Users of the sharing and discussion board Hacker News are this week discussing whether the recent TechCrunch Disrupt New York Hackathon team’s improvements to the ycombinater site are really improvements, but are generally impressed with the work.
The team sought to boost the user experience of Hacker News by adding tags to posts in order to make it easier to discover content on the site. They created Tagger News (a copy of Hacker News, but with tags added).
Most interesting to coders is the way they added the tags. They used Random Forests to analyze 25,000 Hacker News titles and automatically deduce the subjects of the articles based on the combinations of words found in the articles.
Also of note: The team of 4 (Daniel and David Robinson, Nathan Gould and Chris Riederer) came up with the idea and did their work in only 24 hours. Three of their computers were used to collect data using the Hacker News API, and one was used to build the Tagger News site.