71–80 of 138 posts
Anyone know of a good tool to get something like push notifications when specific topics come up on HN? I've been thinking maybe I should build one, but I also feel like someone must have already done it by now.
You can check this [1] service that I prepared for myself then made it publicly available. For now it’s only sending popular stories as notification. Planning to add keyword feature. [1] https://hnn.avci.me/
In response to people's complaints about the usability of the HN Firebase API: yes. We're going to eventually have a new API that returns a simple JSON version of any HN URL. At that point we'll phase out the Firebase API, with a generous deprecation period. I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts about what a generous deprecation period might be.
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Yes, it is. And if you feel that way, that's fine. Why gatekeep?
What am I gatekeeping, exactly?
Only using the official API is quite cumbersome, as fetching a story with comments requires one network request per each comment. Instead, try considering the (more unknown) Algolia API[0]. It supports fetching the entire tree in one request. Unfortunately the comments aren’t sorted, so you’ll still have to use the official one (or parse the HN HTML) if you need that. For my HN client[1], I parse the HN HTML (as it’s…
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What am I gatekeeping, exactly?
For starters, that you only want HN to be used the way you want to use it; which for sure it not the way I want to use it and more than likely significant number of other users too. If that’s not gatekeeping, then what is?
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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…
https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/web/read-and-write
In response to people's complaints about the usability of the HN Firebase API: yes. We're going to eventually have a new API that returns a simple JSON version of any HN URL. At that point we'll phase out the Firebase API, with a generous deprecation period. I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts about what a generous deprecation period might be.
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…
It's not going to happen. Showing comments led to constantly flamewars about unfair commenting. Even without the comment scores, the mods are still constantly having to remind people to stop arguing about scores. The decision not to display or make available other people's scores was litigated intensely; it is now part of the premise of the community.
To me, if users have concerns about “unfair voting” to me the solution is not to hide them. Also, if comment points aren’t important, why even allow them? They are obviously important and if a users is not available to respect guidelines not to complain about them, what’s difference between that an guidelines related to comments about being downvoted?