I find the idea quite interesting, so interesting that I implemented my own version already over a year ago.<p>While I also started with aggregating only the top sites and so on, I found it quite &quot;unpleaseant&quot; that it lists all of the news-items in that way. I tried to make another ranking of the news and also tried to get more factors into the formula.<p>At the end there was a custom crawler, a special API using Solr and a custom Frontend [1] in two versions [2] which aggregates everything together.<p>I have also open-sourced the frontend [3][4]. If you have fun, have a look into that, but unfortunately the source-code diverged from the frontend Reader [1] a bit, because I started refactoring the db-schema and had not time to update my repositories yet. The second frontend [2] just happend because I was curious about the abilities of Foundation from Zurb. Works really well, btw. Also from your smartphone.<p>I plugged all of that into a machine learning algorithm too and let everything classify - online and in realtime. And renamed it to babbleaway, because the name &quot;Newscombinator&quot; was a bit too... well... fill in a word of your choice. The HN Community was not so pleased :)<p>In case there are questions, feel free to ask.<p>Merry Christmas.
Tom<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reader.newscombinator.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;reader.newscombinator.com&#x2F;#&#x2F;</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;live.newscombinator.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;live.newscombinator.com</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tomw1808&#x2F;newscombinator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tomw1808&#x2F;newscombinator</a>
[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tomw1808&#x2F;newscombinator-live" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tomw1808&#x2F;newscombinator-live</a>