
Building a Hacker News clone in Django - Part 1 (Screencast) - arocks
http://arunrocks.com/blog/2013/05/29/building-a-hacker-news-clone-in-django-part-1/
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dysoco
Is there any kind of streaming service like Twitch.tv but for programmers?

Maybe it's weird... but I really like watching other people writing a project
(Like in the Ludum Dare), I like to see how they tackle the design, how they
work, what cool tricks they use, etc.

You can even interact with them via chat, and not only help but also ask
questions about what they are doing... is great for people who are still
learning.

Any?

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mrcharles
This would be so great. It's really difficult to get a good video stream for
displaying text, and often the only recourse is to go for super high quality,
which is killer if you have limited upload rates.

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dysoco
Yeah, my upload speed is about 0.5Mb so I guess I can stream at 640x480 :P

Although many people seem to do fine for the Ludum Dare.

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benregn
Maybe this is a nitpick but I'd revise the opening sentance: "There is no
better way to learn something than to watch someone else do it".

I think we can all agree that when it comes to programming the _best_ way to
learn it is to actually program.

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arocks
Hi! This is the author. I was pretty sure that someone would point this out
and I completely agree.

But, even Programming has to be taught. Among the many ways to learn
programming, I think the best approach is to demonstrate how a good progammer
programs and explain the thought process.

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gamesbrainiac
I gotta say, this looks like it was copied from tutsplus. But hey, if it helps
people, who cares. I don't.

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rakeshmenon
yeah is copied from tutsplus :-/ the only difference being its distributed for
free

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schlecht
Rubs me the wrong way where people don't give the necessary credit.

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stephen_mcd
Cool! Doing this from scratch is great for learning.

I wrote the same article and demo a month ago, albiet a more comprehensive and
complete approach using Mezzanine (a Django based CMS). The article focuses on
how most of the features needed for something like this come out of the box
with Mezzanine:

[http://blog.jupo.org/2013/04/30/building-social-apps-with-
me...](http://blog.jupo.org/2013/04/30/building-social-apps-with-mezzanine-
drum/)

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ra
Probably worth noting that stephen_mcd is the author of Mezzanine.

I really like some aspects of Mezzanine, and I've used it on a couple of
projects with success. But I don't like Grappelli much, I prefer django-
admintools so for this reason alone I prefer FeinCMS or Ella.

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stephen_mcd
Mezzanine intentionally works fine without Grappelli, just remove it from your
project settings :-)

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ra
Will do, thanks.

Never understood why Grappelli removes the button click from admin actions!

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jnazario
neat, and a nice clean demo of django.

myself, i wrote a HN clone one afternoon (when HN was down for several hours)
using flask. since i'm the only user, i feed it with twitter. what i did was
set up a twitter account - @hacktweetnews - and have it follow most of the top
twitter users from the HN community [1] and then score it reddit-like. no
votes aside from what people post as duplicates, no comments - so it
definitely lacks the full features you have, but then again it's just me.
however, like your django example, it was super easy to set up in a framework.
yours is definitely far more feature-filled!

1\. [http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-
followed-b...](http://talkfast.org/2010/07/28/twitter-users-most-followed-by-
readers-of-hacker-news/)

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frankblizzard
That's great - coming from Rails I was always curious learning Python and
especially see how Django differs from Rails. Will definitely watch this..

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smnrchrds
Curious. I was watching a screencast from Tuts+ Premium the other day that was
meant to teach Django to beginners, by building a Hacker News clone.

[1] <https://tutsplus.com/course/django-unchained/>

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daGrevis
This is pretty interesting. Looking for 2nd part!

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wilfra
I built something similar with Rails as a 'hacker news for poker' and open
sourced the code, if anybody wants to play around with it (or use it). Pull
requests welcomed :)

<https://github.com/wilfra/theplayr> (live site: <http://theplayr.com>)

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targusman
How does this compare to 2scoops of django(1)? I bought it but it seems like
that's the book after this one. If so, how come you put that one out first? It
would be nice if these books came out in order of skill

1) <https://django.2scoops.org>

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pydanny
Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of Two Scoops of Django.

This screencast looks awesome! Okay, now to your questions:

First, the screencast for creating a HN/Reddit clone is a tutorial. It's a
good place to start when developing in Django, or as a reinforcement for the
existing tutorial.

Second, Two Scoops of Django came out first because we (me and Audrey Roy)
wrote it first. Arun Ravindran, who is making this tutorial, is a separate
person and completely unaffiliated with us.

~~~
brickmort
I'm not affiliated with either party, but I wanted to chime in and say that I
HIGHLY recommend two scoops for anybody looking to learn Django, expecially if
you found this screencast helpful and are looking for something more to
supplement it. There's so much to learn in that book that I can pretty much
consider it required reading for serious prospective Django developers. Thanks
Pydanny/Audrey! You guys did an amazing job!

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nkuttler
Isn't the more interesting aspect of HN how it scales? Simply writing a few
models, views and templates is certainly a nice exercise but only a first
step.

Not to mention getting the audience, but that's not really a technical
problem.

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publicfig
I think this is more of a Django tutorial than anything.

