
Show HN: Pumpkin – An open-source HN clone - fananta
https://github.com/fananta/Pumpkin
======
jlas
How'd you get upvoted so fast?

Sacha Greif's Telescope [1] is probably the best open source HN clone I found,
last time I checked.

Edit: I liked Telescope because it had a really slick (customizable) UI,
persistent storage, and was a breeze to get up and running on Heroku.

What are you using node? You don't explain how to run the server at all. Not
everyone knows how to use nodejs. Have you considered using a package.json [2]
and publishing on npm?

Being a little pedantic here but your ReST API needs work, e.g. "/topic/add"
is a bad API endpoint. Verbs are to be avoided. You got the POST part right,
but you should be POSTing to a resource like "/topics/" or "/topic/", which is
a list of topics. Take a look at "RESTful Service Best Practices" [3], it's a
quick guide that should get you up to speed.

Edit: Downvoted? Really? I Give 3 solid points of constructive feedback here.
If you disagree with something here please let me know.

[1] [http://telesc.pe/](http://telesc.pe/)

[2]
[https://www.npmjs.org/doc/files/package.json.html](https://www.npmjs.org/doc/files/package.json.html)

[3] [http://toddfredrich.com/restful-best-
practices-v1-1.html](http://toddfredrich.com/restful-best-practices-v1-1.html)

~~~
d0m
Here's why I think people down-voted you:

>> Edit: Downvoted? Really? I Give 3 solid points of constructive feedback
here. If you disagree with something here please let me know.

Probably because your tone was extremely aggressive. You think you provided
feedback but it feels like you're trying to destroy the project. I'm not
saying _I_ thought that, but here's how it can be understood:

>> How'd you get upvoted so fast?

Sounds like "You're a fucking cheater, you gamed the system"

>> What are you using node? You don't explain how to run the server at all.

Sounds like "Using node is fucking stupid, and your doc sucks".

>> You got the POST part right, but you should be POSTing to a resource like.

It sounds like "What you built is crap because you didn't follow the X 'best'
way of doing REST queries".

\-----------------

Maybe it's because english isn't your main language. You could be geniously
giving good feedback but it just doesn't *sound like it.

Maybe instead of:

>> What are you using node? You don't explain how to run the server at all.

it could be:

Why did you decide to go with Node? By the way, it would be great to have some
documentation on how to start the server.

Etc.

~~~
michaelmcmillan
To me it seems you are reading what you want to read.

His criticism was legitimate, there is no reason to waste time nor energy on
his "tone-of-writing". If his points are valid then that should be sufficient.
Replies like yours contribute nothing.

~~~
d0m
I was answering his question of why he was getting down-voted, no more no
less.

>> If his points are valid then that should be sufficient.

In theory, yes, in the real world, appearances matter. Being right is only one
part of the equation.. if you can't convince the other person then it doesn't
really matter whether you're right or not.

If you're giving feedback and it sounds like you're demolishing someone,
chances are your feedback won't be listened to. It's not the end of the world,
obviously, but you're losing your time and the readers too.

>> His criticism was legitimate, there is no reason to waste time nor energy
on his "tone-of-writing".

The irony here is how by not having the right tone his feedback weren't
understood correctly, and hence wasted the time and energy of most readers.

>> Replies like yours contribute nothing.

The irony, again.

------
ma2rten
Maybe it should be pointed out that the real thing is open source as well.

~~~
krapp
[https://github.com/wting/hackernews](https://github.com/wting/hackernews)

... though obviously _the real thing_ isn't open source, as pg and kogir have
made numerous changes they're not releasing and AFAIK they're not taking pull
requests on news.ycombinator.com (but they do have a bug tracker @
[https://github.com/HackerNews](https://github.com/HackerNews))

Odd that in all this time no one seems to have forked the original code and
iterated on it. Deployed it, sure, but not (say) fixed any of the bugs that
annoy people about HN, or made it _better_.

~~~
jsnell
It's a trivially simple program, written in a dead-end language, has a
ridiculous architecture, and there appears to be no prospect of changes to the
open source version being propagated to the production HN. Doesn't seem
particularly odd that nobody has forked the code. If you want to run a site
like this, writing a clone seems like the rational choice.

------
e12e
Isn't (part of/some version of) hn already open source?:

[http://arclanguage.org/install](http://arclanguage.org/install)

[https://github.com/wting/hackernews](https://github.com/wting/hackernews)

Is the current hn very different from the arclang forum?

------
fananta
clickable:
[https://github.com/fananta/Pumpkin](https://github.com/fananta/Pumpkin)

Feel free to use it for projects like "HN for {blank}".

~~~
kawera
Simple and to the point. You could use Elasticsearch instead of an object for
storage and than get search for free.

------
ilaksh
Is there some code that saves the data to disk? I don't see that.

~~~
jbraithwaite
Data is stored in memory..

------
sgdesign
To be honest when I land on that GitHub page, I'm not sure what I'm looking
at. What does this do? Is there a demo? How do I run it?

If you want to get more traction I would suggest making the readme a little
more beginner-friendly :)

