Hey everyone, thanks for the comments. There's too much to respond to everyone, but a lot of people have brought up an "echo chamber" concern.
As other people have pointed out, the naive Bayes model works topically, so it will learn that I like stories about "patents" but not (usually) whether the stories are pro or anti-patent. It is totally true that I might miss an interesting story about the new OSX or about Pinterest, but I'm willing to live with that.
Two larger points are that
1. HN is only a small fraction of the news I consume, so it wouldn't matter that much to me even if it were a bubble chamber, and
2. The main reason I did this is that I simply couldn't keep up with the volume of stories otherwise.
Last night when I spoke about this, someone asked me whether I was concerned about all the false negatives I was missing. But before I started this, my RSS feed had like 800 (and growing) unread HN articles in it. Reading some of them, even a targeted some, is better than none.
Anyway, thanks for all the comments. I'm suprised (and glad) that people are so interested in this!
As other people have pointed out, the naive Bayes model works topically, so it will learn that I like stories about "patents" but not (usually) whether the stories are pro or anti-patent. It is totally true that I might miss an interesting story about the new OSX or about Pinterest, but I'm willing to live with that.
Two larger points are that
1. HN is only a small fraction of the news I consume, so it wouldn't matter that much to me even if it were a bubble chamber, and 2. The main reason I did this is that I simply couldn't keep up with the volume of stories otherwise.
Last night when I spoke about this, someone asked me whether I was concerned about all the false negatives I was missing. But before I started this, my RSS feed had like 800 (and growing) unread HN articles in it. Reading some of them, even a targeted some, is better than none.
Anyway, thanks for all the comments. I'm suprised (and glad) that people are so interested in this!