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Hacker News Official API

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Re: Hacker News Official API

#11

Post by metadat »

O__________O wrote: post #8

Wish API would show comment votes instead of only showing them up until 8 years ago when displaying them was turned off on the main site. Aside from allowing users to enable them via their on interface, do analysis, etc — it broke HN’s comment search based on comment popularity. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535637

What difference would exposing counts make? Why should this data be mineable?

We're already helping to create a training set of slightly above average English speaker discourse for free.

Re: Hacker News Official API

#14

Post by metadat »

Would it be feasible to make a Firebase-to-Supabase connector?

Having a self-hosted private HN Algolia (perhaps via Elasticsearch) would be nice. Algolia's forced fuzziness and limited number of results per page are a drag. Why can't they provide any search controls? Or at least support the "-" operator to exclude a term.

Re: Hacker News Official API

#15

Post by O__________O »

metadat wrote: post #11
O__________O wrote: post #8

Wish API would show comment votes instead of only showing them up until 8 years ago when displaying them was turned off on the main site. Aside from allowing users to enable them via their on interface, do analysis, etc — it broke HN’s comment search based on comment popularity. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535637

What difference would exposing counts make? Why should this data be mineable? We're already helping to create a training set of slightly above average English speaker discourse for free.

If it was up to me, all data would be publicly available aside from emergency recovery email and password.

This would include mod commutations and mod logs; unless it was security related, which would have a formal process with deadlines for release.

—-

To address you specific question as why the comment voting data would be of use, among other reasons, it would allow users to have custom filters. For example, posts and comments with high up/down votes tend to be flamewars. Mods also random boost/ding posts/comments too.

Re: Hacker News Official API

#16

Post by metadat »

O__________O wrote: post #15
metadat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What difference would exposing counts make? Why should this data be mineable? We're already helping to create a training set of slightly above average English speaker discourse for free.

If it was up to me, all data would be publicly available aside from emergency recovery email and password. This would include mod commutations and mod logs; unless it was security related, which would have a formal process with deadlines for release. —- To address you specific question as why the comment voting data would be of use, among other reasons, it would allow users to have custom filters. For example, posts…

I hear you, but what is the endgame with this? Does it lead to a better HN?

Lobste.rs actually exposes even less and doesn't provide an API because the users haven't consented to such intrusions.

Personally, I don't want to be able to review every vote for or against my HN account. It wouldn't be productive and would likely lead to me not wanting to be here at all. It'd be like having a super strong mirror and then looking at your skin and being confronted with too much information about the reality of how nasty looking and imperfect being human is. Basically not a healthy pastime.

FWIW, if you're truly passionate about this, it's not difficult to setup your own site with the lobste.rs open-source code. Maybe there is a whole subset of like-minded folks.

The lobste.rs origin story may also be of interest to you. The TL;DR is jcs was being singled out and abused by pg on HN. Thankfully there is no evidence dang has (or would ever) do this, it was certainly toxic behavior on Paul's part. Being a moderator isn't for everyone, it's a Certain Thing, and net-positive mods who avoid power tripping are truly rare gems on the Internet. Open information would guarantee such abuses couldn't happen in the dark, but at what cost to the best aspects enabled by the HN ecosystem?

References:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452568

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32112665

Re: Hacker News Official API

#17

Post by chrismorgan »

O__________O wrote: post #8

Wish API would show comment votes instead of only showing them up until 8 years ago when displaying them was turned off on the main site. Aside from allowing users to enable them via their on interface, do analysis, etc — it broke HN’s comment search based on comment popularity. Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32535637

I’d like to be able to conveniently access my most popular comments. There are quite a few things in there that I might like to write longer-form articles about.

(https://james.darpinian.com/blog/scraping-my-own-hacker-news... gives one way of doing it, by crawling your /threads?id=‹username› page, which does contain the point counts for each comment by you.)

Re: Hacker News Official API

#18

Post by O__________O »

metadat wrote: post #16
O__________O wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was up to me, all data would be publicly available aside from emergency recovery email and password. This would include mod commutations and mod logs; unless it was security related, which would have a formal process with deadlines for release. —- To address you specific question as why the comment voting data would be of use, among other reasons, it would allow users to have custom filters. For example, posts…

I hear you, but what is the endgame with this? Does it lead to a better HN? Lobste.rs actually exposes even less and doesn't provide an API because the users haven't consented to such intrusions. Personally, I don't want to be able to review every vote for or against my HN account. It wouldn't be productive and would likely lead to me not wanting to be here at all. It'd be like having a super strong mirror and then l…

Again, just expressing my opinion, but another example would be it would allow custom ranking algorithms like PageRank, TrustRank, etc.

And yes, aware of Lobste.rs mod logs, but Lobste.rs is basically dead compared to HN — largely because it’s an HN clone.

Re: Hacker News Official API

#20

Post by ElCheapo »

O__________O wrote: post #18
metadat wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear you, but what is the endgame with this? Does it lead to a better HN? Lobste.rs actually exposes even less and doesn't provide an API because the users haven't consented to such intrusions. Personally, I don't want to be able to review every vote for or against my HN account. It wouldn't be productive and would likely lead to me not wanting to be here at all. It'd be like having a super strong mirror and then l…

Again, just expressing my opinion, but another example would be it would allow custom ranking algorithms like PageRank, TrustRank, etc. And yes, aware of Lobste.rs mod logs, but Lobste.rs is basically dead compared to HN — largely because it’s an HN clone.

This is a website where people post links and other people comment below them. Most front page discussions don't surpass 50 replies. I don't really think we should care so much about this place to the point that we're willing to employ state of the art data analysis tools just to read a blog post and see if someone has critiqued it in the comments
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