News YC Bot
What is "News YC Bot"?
News YC Bot is a robot that posts links from Hacker News to Twitter after they receive enough votes. The tweets include the news link and a link to the discussion on Hacker News.
Like this:
Currently there are two bots:
- @newsyc200 posts news that get over 200 votes
- @newsyc250 posts news that get over 250 votes
Why is News YC Bot?
The Hacker News front page features numerous stories every day. These bots are designed to filter out only the most newsworthy stories based on user voting.
Following either of the Twitter feeds gives you a handful of top stories every day with a quick access to the discussion.
How is this different from, say @newsyc150?
The idea for @newsyc200 came from @newsyc150 and other bots that tweet popular Hacker News stories.
However, recently the @newsyc150 feed (stories over 150 votes) has become a bit noisy, as more and more stories get over 150 votes. The objective of @newsyc200 and @newsyc250 is to limit the number of stories to somewhere between 0-10 a day.
There are a couple of differences between the News YC Bot and others:
- the bot prioritizes the news story's title over everything else
- the bot does not include the Twitter handle of the original submitter
- the bot does not use bit.ly to shorten the URLs
- the bot does not include meaningless hashtags in its tweets
Who made this?
The bot is made by me, Oiva Eskola (@oiva on Twitter; LinkedIn, email). I'm a fan of Hacker News but I don't have the time to read everything. Feel free to send comments or suggestions.
