Show HN: HN Mail – A topic-based newsletter service for Hacker News

[desmonding]

Hello HN,

Hacker News is a wonderful source of information which continues to inspire me to explore and learn. Given tons of posts are created everyday, sometimes it could be difficult to keep up with stories that I’m interested in, wouldn’t it be great to be able to collect and digest stories regularly based on my own interests?

To solve this problem, I built a “smart” weekly newsletter service which delivers HN content based on topics/keywords. I find it pretty useful to me, so I want to share it with you guys in case you need it.

[jaha]

Great project! The hot topics tags/link are not working.

[mkbkn]

I have set up an IFTTT recipe that emails me whenever a new content is created on HN, based on the keyword(s) chosen by me. And it mails on the same day.

Worked perfectly so far. But I'll give yours a try too. :)

[desmonding]

This is a clever idea! To check new content, there would be some kind of service checking HN posts repeatedly I suppose?

[soulclap]

Looks interesting. Does the 'hot topics' section list all available tags or are there more?

When choosing tags, it would help if I could see which tags you're giving to specific stories on HN.

[desmonding]

Only top 50 tags are displayed.

At this moment, a tag/topic is simply the keyword when you do search on HN. I agree it’s going to be more helpful to choose tags if it shows related stories.

[ryanjshaw]

This might be very helpful. Will subscribing to 'blockchain' get me everything from 'bitcoin'? How are topics identified, seeing as HN doesn't have native tagging?

[desmonding]

Not necessarily. Currently a topic is simply the keyword when you do search on HN powered by Algolia.

[SpecialistEMT]

Is there a list of keywords possible or can i input anything?

[desmonding]

You can input anything you want, but it’s recommended to use keywords that show up frequently in HN titles.