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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I often read the comments first. Dessert before dinner.

I rarely read the articles at all.

What's your /. username?

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.

https://twitter.com/AvoidComments

OP may have his tongue stuck in cheek.

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...

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

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

Just look at this glorious echo chamber.

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