Wednesday, October 8, 2014
New: The Hacker News API (with Python support)
By Vasudev Ram
Hacker News (HN), a.k.a. news.ycombinator.com has introduced an API for their site - the Hacker News API.
Hacker News is a tech and other news site popular with developers, entrepreneurs and others, which was set up by Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, a startup incubator / accelerator.
HN thread about the Hacker News API.
The Hacker News API on Github.
The API has been built in partnership with Firebase, a startup that is a graduate of the Y Combinator incubator / accelerator.
There is a Firebase REST API available to access the Hacker News data.
They mention two Python wrappers for the Firebase REST API:
python-firebase, Python interface to the Firebase REST API, by Özgür Vatansever
and another one, also called
python-firebase, Python wrapper for the Firebase API by Michael Huynh.
The news about the Hacker News API was posted just today.
I'll experiment over some days with the API and then may write another post about using it from Python.
- Vasudev Ram - Python training and consulting - Dancing Bison EnterprisesClick here to signup for email notifications about new products and services from Vasudev Ram. Contact Page
Sunday, March 3, 2013
Best programmer jokes, on Stack Overflow and Hacker News
What is your best programmer joke?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5310266
Nice ones, many.
I like some of the math ones, though I have a math background.
Surprised and slightly pleased to see that HN guys can laugh at themselves (or at least at our "tribe").
- VR, the friendly bison.
dancingbison.com
Friday, January 11, 2013
pyhn, Hacker News command-line client
Seen via Python Weekly.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Hacker News UI makes me squint
See:
Doing Y Combinator a second time | Hacker News
Check how the text shifts to the right, some way down the page, when the nesting level increases - making it irritating to read.
Happens in many other HN pages too.
Saturday, August 18, 2012
Insightful comment to Paul Graham on Hacker News "hate" thread
I wish you'd consider investing less time in technical countermeasures to dumbne... | Hacker News
Maybe more on this later, but for now, I've been thinking recently, based on reading about similar events, that many techies are too prone to advocating a technical solution to all or almost all problems - and that includes Paul Graham, some Hacker News users, and Google, IMO.
Monday, May 21, 2012
All time favorite Ask HN threads
Seen recently on Hacker News.
"Ask HN: Favorite HN threads of all time":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3996652
At least dozens of potentially interesting links and meta-links about all things related to startups and life, all from Hacker News under the Ask HN "category" of posts.
Should give you enough reading for weeks or months.
- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com
Friday, April 13, 2012
Hacker News summaries site
Seen via today's post on avc.com.
Sends the links and a brief description for each story, via email. Can set your time zone and delivery time, also the number of stories (10, 20, etc.) for the daily email. Neat idea ...
- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com
Sunday, March 25, 2012
The Unofficial Hacker News FAQ
www.jacquesmattheij.com/The+Unofficial+HN+FAQ
Somewhat interesting.
- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com
Friday, July 1, 2011
Jetslide - geeky queries, mobile and personalized news
I had tweeted about Jetslide earlier. It's sort of a real-time news site for hacker-related news. Very roughly like hackerstream.com and Peter Cooper (@peterc)'s hackerslide.com, both of which I had also
tweeted about earlier.
Just got an invite to Jetslide.
Excerpts from the email and from the links in it:
[
You can jetslide anonymously but also get some benefits when you login.
...
With Jetsli.de you get the latest news out of twitter, hackernews, delicious, dzone, reddit and digg. The algorithm of jetslide will boost articles with a higher share count (retweets or diggs etc.) and tries really hard to avoid that you'll waste your time e.g. it reduces
duplicates and spam!
...
At the moment the following read modes are available:
Daily: Every 24h Jetslide marks your topics as read.
Auto: Automatically marks your topics as read when you click on the next topic.
...
Read the news on your mobile device like Android.
...
Use geeky queries like e.g. "elasticsearch^2 OR solr" which boosts articles containing elasticsearch.
...
To get posts directly sorted against the share count of one network
you can append the sort parameter, e.g. sort=reddit.com will give you the articles from reddit and sorted against the share count of reddit.
...
Last but not least you can get articles from an url or in this example via domain:
domain:techcrunch.com
]
Seems like an interesting attempt. I think we need more such "geeky query"-type search services :-)
Some time ago I had tweeted (in reply, IIRC, to a tweet by Stormy Peters - @storming), that Gmail should have an SQL-style search facility. (Stop for 1 minute to imagine what you could do with that.) So should other services that provide any kind of search.
The current search facilities, while of some use, are not enough. Of course, initially only technical people would be able to use new facilities such as SQL-style queries, but I don't think it's such a big deal for laymen to learn it. After all, SQL was originally invented - by IBM - with the goal of being an end-user query language (as I had blogged on my earlier blog, jugad's Journal - link below), and though that goal did not really work out - instead, SQL became a programmers' language - nowadays, with vastly greater computer awareness and skills in the general population, I don't see why they should not be able to pick up SQL, at least for basic to intermediate uses.
Earlier blog post about SQL being originally designed for end-users:
IBM Database Connectivity for JavaScript - will the wheel come full circle?
http://jugad.livejournal.com/143125.html
Links about Jetslide and its maker:
http://www.pannous.info/products/jetslide-mobile-and-personal-news4geeks/
http://www.pannous.info/products/
Posted via email.
- Vasudev Ram
Sunday, May 22, 2011
Hackerstream.com - Hacker News in real-time
Just saw this:
The site is titled "Hacker News in real-time". It has a section at the top that dynamically updates to show the number of new posts, where "posts" seems to mean comments as well.
Below that, the rest of the page shows topics from Hacker News, with each topic showing a (linked) topic title, and the latest comment on the topic. Clicking the title link opens that HN topic in a new browser tab.
There does not seem to be much information about who the site is by, except that the feedback link in the top right corner of the page is a mailto: link to feedback@readwarp.com . I only did a quick check though. Readwarp.com seems to be a search / news site for various categories of topics.
I had sometime earlier tweeted about the Unofficial Hacker News API. Not sure if this site is built using that, or in some other way, such as using HN's RSS feed.
Posted via email
- Vasudev Ram
