

Show HN: Hacker News in real-time - akkartik
http://hackerstream.com

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shawnee_
Neat. "Shortlist" might not be the most apt title for the watched threads,
though. . . calling it something like "Watchlist" or even just "Watch" might
make it more clear at first glance.

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akkartik
Good idea, thanks. Done.

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hollerith
Well designed site, but if you do not mind my saying, what prevents me from
returning to hackerstream.com is that the text in the left column moves while
I am reading it. (I'd be OK BTW with my having to hit a refresh button to get
an update.)

But thanks for trying to improve the "HN ecosystem".

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akkartik
Thanks for the feedback! Yeah, I've looked at a few options for that problem.
There's twitter's approach, which is to never update the page, just a link at
the top. There's the friendfeed approach, which is a pause button.
Hackerstream's approach - clicking on a post to copy into the shortlist - is
experimental. Do you like one of those more than the others? Is there a fourth
(or fifth) option I haven't thought of?

I'm still not convinced the shortlist is pulling its weight.

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moblivu
It would be great if every website have an open analytics section where you
can see a live stream of activity across the website, a map with real time
user activity... i don't know it would be cool.

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dshankar
With what and how did you implement this?

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SkyMarshal
/second. Curious to know the tech behind it. Node? Or something else?

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jalada
It's Rails and it's polling.

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sawyer
Love it! You've actually managed to make HN harder to navigate away from!

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akkartik
Thanks! I'd love to hear gripes over the next few days. Hold on, let me add a
contact link to the site.

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cduruk
When we (Digg) released our Streaming API, I threw together a similar site for
Digg. You can see it at <http://tigris.duruk.net> and the code lives at
<http://github.com/cduruk/tigris>

It's essentially a Apache redirect and bunch of JavaScript.

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mitultiwari
Interesting. Thanks for sharing!

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solipsist
I'm getting a 502 Bad Gateway message...

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akkartik
Yeah, traffic issues :/ Hitting reload seems to help some of the time. I
didn't expect this much interest. Trying to fix now..

Update: should be fixed now. Let me know if you see it again.

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mrleinad
You post a HN related site on HN, you better be ready for some action! :P

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mrleinad
Feedback: Allow me to provide it without firing up my e-mail client.

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mrleinad
Also:

\- Let me turn comments on and off, globally and for each story.

\- Adding an item to the watchlist adds only that comment, unless I click on
the parent story in the stream. I want to add the parent story to the
watchlist, not the comment. Besides, it also opens the link to the HN thread.
Not sure if I want that.. I mean, two functions in one.

\- "new" and "comments" take me to HN. Perhaps they should have a
functionality inside your site. Maybe related to the previous point.

\- Favicon? Perhaps "Yrt"? (Y real time)

Great work!!

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akkartik
Great comments. Watch this space :)

Re UI for 'new' and 'comments': It's a good question how immersive an
experience this alternative UI should be. Our initial ambition was just an
alternative view, a different random sampling of HN, to augment the HN UI
rather than replace it.[1] This is why the UI mimics HN, and we link back
everywhere that it makes sense. But this exchange has given me some ideas to
expand my ambitions, so thank you.

[1] Especially since we can't let you vote or reply directly on hackerstream
(due to security restrictions in browser AJAX).

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sinaiman
It wasn't updating in real time for me in Chrome, I'll give it another try
later. Sweet idea!

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sinaiman
Oh I see, it's polling every 30 seconds :)

I've tried Orbited on Rails with success, it does fake comet with an easy-to-
use Javascript API so you can push messages to subscribed clients. Also looked
at Hookbox, which is by the same guy who made Orbited. They're both realllly
easy to integrate and use in Rails, and Hookbox can be used from the public
HostedHookbox service, meaning you don't actually have to install a Hookbox
server if you just want to try it out.

^In case you'd like to add a push feel to this

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akkartik
Thanks for the tip! Yeah we may move to that (and I want to try it out :) but
for HN's content-creation frequency polling seems to suffice.

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sukuriant
Obligatory: oh great, another way for me to be completely distracted by HN
while at work!

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phlux
Sweet!

It would be interesting to have a "pop-out" for my watch list, like a G-Chat
has - so I can have that little watch window as an applet of sorts on the
screen to the right.

Is there any way to indicate when someone replies to a comment I made? (An
orangered copy ala reddit)

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akkartik
Yeah that's a good idea. We still have no customization based on your
username, but it's on the roadmap.

