We are big fans of Hacker News here at MonkeyLearn. We read HN on a daily basis, but not all of us have the same interests; some are more interested news related to programming, and others are more interested in news related to startup and business.

So, what if we can read Hacker News but only see relevant news related to our interests?

This is why we created My Hacker News, a demo that classifies Hacker News posts with MonkeyLearn, you can check it out here: http://hackernews.demos.monkeylearn.com

By using My Hacker News demo, users can see HN top news classified with categories like ‘programming’, ‘business’, ‘design’, ‘entertainment’ and more. The interesting thing is that you can filter HN news based on the category you are interested. For example, if you are only interested in programming, you just click on ‘programming’ tab and voilà; you see only HN posts related to javascript, python, docker, elasticsearch and other programming related content.

How we built My Hacker News?

We used MonkeyLearn to train a machine learning categorizer with categories like ‘programming’, ‘business’, ‘science’, and downloaded texts from relevant subreddits to do the training.

The plot at the top shows you the distribution of categories for each hour, and you can filter the news by category.

The actual classifier is public so anyone can use it with a free MonkeyLearn account. You can try it out here.

The source code can be found here.

Every five minutes the app polls the HN API to categorize the latest submissions.

Although it is just a demo, we would love to hear your thoughts on it and how we can make it better. Any comment and suggestion is welcome!