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Comment on Show HN: RSS Brain

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Looks like Gnus for people that don’t like Emacs. With Gnus, you can using scoring to make your own algorithm to display news in a user defined way. The Gnus manual calls this artificial stupidity.

That sounds interesting. I took a brief look to find out what information is available to the custom algorithm but didn't find too many details, so I will just ask the question here:

If I want to write an algorithm to sort articles in HackerNews by upvotes and time, is the upvotes information available to Gnus? Assume the RSS feed has a customized field called <RSSBrain:upvotes> for each of the article, does the algorithm have access to that data?

And does Gnus need to get all the articles in a folder/feed and run the sorting algorithm on the fly? If so it seems to be a performance concern. Would love to know how it works in real life.

Personally, I'm only using Gnus for two weeks now, so I'm just now learning a bit about the (adaptive) scoring capabilities. Take a look at how Emacs maintainer John W manages the barrage of information that he needs to filter and sort[1]. I'm trying to apply this to my email/mailing lists/RSS/diary/etc....

[1] https://sachachua.com/blog/2012/07/transcript-emacs-chat-joh...

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