Its exactly the kind of thing I would build and abandon. So the maybe more interesting things is why you don't use it? I presume its a UI thing, or classifier is unreliable, or something?
I would love to hear why vanilla HN is better now.
I don't know that vanilla HN is better now. I abandoned it for two main reasons:
1. The Hacker News API I was using was very unreliable and would go down for days / weeks at a time, which made the whole pipeline unreliable.
2. I was consuming this as an RSS feed, but when Google Reader shut down I abandoned my RSS habit cold turkey, so now I pretty much only read sites that I visit directly, or things people link to on FB / Twitter.
I implemented the same thing for reddit a while back, and learned the same lesson :)
However, I haven't completely given up on the idea. The point is that while limiting news to things you've liked in the past is a terrible idea, helping you find good articles isn't.
The question is, what constitutes a good news item? I think the key is that there are many answers to this question:
1. Something very specific to your interests (your classifier should be good at detecting this)
2. Something big that everyone should hear about (the HN frontpage is good for this)
3. Something about a new concept you've never heard about. I've implemented this by keeping track of popular words on reddit and giving a boost to words not seen in the past, with some success.
