Hacker News Twitter Feeds with Hashtag Metadata
Certain types of Hacker News stories always make me pay extra attention:
- Submissions by users with a lot of karma points. High-karma users are mostly HN gurus who have been on the site for a long time. They know the tastes of the community and have built a track record of quality posts. While not a perfect indicator, these superkarmic users tend to post better stories than users with more earthly karma.
- An unusually high number of comments. Average HN stories always attract a handful of comments no matter what, but the juiciest submissions spark active discussions that go on for pages and pages. This is often a tell that there’s something interesting going on with the underlying story. And the comments make for great reading by themselves.
- Trending, high velocity stories. Story A scores 100 points over 4 hours; story B scores 100 points in 30 minutes. Which one’s likely to be more intriguing? Story B. When a post piles up points quickly, it’s clearly grabbed the attention of HN readers. Of course the slow-burn stories can be great, too—especially in more esoteric topics—but items that rocket to the top of HN are usually the hacker-ish articles that I enjoy.
My Twitter feeds for Hacker News now contain hashtags that identify stories with these special attributes.
#guru
The #guru tag is applied to stories submitted by users with karma scores in the top quartile of all Hacker News users (a karma of ~ 1,000 as of Nov 2010).
Keep Tabs On Your Favorite Startups With StartupFollower http://tcrn.ch/9UzobE (http://bit.ly/a0ci2x) via @Stephen #guru
Hacker News 20
newsyc20
#active
The #active tag is for stories whose comment-to-score ratio is above 0.5. For example, a story with 50 points and 30 comments would be tagged as #active. This applies at the time the story is tweeted.
Things in MySQL that won’t work as expected http://bit.ly/9mdlaP (http://bit.ly/bbBWcJ) #activeHacker News 20
newsyc20
#trending
The #trending tag identifies stories that have scored more than 20 points per hour. This velocity is measured at the time the story is tweeted.
Microsoft releases an incredible product http://nyti.ms/addunX (http://bit.ly/aGnQKS) via @carterac #trendingHacker News 20
newsyc20
Combinations
Sometimes a story hits a combination of hashtags, or even all three:
Zero to a Million Users in 15 Days http://bit.ly/alzAJ3 (http://bit.ly/bSb7Rg) #trending #active #guru
Hacker News 50
newsyc50
Follow
Follow the Hacker News Twitter feeds here:
| Hacker News stories reaching 20 points |  @newsyc20 |
 RSS feed |
| Hacker News stories reaching 50 points | @newsyc50 |
RSS feed |
| Hacker News stories reaching 100 points | @newsyc100 |
RSS feed |
| Hacker News stories reaching 150 points | @newsyc150 |
RSS feed |
Or read my original post A Cure for Hacker News Overload.
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