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Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

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Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#161

Post by duck »

randomdata wrote: post #159
duck wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, not sure if I agree with that or not... but if so, it has a very limited usage quota before you get banned. :)

I'm curious why you disagree, aside from the quota thing? I have written many API consumers over the years and there is basically no difference between parsing HTML or any other format; XML especially, for obvious reasons. HTML APIs to come with the added benefit of being less prone to change, which I realize goes against conventional wisdom, but seems to hold in practice.

I agree that parsing can be easily done, although I don't think it is necessarily equal... but I guess that would depend on a case by case basis since a lot of API's are terrible. What makes it not an API IMHO is that you can't consume it when needed, but rather you have to consume it all the time. I guess you will call that a streaming API though. :)

HTML APIs to come with the added benefit of being less prone to change

Really? I don't think that does hold in a lot of cases. Using HN as an example, it broke a year or so ago when PG changed how the job postings were listed. Again, the quality of an API can vary, but at least you would know what changed in that case.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#162

Post by duck »

sillysaurus wrote: post #142
duck wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmmm, not sure if I agree with that or not... but if so, it has a very limited usage quota before you get banned. :)

What API do you want? Automated submissions of posts is not a good idea, so that leaves data scraping. If you're looking to extract data from HN, use HNSearch. http://www.hnsearch.com/ There's no reason to scrape data from HN itself.

HNSearch is great and I use it for my Wayback Letter project, but it hasn't been around that long so I couldn't use it before. When I started Hacker Newsletter about 2.5 years ago there was nothing, so scraping was the only solution. One of these days I will convert the application I built to build out each issue, but there also is a risk of HNSearch going away just like the last search engine did.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#163

Post by rwallace »

zalzane wrote: post #97
michaelochurch wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit's voting system has two issues: (1) Lots of strategic downvoting. That's why no thread stays above 75%. It happens to comments as well as threads. Some of it is spammers trying to improve their own ranking, and some is probably just trolls. (2) "Stalker" downvoting, which is when a person retaliates to a comment by downvoting that person's contributions en masse . I wonder if they've put any machine learning m…

The entire concept of the downvote is flawed and is very likely to be the absolute worst part about reddit. In theory it may be a good idea, but in practice it's essentially a "CENSOR THIS POST" button that people use to get rid of content they don't agree with. I've also noticed that negative points on a post completely destroys credibility despite cited evidence or a well thought out argument. I've seen identical c…

Hmm, very different perspectives; personally I think a big advantage of reddit over hn is that on reddit, if I see harmful bullshit or toxic garbage, I can do something about it without having to take up everyone's time. I don't downvote based on mere disagreement; surely there are some people who do, but I haven't seen that much of it.

That having been said, I mostly read the programming section of reddit; I'm prepared to believe standards might be lower in e.g. the politics sections.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#165

Post by SkyMarshal »

michaelochurch wrote: post #22

Programming Reddit (Proggit) is more focused on programming (as opposed to politics, tech startups) and therefore, I would argue, is more likely to have the sorts of links you're looking for. But, in my experience, the quality of discussion is lower (though quite high in absolute standards) and you're more likely to have a good comment downvoted.

I would suggest starting at /r/coding for pure technical/coding discussions:

http://www.reddit.com/r/coding

Then follow the sidebar links for related stuff.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#167

Post by mahmud »

VMG wrote: post #146
randomdata wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, HN already exposes an API over HTTP. It just uses HTML as the exchange format instead of XML or JSON.

I try to remember that line the next time my boss wants me to code an API.

that's a shitty excuse. HTML as a "protocol" mixes presentation with content. An API should not only be presentation agnostic, but presentation free.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#168

Post by randomdata »

mahmud wrote: post #167
VMG wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to remember that line the next time my boss wants me to code an API.

that's a shitty excuse. HTML as a "protocol" mixes presentation with content. An API should not only be presentation agnostic, but presentation free .

Where then do microformats fit, in your opinion? A defined standard for API-like transmissions, but mixed into presentable content.

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#169

Post by michaelt »

zalew wrote: post #12

> has less negativity what do you mean by that? ironically I'll probably sound negative, but are you looking for a place which enforces PC to an ubearable point where the only accepted state is, you know, people standing in a circle smiling while performing a certain activity?

If you take a look at the thread "Ask HN: I want to build a cable company. How would I get started?" [1] I saw that title and thought great, a discussion of the economics and technical side of building out a FTTH network. I was wondering how feasible it would be to start something like Google Fibre in my city.

I was disappointed. There's about three reasonable quality posts, and even they are short on technical and financial details. All the other top-level posts are basically noise.

I don't think HN needs "enforced PC" but I do think it would be improved if instead of just posting "it won't work" people posted "it will be difficult because of a, b and c which you need for x, y and z and which will cost i, j and k"

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893776

Re: Ask HN: A place like HN but with more nerdy stuff and less social stuff?

#170

Post by jhund »

haldean wrote: post #156
jhund wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have designed and built intigi.com for this exact purpose: a secret weapon for hackers to consume news. This is how it works: You tell intigi what sources (RSS feeds and twitter accounts) you want to follow. Then you provide intigi with what's basically a lucene query that you want articles to match. Intigi then monitors your sources, indexes the article's title and full body, and delivers to you only the relevant…

That's not really what he/she asked for. What your parent is asking for (and I would love to see this too) is a tool that treats RSS feeds as sets of articles, then lets you do set operations on those sets (i.e., get me all articles a \in A such that a \in HN \and a \notin rpolitics)

Hi there, good point. I didn't explain myself very well. You can do this with intigi, too. You can filter both at the content and the source level. So you could set up an interest that presents you with results that

a) appear in the HN RSS feed AND b) that don't appear in the r/politics feed

In order to do set operations on URLs reliably, we also solve the issue of canonicalization (resolving redirects, removing tracking markers, etc.).

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