Hacker News in the Terminal | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News in the Terminal

andrewvos.com

112 pointsAndrewVos68 comments

There are no links to comments, because you should never read the comments.

wait, what? There are some great comments around here.

Right? It's a forum, not a link aggregator. Comments are the entire point.

Grabbing all the comments and intelligently displaying them in a terminal would require substantially more work, I suspect.

That's probably true. The nested format would be a challenge at the very least.

Then the author should say that. "You should never read comments" just doesn't make sense in HN when comments are the entire point of why I'm here.

Right now, I don't see why I should use this tool when I can just use elinks.

...maybe it was a joke.

I used to use elinks with a filter (words.txt) by topic

  elinks -dump news.ycombinator.com | sed -n -e 's/\([0-9]\+\)\.\ \+\(\[.\+\]\)\+\(.*\)/\1: \3/p' | grep -f words.txt -i

An HN to nntp scraper would be awesome.

Just so I understand correctly, are you saying you would like to be able to read HN using an nntp client?

Yes!

https://news.ycombinator.com/rss + http://gwene.org/

EDIT: Though I suppose it would be cool if comments worked, too.

Yeah, I meant for each top port to be a thread, and threaded comments below that.

I want that for mail. I keep planning to write something that can connect to an IMAP server and present the contents via NNTP, but it is low enough on my list that I don't know if I'll ever do it.

I know that the effect can be achieved by running an NNTP server, and using a mail/news gateway, but that's a lot more complex. Most NNTP servers are meant for big multiuser situations, and that makes configuring them complex, and often requires a lot of supporting software. Massive overkill for someone who just wants to read their mail in their newsreader and get a good threaded message view with a good UI.

Nope http://pastebin.com/Y9F1PYLM

And yet they are all but impossible to read without greasemonkey scripts.

Exactly. There are lots of stories where I'm more interested in the comments than the article itself. Usually, the more mainstream the news source (TechCrunch, HuffPo, NYTimes, etc), the better the comments are relative to the article. Much of the time that value of the comments far exceeds the value of the article itself.

Or, to flip that concept around: the better the article, the worse the comments. The best "technical-focus" articles rarely have any comments at all. It's only when people post stupid shit that everyone feels the need to rebut, that we get a discussion.

I often read the comments first. Dessert before dinner.

I rarely read the articles at all.

What's your /. username?

My interpretation was that if you are reading HN in a terminal, you are probably procrastinating from work and therefore shouldn't get sucked in to the discussions that make this a great place.

While I will freely admit many parts of this industry, and many of the people hailed in heroes within it, are basically bogus "right place, right time" cases who are just as blockheaded as the MBAs in suits that came before them, the comments here can be as valid as the articles.

Especially since many of the participants in this forum are significant participants in the industry.

https://twitter.com/AvoidComments

OP may have his tongue stuck in cheek.

I have to admit that sometimes I even skip the articles and read the comments because I can usually rely on HN to filter out the BS and make note of the juicy good parts (which I can then go and look at in the article/post).

Same here! HN without comments is like pissing without farting.

The comments can be far better than the dreck that usually gets posted.

Here, I made a crappy version with comments: http://pastebin.com/Y9F1PYLM I also removed the light background...because I like my terminal that way - feel free to edit it back in...

My immediate response was, "Ruby? Ugh! You should never use Ruby."

Just look at this glorious echo chamber.

Or just use elinks, which works great: http://i.imgur.com/FuxUew1.png

Unfortunately comments don't nest nicely in elinks. Otherwise it's great.

That's because HN uses an image tag to do the nesting and apparently elinks ignores the width property on image tags.

Wondering how involved it would be to add a script to do that in elinks.

in ~/.elinks/hooks.pl: http://pastebin.com/P4frn4N7

Awesome, thanks.

I'm quite disappointed that this is the case. I don't expect a crazy parallax motion-sickness inducing css3 but I do expect decent markup.

I was disappointed when you said they used images.

I was more disappointed when I looked at the source and realised it's nested tables.

For shame, HN. For shame.

If it bothers you submit a pull request that fixes it.

To where?

As far as I know, the current version of HN isn't open source.

Indeed it definitely isn't.

To elinks.

Comments nest in w3m, which is my favorite text web browser on the strength of its formatting. However I've never been able to log in with w3m.

I just gotta say, you were awarded one helluva filename there!

It should be possible to do this in a line of bash, this is my current start point -

  curl https://news.ycombinator.com | sed 's|<[^>]*>||g'

edit - for reference, this is being done in an osx 10.7.5 terminal, so ymmv

getting somewhereish, I only have a slight understanding of regex to be honest :)

  curl https://news.ycombinator.com | sed 's|<[^>]*>|-|g' | sed -e 's/-------/\'$'\n/g'

...

  curl https://news.ycombinator.com | sed 's|<[^>]*>|-|g' | sed 's|------------|-|g' | sed -e 's/-------/\'$'\n/g'

50 commentators fail to get the comment joke... (he is British I spose)

I don't get the British reference?

comments are essential to much of HN

Yep, sometimes that's where the real story is at. Heck, one of today's front page posts is comprised almost solely of two HN comments.

I see one with three comments, but not one with two...

Oh well.

But, you're right, comments are really where places like HN shine.

I was referring to the blog post[1] which was basically a copy and paste of two comments on a previous HN post.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6146930

You would say that.

Exactly, how can a community be valuable without a voice?

Wrote this into Factor last year. It even has the orange color in the terminal!

https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/hack...

    IN: scratchpad USE: hacker-news USE: io.streams.256color [ hacker-news. ] with-256color`

Hacker News

1. FBI pressures Internet providers to install surveillance software (news.cnet.com) 104 points by ojbyrne 2 hours ago | 32 comments

2. Hard drive hack provides root access, even after reinstall (spritesmods.com) 200 points by pd0wm 5 hours ago | 46 comments

comments powered by Disqus

Why not to use regular text browser like links or elinks?

$links https://news.ycombinator.com/

I was first interested in this post since I do most of my HN browsing via newsbeuter/w3m which are terminal applications. To post, the easiest way seems to be to just pull up the story in my web browser.

Hmm..this might be enough to get me to try Ruby. Looks neat and I've been wanting to learn the language. I hate dependency plumbing but this looks like it might work out of the (my) box.

It's a very fun language. You should definitely give it a go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELinks

I may have been more inclined to use this, if it did have the feature to read the comments!! More often than not, I go through the comments first just to gauge the quality of the article and only if I am satisfied do I actually go read the article. That's why I don't like using desktop rss tickers for HN.

for just monitoring the news on a console I still use hackertop

https://github.com/pkrumins/hacker-top

alias news='lynx http://news.ycombinator.com'

Couldn't I just use links to get the same effect? But with the comments (what I consider the best part of HN)

I've been reading HN in a terminal for a while via Emacs and w3m mode.

EDIT: or also, just use w3m outside of Emacs.

Awesome little utility. Next step is letting me comment :).

M-x hackernews

uses the api instead though.

emacs-w3m is the best hacker news reader!

Thanks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com