truffle_pig

I read a lot of hacker news, and I've noticed something: HN is a better judge of Substack quality than the Substack's subscriber count (even paid subscribers). To test this, I built MetaStack. It works as follows:

  1. Collect HN submissions that link to substack domains.
  2. Calculate the HN affinity of each Substack, i.e. "how much does HN like this compared to Substack users?"
  3. Using this HN affinity, create an implied HN score for all posts in the Substack (even those never posted to HN).
  4. From here, I manually trim down to substacks with a high signal-to-noise ratio, and send them to you as a weekly roundup.

This gives you a slice of the best independent writers, weighted towards what hackers find interesting.

My favorite one so far:

mantula: a small parasitic stinging insect that feeds on ants, flies, and other small insects, native to leafy lawns and shrubs. "mantulas are widely grown as food"

You could do some great auto-worldbuilding in a dwarf fortress type game with this. Maybe constraining the input data to "bio" and "historical" definitions.

Good idea, cheers. I'll have to gather more data before I can do historical changes.

I made this a few days ago as a way to get some interesting data about the tech demand in different cities.

There's a lot of changes I want to make, but I'm posting now to get real feedback as quick as possible before I iterate. So all feedback is welcome!

Uber is currently worth more than Stripe, Spotify and Dropbox combined. I'd easily rather own those 3 outright than Uber. Wonder what the market knows that I'm missing.

The products are ranked according to the "Popularity score" which uses # comments with distinct authors and positive karma. Amazon links in a comment usually = endorsement

Hey yep I'm the developer. What's your use case for this feature? Is it just overwhelming with too many books?