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 tag

#guru 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).

#active tag

#active 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.

#trending tag

#trending identifies stories that have scored more than 20 points per hour. This velocity is measured at the time the story is tweeted.

Combinations

Sometimes a story hits a combination of hashtags, or even all three:

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
Hacker News stories reaching 300 points  @newsyc300  RSS feed
Hacker News stories reaching 500 points  @newsyc500  RSS feed

Related post: A Cure for Hacker News Overload.