I’ve managed dashboards before and the type of content that does well there is not the type of content that does well on hacker news, at least not in the native format.

The stuff that works well as a dashboard is graph or gauge form where at a glance or by it’s change you notice an anomaly. Think green-yellow-red classified stuff. It might direct you where to go.

You might be able to consume the front page data and graph the number of comments to indicate a story’s activity.

Or you could go deeper and track for swings in karma score of posts or users