HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

desmonding

28 karma · joined June 21, 2018

submissionscomments
desmonding··on Show HN: Moji – A read-it-later app with self-organizing smart collections
Thanks! It should be available in Germany now — let me know if you still have trouble finding it.

Yes, Readability.js is injected into a hidden WKWebView for each extraction. I also recently added Defuddle as a second engine to handle JS-heavy sites and ones with custom extractors (Twitter/X, Reddit, YouTube, Hacker News, GitHub, etc.). A coordinator routes to the right engine based on the domain. After extraction, the HTML gets parsed into typed content blocks and rendered as native SwiftUI views — much nicer for theming and performance than using a web view. The Share Extension just grabs the URL and hands it off to the main app for full processing.

That's really cool that you rewrote the Postlight parser in native Swift — that's a serious undertaking. I considered going fully native for parsing but the JS engines are surprisingly capable when you let them run in a WebView. Really enjoyed reading your write-up too! The scoring approach you took for content extraction is essentially what Readability.js does under the hood too — scoring DOM nodes by heuristics and bubbling scores up to parents. Impressive that you reimplemented that in native Swift.

desmonding··on Show HN: Moji – A read-it-later app with self-organizing smart collections
Thanks for the feedback! Will add some for sure.
desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – Topic-based HN newsletter service
Good idea. I’ll add that to my todo list.
desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – Topic-based HN newsletter service
Thanks! An article is categorized based on the keyword search result powered by Algolia, which is quite simple as of now.

Yeah I’m aware of those bad user inputs, I’ll probably add some basic validation for that when I get a chance.

desmonding··on Show HN: Best of Show HN
I guess https://hnmail.io could be what you wanted, but without “hotness”.
desmonding··on Show HN: I Built a “Google Alerts” for Hacker News
Only article titles are searched.
desmonding··on Show HN: I Built a “Google Alerts” for Hacker News
For people who'd like to digest articles with certain keywords in a weekly manner, try https://hnmail.io
desmonding··on Ask HN: How do you follow blogs / curate a content stream for yourself?
For HN, I use HN Mail to get stories that I’m interested in delivered to my inbox every week.

https://hnmail.io

desmonding··on Ask HN: Feedback on this topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News?
Here is the link: https://hnmail.io
desmonding··on Ask HN: What are the best email newsletters you subscribe to?
I use a topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News: https://hnmail.io
desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – A topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News
This is a clever idea! To check new content, there would be some kind of service checking HN posts repeatedly I suppose?
desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – A topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News
You can input anything you want, but it’s recommended to use keywords that show up frequently in HN titles.
desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – A topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News
Not necessarily. Currently a topic is simply the keyword when you do search on HN powered by Algolia.
desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – A topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News
Only top 50 tags are displayed.

At this moment, a tag/topic is simply the keyword when you do search on HN. I agree it’s going to be more helpful to choose tags if it shows related stories.

desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – A topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News
Is it working now? It should open HN Algolia search page.
desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – A topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News
Hello HN,

Hacker News is a wonderful source of information which continues to inspire me to explore and learn. Given tons of posts are created everyday, sometimes it could be difficult to keep up with stories that I’m interested in, wouldn’t it be great to be able to collect and digest stories regularly based on my own interests?

To solve this problem, I built a “smart” weekly newsletter service which delivers HN content based on topics/keywords. I find it pretty useful to me, so I want to share it with you guys in case you need it.

desmonding··on Show HN: HN Mail – Hacker News Tailored for You
Hello HN,

HN is a wonderful source of information which continues to inspire me to explore and learn. Given tons of posts are created everyday, sometimes it could be difficult to keep up with stories that I’m interested in, wouldn’t it be great to be able to collect and digest stories regularly based on my own interests? To solve this problem, I built a “smart” weekly newsletter service which delivers HN content based on topics/keywords. I find it pretty useful to me, so I want to share it with you guys who might have the same need.

Cheers, Desmond