Hacker News Reader

You could say that the code isn't really awkward to read.

That's what she sed

Mom! They spilled Reddit all over my hackernews!

Go ask your father.

I always avoided awk because I thought it was just a really weird looking alternative to sed. When it's nicely formatted like this it looks like a perfectly sensible C-like language.

I was hoping for some clever abuse of AWK's patterns & regexes but clean code will also do :)

For that, to start with, you'd need to be able to create a feedback loop of awk's output back to itself as input. For it not to interfere with rendering, it needs to be on a separate file descriptor from stdout.

I found this snippet on stackexchange showing how exactly that is possible on Linux.

> echo hello | gawk '!length{exit(0)} {print; print substr($0,2) >"/dev/fd/3"; fflush()}' 3>/dev/fd/0

This "renders" on stdout then feeds itself more input on /dev/fd/3.

Wow

Awk reads quite javascripty. JavaScript's function syntax was copied from awk.