The Readability parse is a good idea, but implementing that would need more time than I can spare right now. If anyone wants to do the legwork on that, please contact me and I'll be happy to put it in the feed.
http://twitter.com/newsycombinator is also good if you want anything that hits the front page (surprisingly it has almost 14,000 followers.. which seems sky high compared to the number of HN users to me.. :-))
It's a Python script I run every 5 minutes with cron. It uses BeautifulSoup to scrape the newsyc front page, Tweepy to send out out tweets, and sqlite3 to keep track of which stories have already been tweeted.
How about if the original link is small enough to fit in without truncation (bit.ly), then show the original link as well as a bit.ly link to the comments.
I hate losing the domain information in bit.ly links, and the @hackernewsbot (http://twitter.com/hackernewsbot) does a nice job of showing the original URL when possible.
Yep, that or create a simple web-app where users can log in (using OAuth preferably) and configure the number of stories they see a day or the karma threshold and then spin up a custom RSS feed for them.
If it isn't too much trouble a version of this for 40 points (and maybe 60) would be great. I find 20 to be way too much traffic in my Twitter feed, so I unsubscribed from it.
Twitter has always included trailing parens in links (even though, it seems more often than not they're not supposed to be). On the bright side, bit.ly ignores them so you still get the originally intended link.
I'm pretty sure trailing square brackets are ignored - anyone know for sure?
It's doing it on the square brackets too. =) It's not a huge deal; as another person replied to me, bitly seems to ignore them and get you where you're going.
Especially since with the shortened URL I don't really know where I am going.