
Follow people on Hacker News - Trindaz
Ever wanted to follow specific people on Hacker News? (without having to go to their individual Submitted and Threads pages every day!)<p>If so, try this: http://beta.fedang.com. andymorris and I spent the last 24 hours slapping it together and we're hoping to get a few users to put it through it's paces.<p>It's only 24 hours old and will probably fall over if more than 20 people start using it. If we can get it working solidly for HN and a few of us seem to like it, then we plan on making it work for other sites too in the future.<p>EDIT: Also interested in feature suggestions. We're thinking RSS for the feed, and tracking replies to your own comments, no matter who they're from.
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erickerr
We created a similar service, <http://hackerfollow.com>

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mikeklaas
Question: Why do you call the site a startup? Are you planning on turning it
into a business?

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lachyg
Unless I'm missing something, he called it a service...

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bobds
There's a picture on the front page that says "Wait, what does your startup
do? So basically it's like a Twitter for Hacker News.".

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erickerr
That's a reference to a previous satirical service we made,
<http://itsthisforthat.com>

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Trindaz
'Zappos for your mom'. Love it!

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andymorris
I just added an RSS feed to the site that contains all the posts from people
you follow: beta.fedang.com/rss/<username>

This is a public feed, so anyone can see who you're following - I plan on
making this an optional setting if there's too much of uproar about that.

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paolomaffei
I'm not sure this is what we really need, considering that the HN hive mind is
pretty smart and that anyway big name authors are already upvoted just because
of their names often.

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RiderOfGiraffes
There are people who I find I trust to make smart submissions and smart
comments. However, with the increasing popularity of HN it's all too easy to
miss a submission or comment by them. Sometimes by fluke of timing or
something an otherwise worthy submission gets missed, un-upvoted, and sinks
without trace.

I'd welcome a system that finds items it thinks I'd find interesting and
brings them to my attention. the occasional false positive will mean that I
see things I otherwise might ignore, and I would get the chance to upvote
things I think deserve it.

The fact that there are so many people doing or thinking about something
similar shows that there is a need. Or at least a want.

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Trindaz
'Finding' similar items would be a very cool feature to ad. We're thinking
something using NLP to find posts similar to the posts by people you follow,
whether it be from HN or any other sites with an RSS that you want to follow
through it. OK if we ping you if/when we add this feature?

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RiderOfGiraffes
Absolutely - email in my profile, including the passphrase to bypass my spam
filter. You probably don't want my ideas, but you're welcome to have them.

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siculars
are you using <http://api.ihackernews.com> ? Right now, I'm using it to fetch
the front page for my little hn smashup. Polling every 4min or so. Thanks to
@ronnieroller, <http://twitter.com/ronnieroller>, for that little piece of
niceness.

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Trindaz
We may have to the next little while. Our server just got blacklisted for
(we're assuming) going too many page requests. EDIT: And what's the URL for
your mashup?

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faramarz
Very neat! I have a dozen or so people in mind I would love to add.. but I
don't have the patience to go and find their exact usernames.

So far I have PG and matt_cutts (google)

Anybody would like to share their list for easy picking? :P

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treblig
On HackerFollow (<http://hackerfollow.com>), we created a leaderboard of most-
followed users. There's also a bookmarklet for when you're on a user profile
to add them.

This seems like a pretty similar service. Love the market validation ;)

Current leaderboard:

AndrewWarner bdittmer davemc500hats dcurtis dhh erickerr gyardley keysersosa
kn0thing loganfrederick mojombo paul pg treblig

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Trindaz
This hackerfollow.com interface is really good. And we felt the same about the
validation!

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vladocar
Great idea! But why don't we make it simple? I just made Open Google Docs
List, put your HN name,link and twitter link.

Fell free to join the list everybody is welcomed, no carma points are
required.

Here is the link:
[https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApUjBkHSxmB1dHdMdlN...](https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0ApUjBkHSxmB1dHdMdlNwX2QtbnFsa1lkNG13VUxpY0E&hl=en&authkey=CMP8kxQ#gid=0)

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Trindaz
This is awesome. I'm in the list now. The whole point of Fedang is to let us
follow the same person whether it be Twitter or hackernews or anything else. I
might add some more adapters to it soon too so I can get one stream with all
of andymorris's Twitter and Tumblr posts.

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vladocar
I will also put all HN users why will sign up on my Hacker News Friend list
<http://twitter.com/#!/list/vladocar/hacker-news-friends>

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Udo
Very cool! However, it didn't return my activity (egomaniac that I am), but
worked perfectly for other users.

Just a minor nitpick: this project would profit from OpenID/Oauth/whatever
sign-on. There is really no reason why I need to create a "real" user account
with a username...

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Trindaz
Great point Udo. I'd actually like to remove forcing people to sign up too
because the whole point of Fedang is to _not_ force people to keep track of
multiple usernames all over the internet.

Also, your activity will probably come up shortly - sometimes your data gets
in immediately, other times it might take 60 seconds or so.

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Udo
> _Also, your activity will probably come up shortly_

It's visible now, thanks!

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folz
Clickable: <http://beta.fedang.com>

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mikeklaas
Tried to go to the feed while logged out. Yuck:

<http://beta.fedang.com/accounts/login/?next=/feed>

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Trindaz
Fixed the 'Yuck' part. Still shows an error instead of homepage redirect
though. Thanks for the note.

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Locke1689
Do you guys have a bug reporting system available? You really need to disable
Django debug mode, btw.

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Trindaz
I actually let it on intentionally for now so that our (hopefully) helpful
users might also send through actual error text when they get a bug. This'd be
something we remove a few hours or days from now.

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adrianh
Do NOT do this! You know Django will e-mail you error tracebacks if you've set
it up correctly, right? See this document:
<http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/howto/error-reporting/>

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whalesalad
DEBUG = False

