Hourly Hacker News Snapshot | Hacker News Reader

Hourly Hacker News Snapshot

domador.net

50 pointsdomador10 comments

Your reasons given for building this are exactly why I built hckrnews[1], and why Peter Cooper built hackerslide[2].

hckr news is pretty cool. I ran across it a few weeks ago, and saw that it embodied very similar goals to what I had in mind. However, since I had already collected snapshots for a long time, I thought, "Might as well give others access to them."

I somehow missed Hacker Slide when I looked through the Hacker News links on Resourcey. Very nifty!

How far back can you go on each site? I see that Hckr News has an endless-scrollbar-like interface, and Hacker Slide seems to cover two weeks. (Those time frames and navigational control might be plenty for most readers, but some of us are a little more obsessive...)

hckr news has data going back just over a year. I've thought about exposing the data via a ui other than 'get next day', but frankly have never had the need. Whenever I've wanted to revisit an item, it's been within a few days -- for anything more, there's hnsearch.

hnslide has 2010/10/15 - current, with a couple hundred missing

All three sound like they're duplicating the functionality that simply subscribing to the HN RSS feed will give you.

On the other hand, if you haven't subscribed to the HN RSS feed, or have deleted some of the items, then these would still provide a valuable service.

I really like this idea.

I was messing with the hours manually, and realized it would be very cool to have a timeline-toolbar at the top that would allow the user to fly through hours of the front page.

It would allow us to see the comment count changing over time and seeing which stories quickly disappear and which stick around.

/my two cents

Thank you for your feedback.

Is the timeline-toolbar you envision kind of like the one on Hacker Slide?

This is neat, however I'd like to see it archive the comments as well. It looks like it redirects to the actual discussion page on Hacker News, which is not an accurate glimpse of that thread at the point in time it was archived.

That would be neat, too. I can't say when or if I'd get around to it :(

I imagine something similar must happen with Hacker News itself. We ask the owners for features, but not all of them are adopted (or implemented as soon as we wish). Eventually, some of us create companion products or services to scratch our respective itches.

I could possibly be convinced to adopt the feature you request if someone else were to implement it. First, though, there are some additional factors to consider beyond my time (factors such as resource usage on my webhosting service and whether Hacker News would be cool with this level of site scraping.)

Very nice. I've been discussing this very thing with the HNSearch guys, trying to add it to my hobby project.

Well done!

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