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Show HN: Y Recombinator – The HN threads HN keeps recommending

13 points by nightjar ago | 7 comments
A lot of the best stuff I've read on HN I found through a comment saying "this old thread is worth reading." So, I tried to collect all of them!

It takes every HN comment that links to another HN item, drops the dupe/previous discussion/related links, and uses Sonnet to decide which of the rest are actual recommendations. Then it ranks them by how many different people recommended each one.

The Dropbox comment is #1, which I guess is no surprise. Further down there's a lot I hadn't seen.

If you swap news.ycombinator.com for yrecombinator.org in an item link, you can see who recommended it.

Inspired by Karpathy's HackerTube: https://yrecombinator.org/item?id=50319510

greazy |next [-]

This is fantastic. Some great comments and posts that I've never read before.

The "wisdom of bane" is something I've preached but in experimental design. No one ever listens.

adrianwaj |next |previous [-]

Might even be worth providing an API for this. But that may end up becoming part of the official one.

Another interesting variation would be to tally "Author here" comments and users and find a viewport into that.

It could be a discography-type page but for hackers. Track all the apps and articles associated with a various user, whether they are still up, but also give an opt-out feature too. A Hackerpedia. Use the "Author here" term to fill a page. Eventually tie-in unified traffic stats - and measure traction on all new things launched. That could be a paid service. You could also provide subdomains for a fee, or even for free like with afraid.org.

There's so much stuff being launched, having background and traction info would be valuable.

Could also provide "crypto APIs" somehow and aim to create a boutique economy.

nightjar |root |parent |next [-]

Oh that’s a cool idea! Currently there is no API because I wanted to make it fully static, but everything behind it can be downloaded from the data page (https://yrecombinator.org/data). That covers every item, every comment counted as a recommendation (with label, strength, and quote) and all ~400k HN-to-HN links. It’s ODC-BY so if HN ever wanted it, they would be welcome to it.

“Author here” is a fun one too. I did a quick regex and roughly 11k comments open with a variation of “Author here” from about 5,800 users. I can take a look. Thanks!

|root |parent [-]

nightjar |root |parent |previous [-]

I just built and deployed the Author Here idea: https://yrecombinator.org/author-here.

Threads where the author of the article or project showed up in the comments (~5,200 threads and ~3,900 authors). Thanks for the idea!

adrianwaj |root |parent [-]

Great work. I'd think about having yrecombinator.org/user/#### pages.

People can link to those from their profiles.

I initially started thinking about "author here" searches here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49317157 whereby people could clearly see items where an author had shown up. The complimentary idea was to inform a user if something they'd written or developed had appeared on the site (as a notification.) This is in the vein of Google alerts, which has been running since 2003. https://share.gemini.google/kZJ6i9bfZwZZ

polarsanel |next |previous [-]

May be more interesting to weigh recent recommends more highly giving the list a chance to jump around a bit. I.e. something recommended today is likely to get in top 10 (you could filter by karma too).

adrianwaj |previous [-]

"aged poorly" - top item has actually aged well with regards to how often it still comes up.

An interesting perspective would be the distributions of recommendations over time, to the point something could be attaining "cult status" even if its absolute number of recommendations is still relatively low - its distribution instead of being a bell curve would be on a slight incline.

https://share.gemini.google/aOxdepZJiHv5 (distribution plots)

Find the cult heroes! Show the plots.

Could also track links to usernames, or external urls within comments and in that respect, I use this script: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/502980-hackernews-links-re...