

HNSearch API Contest - andres
http://www.hnsearch.com/contest

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shykes
Every hnsearch contestant gets a dotCloud account to run their app easily, and
for free.

Email hn@dotcloud.com to get started.

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d0m
I sadly don't have time to implement it, but I'm still suggesting the idea.

You enter a keyword - say Python.

It shows a graph where nodes are submitted articles and comments intermixed.
On each "Comment" node, we see the picture of the author (obviously if found),
the karma and other possible information about him/her (Blog, website, startup
company, etc.).

Also, on each nodes start new related nodes.. So, if I search for python, I
might have a link to a new node called Django which would then link to useful
comments and other articles/comments.

So, the overall idea is to really be able to "visually browse and learn
through hacker news". "Vim" would give all plugins, author's plugin, etc.

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ary
Just for curiosity's sake, how is this dataset populated? Is ThriftDB just
scraping HN? Is there some kind of back-end DB feed?

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jrussbowman
Well this is as far as I got in about an hour for adding a /hn tag to
Unscatter.com - <http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fhn+facebook>

Javascript paging still isn't and it needs to be prettied up, but I figure not
bad for about an hours worth of work. And a good demonstration of the
framework Unscatter.com is built on being suitable for rolling out new apis
pretty quickly.

I'd wrap it up today but I got family stuff today, should be complete by 6/20.
Until I finish the javascript and layout /hn won't be advertised on the
sidebar, but anyone is free to start using it, I won't be turning it off.

~~~
andres
Awesome! It would be great to start a discussion about ranking algorithms in
the HNSearch developer forum (<http://groups.google.com/group/hnsearch>). We'd
like to implement some ThriftDB features to tweak ranking algorithms
automatically but that won't be ready for a while.

~~~
jrussbowman
I haven't even gotten into ranking yet. I took the example url and rolled with
that. I think the first thing I'll focus on is seeing if I can also offer
/hncomment and /hnlinks to help people search different types, then work on
the algorithms for all 3. Once I have /hn display looking good I can roll it
out to the other 2 pretty quickly.

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andres
We just changed the contest date from June 15th to June 20th to give people
more time to work on apps.

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jbuzbee
OK - I have no illusions about winning the contest, but just for fun I gave it
a go by adding support to my existing Android app, SocialMediaTicker. My app
is designed for when your device is charging or otherwise idle and is a bit of
an eye-candy display. It's a 3D, interactive ticker-tape type display that
scrolls facebook feeds, twitter streams, news headlines, photos, rss feeds,
etc. Click once to stop an item, click on it again to call up the full photo,
story, rss feed, etc.

For HN, I added a headline search capability and also made it part of my
experimental Twitter Trends mashup where the search terms for content
automatically come from the currently trending topics under Twitter. This can
be hit-and-miss for HN as oftentimes Twitter trending terms don't match well
to the topics found under HN, but other times I've been surprised about what
pops up.

If you want to give the mashup a try, I'd turn most other content off, turn
the mashup on, sit back and watch what happens! Configuration of all content
can be found in the preferences menu. By default HN is off.

To give it a try on your Android, download the app here:

<http://www.socialmediaticker.com/SocialMediaTicker.apk>

Feedback appreciated!

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callmeed
Anyone wanna team up on this? I'm thinking of a WordPress plugin that shows
links to related articles or discussions based on a post's title or tags ...

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knockknock
Here's my simple HNSearch API JavaScript example. It lists submissions from
the last 3 hours and sorts by points.

<http://www.hnjs.dotcloud.com/>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2663282>

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ezyang
This probably won't win, but it would be great if someone could write a tiny
app that converts search results sorted by date into RSS feeds. I might hack
something up myself after I'm done with exams, if no one else does.

~~~
ZackOfAllTrades
Does this work? <http://news.ycombinator.com/rss>

~~~
ezyang
That is for all(?) of Y Combinator, whereas you might be interested in new
posts with some criterion (keyword, points, etc.)

~~~
ZackOfAllTrades
Interesting. I wonder how you go about setting up an rss feed.

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evanrmurphy
What makes the monitor "hacker-optimized"?

~~~
andres
It's really big.

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franze
_disclaimer: this is shameless self promotion for something i coded some time
ago_

well, is somebody hacks up something nice via node.js why not transform the
whole hnsearch api into a nice npm package using

<https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/apimaker>

basically you put some nice URLs in -> magic -> a wrapped API comes out.

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zscally
Hello I've spent the last two days hacking together a mobile site for hacker
new search API... the mobile site is fully function but still needs some UI
updating I currently working on integrating into twilio to allow you to pull
search results via TEXT kinda over kill but why not!

<http://hnsearch.mobi>

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ezyang
What are reasonable rates for querying the API?

~~~
andres
For now, don't worry about rate limits.

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evanrmurphy
If this is successful, will you consider running a similar contest for Arc
Forum? <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620297>

_Edit:_ Fixed link to have correct URL. Sorry for the mistake.

~~~
andres
Has someone written a crawler for the forum? If so, I can help with the
ThriftDB setup.

~~~
evanrmurphy
That would be amazing! I think there have been at least a couple crawlers
written for it. (One being SearchYC's.) I'll let you know when I find
something more concrete.

Is there anything else that would help make the ThriftDB setup go more
smoothly?

~~~
andres
I don't think so. Once we have the data it'll be easy to upload it. I'm
emailing with the SearchYC creator so I'll ask him about arc forum data.

~~~
evanrmurphy
Kartik is happy to contribute his crawler, but wonders if it wouldn't be
easiest to reuse the HNSearch crawler (since both forums have the same
structure). <http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14774>

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RobMcCullough
Here is one: <http://HNTop100.com> \-- the top Hacker News posts of all time!
Sort by most up voted or most commented on. This took me way longer than it
need to because I kept finding awesome articles to read! Enjoy xD

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vnorby
Put in a quick first entry for the contest (HNInstant.com):

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621144>

More coming...

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RobMcCullough
Looks like fun, gears are churning.

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zemanel
anyone looking for a coding buddy to do something or ideas? i have some free
time atm

~~~
zemanel
How are group entries supposed to share the prize? Refund for dinero?

