I’ve been spending a lot of time on Hacker News lately, and like many other people I’ve taken to building a large backlog of links to several blog posts, articles, and discussions. It feels like a waste for me to clutter my bookmarks with links I end up not reading, especially when many of these links are interesting, insightful, or happen to be relevant to whatever I’m working on at the moment. I’ve saved these things because past-me thought they would be useful in some way.
If you ever feel the need to read something, doesn’t it make the most sense to start from your bookmarks? What better recommendation algorithm could there be other than your past self?
HN doesn’t provide a good way to navigate through your saved items, so I wrote up a small program to help download all my favorite and upvoted posts. This way, I get to see everything at once rather than 30 at a time, and I can reorganize them however I like. In the future, I’d like to generalize this program to work with links from any source, but since most of my links come from HN, this is a good enough solution for now.
I tend to read a lot more posts than I save, so in theory I should be able to read (or at least decide to read) all of my saved items pretty quickly. In practice though, I tend to go back to the front page to get my fix rather than reading something from my favorites. I guess my past self doesn’t know me as well as he thought he did.
Source code and instructions here: https://github.com/ejacobg/hn