Hacker News is one of the best news sources for technology-related content, particularly because none of it is dumbed down - the signal-to-noise ratio is very high.
But the non-technical news on it is also excellent. Here are two examples:
These are pieces of serious long-form analysis and journalism, respectively. They are the opposite of clickbait.
Many of my non-technical friends would be interested in reading these two pieces, but because the majority of content on HN is technical, they don't use the site.
That's where Non-Hacker News comes in.
I trained a classifier model to separate technical and non-technical posts. The details of that implementation can be found in this repo. This repo holds the Chrome extension code.
NHN is available as a Chrome extension, and it allows you to choose the aggressiveness with which posts are filtered - a filter level of 1 means no technical posts are filtered, while a filter level of 10 means all technical posts are filtered.
A user-configurable filter level is crucial because there is a large grey area. Examples:
- FaceTime bug lets you hear audio of person you are calling before they pick up
- Uber Fires More Than 20 Employees in Harassment Probe
These are technology-related articles but not technical in nature. User-configurable filter levels allow users to decide what they prefer to read. The model returns predicted probabilities (rather than 0/1), which allows for this type of of usage.
