

HNotify.py: be notified when the time is good to post on Hacker News - gawenr
https://github.com/Gawen/hnotify

======
mbreese
This makes me sad. True - there are good times and bad times to post / comment
on HN for the maximal karma scores. But that really shouldn't be the case...

I really started to notice it when I moved from Indiana (UTC -5) to California
(UTC -8). The threads and comment scoring seem very different depending on
what time zone you are in.

From the East coast, in the morning, you pick up the late UK threads and
comments, and at night the late afternoon California threads. From the West
coast though, in the morning you catch the East coast threads (already in full
swing), and at night, things die down a bit before the few Asia posts start to
pickup (I stay up late).

It's strange how one site can have a few different feels based on who happens
to be awake in the world.

~~~
gawenr
I agree with the fact this is something we should not use.

If the point to such service is karma whore-ing, I suppose it's "lame".

The point is it's very hard to know when the service is active or not, and
when something should be posted to be (potentially) read by the most, to be
fully efficient for the community.

I have no doubt that if some post doesn't provide any interest, it won't be
up-voted. So, even if such "tool" is used, the power of it is kind of
relative.

~~~
ekianjo
Isn't hacker news supposed to be about "hacking" ? :) If someone finds a
clever way to get better results on hacker news without cheating, I do not see
it as "lame", rather inventive.

~~~
bpatrianakos
It is about Hacking. Not points. Which is exactly why this shouldn't he used.
It's about news that Hackers are into. This isn't Reddit. This isn't
Stackoverflow. But I fear that may not be the case in the not too distant
future.

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mehdim
It is a fantasctic exercise for game theory ! If you have success with your
post with lot of forks on github and upvotes, we may expect that a lot of
people will follow it and the success of HN posts will be not following your
script. I go now make an anti-script ;)

~~~
gawenr
Exact :) But I did a really humble job here. I just wrapped a desktop client
upon the Hacker News Story Pickup Ratio website
(<http://hnpickup.appspot.com/>). All the intelligence is done by hnpickup, I
just get the data and displays it in another way.

~~~
mehdim
Thanks for what you've down, I'll play a little with it. :)

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bpatrianakos
What a great terrible thing. I don't like the idea of using HN as yet another
promotional tool and that's exactly what this does. At the same time theres a
piece of me who likes the idea. Good going on making and shipping a cool thing
but please shut it down?

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anigbrowl
Just post good content and comments, and the karma will take care of itself.
Some times are better than others to post, but when people flood those time
periods with linkbait its obvious what they're doing.

~~~
zem
not really - my experience with submitting posts to hn is that they pretty
much get ignored. assuming i'm reasonably typical, and don't have an intrinsic
knack for being the only person on all of hn to find something interesting, i
can definitely see why some people would be driven to hack whatever external
factors they feel are leading their posts to be likewise dead-on-arrival.

then again, i don't read the new queue either, so i guess i can't complain.
maybe reddit's system of posting a different article from "new" in a box at
the top of the page every time you refresh it would help fix the problem.

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alpb
I don't know if you played a lot with HNpickup.appspot.com, but it goes down
so much that I don't get the data loaded on their frontend exactly when I
needed sometimes.

~~~
gawenr
Yes, it often is (down right now btw). I will add something to let the user
know when hnpickup is down.

EDIT: <https://github.com/Gawen/hnotify/issues/3>

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BryanB55
I've been wanting this for a while.... I have no idea how to get it to work on
OSX though.

~~~
gawenr
I can't boot right now on MacOsX. I will update my repository tomorrow to
describe how to install the script on every platform. Stay tuned.

EDIT: <https://github.com/Gawen/hnotify/issues/2>

