. `title contains "javascript" or text contains "javascript"`). This would define the list of links you would receive.

Is this something you guys might find useful? I'm thinking of throwing something together as a weekend hack project.

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I like the serendipity of Hacker News, so I don't want to filter out or in specific topics. But if you filter for quality, I love that. Using machine learning to pick out the "best" items was the subject of a discussion recently:

http://pyvideo.org/video/2612/enough-machine-learning-to-mak...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297

The author is nice enough to keep that app going here:

http://hn.njl.us/

It is an opinionated filter, but with ADD I can get caught reading most things on the front page. This guides me to some important links that don't initially seem all that interesting.

I asked the author if he would share his training set, or open source the app, but apparently not. If you can turn that web app into an RSS feed or a digest, that would help.

As for your idea to filter on keywords, you can get that working as an RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes without writing any code.

Interesting. I had not seen that discussion. I'll take a look.

I also like the mix of stories and subject in HN, but when one subject saturate the front page I use hnapp to filter the other stories. For example you can subscribe to the rss of http://hnapp.com/?q=javascript%20type%3Astory%20score%3E1

This would be useful, particularly in a use-case where I'm interested in a niche topic that I wouldn't like to miss anything in.

A filter, like 'hit the front page', 'in ask', 'above XX points', 'above XX comments' would also be useful as a simple, well, filter.

I personally prefer RSS over email, so I've built https://github.com/raquo/hnapp for the task. Just thought you might want some code to get started.

That's almost what I had in my head. That's a cool little utility. You did a lot of hard work already :P

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