
Hacker News Instant - brudolph
http://hninstant.org/
======
mechanical_fish
I'm afraid I really can't get past the orange. I think I literally _felt_ my
eyes relax when I pressed the back button.

~~~
brador
I checked the comments first and thought you were kidding. Jesus.

~~~
pmorel
Same. It made me shut my eyes instantly even if I was prepared for the
worst...

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xtacy
Feels very quick and snappy. Could you comment on how you did it?

BTW, the "full orange" strains my eye. Maybe it's just me, but it would be
nice if you could have softer colours!

~~~
brudolph
Sure, I'm going to be writing a longer blog post on how I made it, but for now
here's a short summary:

I made a script that scrapes all the links from hacker news every 15 minutes.
I then open the links and process the text using python's nltk package
(deciding what words are important and useful). Then I used a suffix tree in a
mongodb backend to store the important words in such a way that once it looks
up a word you can get the set of documents pertaining to the word. This way
the search is linear in the length of the query and not the number of
documents. The rest was just some jquery ajax calls and parsing of the search
query.

I'll look into a new design, maybe make the orange's white and the white's
orange.

~~~
Legend
Great and snappy! I would really love the longer blog post...! Two questions
if you have a minute: 1) Why suffix trees and not suffix arrays? 2) How are
you implementing them? Did you do the tree building yourself or is there a
good library that you recommend? Thanks.

~~~
brudolph
I used a suffix tree over a suffix array because I hadn't heard of suffix
arrays, but after glancing at the wikipedia page for suffix arrays it seems
those might have been a good choice too. I'll look more into it. I did all the
tree building myself, and I'll explain that in my post. The post should be
ready by tomorrow.

~~~
Legend
Awesome! Thank you so much...

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TamDenholm
Not to thread hijack but i made instantise.com forever ago and it got on HN,
it also has an HN instant.

~~~
rplnt
I get error on the homepage as there is google embedded in an iframe which, as
my browser says, is not ok. If I switch to other site it's ok.

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mpobrien
Very nice. Do the search results link to the comments pages anywhere? It looks
like there are only links directly to the original articles.

~~~
nrkn
I too would like to see a comments link, because without it this is useless to
me, which is a shame, as it's otherwise very nice.

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eogas
Is it just me, or does this not work at all? I'm on the latest version of
Chrome for Windows.

Also did you create two accounts right when you posted this to comment on it
and say it's awesome?

EDIT: I figured out why it seemed like it didn't work at all:

<http://i.imgur.com/CmsZG.png>

~~~
solipsist
As long as you were "touching up" the photo, you might have wanted to hide the
bookmark tab titled "Piracy"

:)

~~~
swatkat
Always 'peel' away the tab to its own window before taking a screenshot. And,
uncheck "Show bookmarks bar" ;)

------
irrationalfab
Does anyone knows what is the stance of Y combinator with HN scrapping?

~~~
pg
<http://news.ycombinator.com/robots.txt>

------
pyre
Some of the searching seems off. Searching "bill" gets me headlines with "Bill
Gates" in them, but searching "Bill Gates" gets me no results.

~~~
brudolph
Working on that as well, it's the question mark after gates that is throwing
it off.

------
sjwright
Nice. All it needs now is a Hacker News theme. I'm thinking small black text
on light grey... ;-)

------
dudurocha
For me, the only thing missing is the link for the discussion. But its a nice
service, congrats!

------
swapsmagic
Awesome. Love it. Suggestion as many has pointed to swap the Orange and White
color. And one request, can you put HN link instead of direct article link as
i want to view the discussion on that article too.

~~~
brudolph
Cool, thanks, I'll put it in for the next version

------
konakid
I like it! Clean interface and quick search. The top articles feature is
handy. Maybe make the search options more customizable though? Being able to
tweak the parameters of the search would be awesome

~~~
zanny
This makes me wish there was a top articles on HN proper, of all the top
articles ever.

------
kapitalx
Looks good, and quite responsive.

I noticed that the more links are in there also. You can find it by searching
for 'analytics' then click on 'more' button. you'll notice a search result
that links to "/news2" :)

~~~
brudolph
Ah good catch!

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gojomo
My #1 use of hnsearch.com (and before it, searchyc.com) has been to find my
own old comments. This has no results for my username, so it can't yet fill
that role.

~~~
brudolph
Didn't realize this was such a huge demand, I was always more interested in
the content, but I'm definitely going to add the comments link

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ghc
Doesn't seem to handle Japanese. I'm having the same issue with an instant
search I've been developing for another purpose.

~~~
w1ntermute
The problem's not Japanese-specific. Try any accented European letters for the
same problem.

------
nicksergeant
Result set is quite poor. Some results are missing completely, other results
aren't even related to the search term.

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muyuu
As much as I like orange, it's not meant to be used in such quantities in
screens...

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zephjc
No workie on my iPhone (also has no mobile specific layout)

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ricardobeat
Looks like it only searches articles < 1 week old.

~~~
brudolph
Yeah it'll grow as time goes on. Once week ago was when I was happy with my db
structure and stopped dropping all the contents in it.

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narad
Not working, when the browser is resized. Chrome 15.

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cal8food
Hey this is really cool man! Great work. I love it.

~~~
brudolph
Thanks for the feedback! As time goes on its article database will grow and
it'll be more useful

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sktrdie
Isn't <http://hckrnews.com/> a much better effort than this?

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groovy2shoes
I, for one, welcome our new orange overlords.

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skeptical
add keyboard shortcuts, otherwise the 'instant' becomes kind of pointless.

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necenzurat
i am hungover and that orange is making my eyes bleed, SERIOUSLY

