Hacker News in the Terminal(andrewvos.com)
andrewvos.com
Hacker News in the Terminal
http://andrewvos.com/2013/08/02/hacker-news-in-the-terminal/
21 comments
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.
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.
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.
Right now, I don't see why I should use this tool when I can just use elinks.
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...maybe it was a joke.
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!
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/rss + http://gwene.org/
EDIT: Though I suppose it would be cool if comments worked, too.
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.
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.
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.
Or just use elinks, which works great: http://i.imgur.com/FuxUew1.png
I just gotta say, you were awarded one helluva filename there!
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.
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.
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.
Wondering how involved it would be to add a script to do that in 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.
It should be possible to do this in a line of bash, this is my current start point -
getting somewhereish, I only have a slight understanding of regex to be honest :)
curl https://news.ycombinator.com | sed 's|<[^>]*>||g'
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.
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
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6146930
Exactly, how can a community be valuable without a voice?
[deleted]
You would say that.
Wrote this into Factor last year. It even has the orange color in the terminal!
https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/hack...
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
..
https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/hack...
IN: scratchpad USE: hacker-news USE: io.streams.256color [ hacker-news. ] with-256color`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
..
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Why not to use regular text browser like links or elinks?
$links https://news.ycombinator.com/
$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.
[deleted]
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
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.
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.
uses the api instead though.
emacs-w3m is the best hacker news reader!
wait, what? There are some great comments around here.