Hacker News Reader

Comment by aspensmonster | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

Nope http://pastebin.com/Y9F1PYLM

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

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.

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