I like the serendipity of Hacker News, so I don't want to filter out or in specific topics. But if you filter for quality, I love that. Using machine learning to pick out the "best" items was the subject of a discussion recently:
It is an opinionated filter, but with ADD I can get caught reading most things on the front page. This guides me to some important links that don't initially seem all that interesting.
I asked the author if he would share his training set, or open source the app, but apparently not. If you can turn that web app into an RSS feed or a digest, that would help.
As for your idea to filter on keywords, you can get that working as an RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes without writing any code.
http://pyvideo.org/video/2612/enough-machine-learning-to-mak...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7712297
The author is nice enough to keep that app going here:
http://hn.njl.us/
It is an opinionated filter, but with ADD I can get caught reading most things on the front page. This guides me to some important links that don't initially seem all that interesting.
I asked the author if he would share his training set, or open source the app, but apparently not. If you can turn that web app into an RSS feed or a digest, that would help.
As for your idea to filter on keywords, you can get that working as an RSS feed using Yahoo Pipes without writing any code.