Show HN: Hacker News 2.0 - A Work in Progress | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Hacker News 2.0 - A Work in Progress

hn2.co

7 pointszupreme28 comments

Doesn't seem to work at all on Chrome for Mac. Just seeing a single black line down the page.

It's fine for a test product to not support all browsers, but I think that at the very least, the most up-to-date version of each of the main vendors should be tested.

It was working a few minutes ago.

I suspect a weird bug or server misconfig, since looking at the HTML/JS it seems like the scripts/markup have been truncated.

HN is refusing the GET requests now. I think they have a daily threshold set for queries. I'm troubleshooting options for working around this now. Most likely it will involve a cron job to pull entries on a set interval and saving those entries to the database instead of retrieving the entries in real-time when users visit the site

I have the same problem. Just a black vertical line. I'm using chrome on Win 7.

Or on any chromium-based browsers (SRWare Iron)

Off-topic but there is probably no good reason to use SRWare Iron: http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam. Something might have changed after that was written but it doesn't seem very likely.

Same here on Firefox 9.0.1.

I would want HN2.0 to not have the same mass market blogs being submitted to death by karmawhores.

Not having comments makes it less interesting as well I think.

comments are a must

I'm sure I'm not the only one that comes to HN for the comments rather than the articles.

So basically, for me it's missing the only feature that makes HN worth reading.

Agreed. I plan to add comments over the next couple of days (once I get things working to the extent that HN will not block the GET requests due to traffic)

Benologist: Thanks! Unfortunately this site is just a (more attractive I hope) mirror of HN. Whatever HN allows to hit the front page will hit HN2.

To be clear: I'm not trying to steal HN's audience. I just think the folks at YCombinator have better things to do than to address UI issues and add new functionality. I'm trying to fill that gap with HN2.

Since I don't see anything at the moment I still prefer http://hckrnews.com/

Some thoughts:

+ Comments are an absolute must (in the sidebar somehow?)

+ The page doesn't reach the bottom (gap between the bottom bar and above frame/sidebar)

+ Perhaps make the sidebar smaller (slide in/out on hover?) when viewing a site, it currently takes up too much of the sites space

+ Padding!

Also, I just reloaded the page and it's suddenly empty (not sure if that's just Chrome going weird though).

Congratulations Fizzadar! I think your refresh was the once that pushed the site over HN's limit :-)

I'm going to try using a different server to fact the data as a proxy which will then get stored to a database. I need to look around and see if HN has published any query limits so I can schedule the fact accordingly.

Thanks for looking and for your excellent feedback!

Not impressed. This is why frames are dead for quite some time now. Feels unnatural and breaks importance of catchy titles.

TZaman: I used an iframe because it was the only way of displaying the content I could think of without resorting to copyright infringement (i.e. doing a CURL query and reproducing the article on the site). If you can suggest a better and more user-friendly way, I'd be happy to consider it.

Thanks a lot for commenting.

It's not the technology, it's just that I do not want a "preview" feature for every post on HN. When I see an interesting title, I click on it - otherwise I ignore it.

The guys at http://hackful.com/ open sourced their HN "clone". You can have a look at https://github.com/8bitpal/hackful.

I can't tell if it's just me, but for some reason it doesn't work (just shows a vertical line) on Chrome, SRWare Iron (Chromium-based), FF and Safari.

Not impressed really. No comments, breaks my back button, and needs JavaScript to work.

You're the first one to report a back button issue. Can you give me details on what browser and OS you are using so I can try to duplicate the problem?

Thanks.

Next up: Handling sites gracefully that employ frame busting methods. I don't mind the ones that break out of the frame and redirect the visitor to their site - if they wish to do that, then that's fine by me.

What I need to figure out is how to best handle the sites that simply refuse to show their content. I'm thinking that, I should create a Javascript event that will just forward the user to that site (window.location = xxx) in the event that the site refuses to show content in an iframe. That way the user still gets to the content they want without interruption.

Does anyone have any feedback on that approach, or can anyone suggest a different one?

Update: Per PG's post at the location below, it looks like I can query once per minute safely. I'm going to do better than that and query once every 2 minutes. Hopefully a 2 minute delay won't be too much for HN readers to bear.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105

Thanks for the feedback everyone. It was working earlier - it looks like it hit some throttling threshold on HN due to the traffic. I will have to wait until the throttling period expires and then enable caching of requests.

Thanks everyone.

And the site is back up. Thanks for everyone's patience!

Nice work so far. Any plans to implement a comment view?

Definitely. Thanks.

If you or anyone else have suggestions on an attractive way to incorporate them, I'd appreciate it.

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