We have designed and built intigi.com for this exact purpose: a secret weapon for hackers to consume news.
This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only the relevant results.
You can black list sources, domains, terms in the article. The advantage of this approach is that you can look through attention grabbing headlines and find fresh information that matters to you. You could also optimize for precision or for recall...
That's not really what he/she asked for. What your parent is asking for (and I would love to see this too) is a tool that treats RSS feeds as sets of articles, then lets you do set operations on those sets (i.e., get me all articles a \in A such that a \in HN \and a \notin rpolitics)
Hi there, good point. I didn't explain myself very well. You can do this with intigi, too. You can filter both at the content and the source level. So you could set up an interest that presents you with results that
a) appear in the HN RSS feed AND
b) that don't appear in the r/politics feed
In order to do set operations on URLs reliably, we also solve the issue of canonicalization (resolving redirects, removing tracking markers, etc.).
This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only the relevant results.
You can black list sources, domains, terms in the article. The advantage of this approach is that you can look through attention grabbing headlines and find fresh information that matters to you. You could also optimize for precision or for recall...