Hacker News Reader

I’d like to be able to conveniently access my most popular comments. There are quite a few things in there that I might like to write longer-form articles about.

(https://james.darpinian.com/blog/scraping-my-own-hacker-news... gives one way of doing it, by crawling your /threads?id=‹username› page, which does contain the point counts for each comment by you.)

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Which would be possible if HN was API first and all data beside email for recovery were public. Otherwise, HN is simply not designed to be responsive to user system design requests — but their have been a massive amount of alternative systems built by users that built things HN would have never made.

(Aside: I finally got round to scraping my comments in that way. My comments follow the sort of distribution you’d expect, ranging from −4 to +76, but there’s one outlier at +283, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27274146. People really hate stale bots on bug trackers.)

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