
Reinstate hystry's Hacker News - pchristensen
hystry.com lets me read Hacker News comments in chronological order instead of having to go back to each story (http://hystry.com/newsyc/follow/).  I found it invaluable and I was a lot more involved in the community when I could follow the conversations easier.  It died a couple days ago, apparently its IP address was banned from crawling Hacker News.<p>pg, could you please let them back in?  Please, pretty please?<p>EDIT: or at least change the Comments page to include link and title for the story each comment pertains to?
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akkartik
Wow, this is awesome. I've managed to make something at least somebody wants.
It's a start.

I didn't see this until now because I can't seem to go back to reading Hacker
News without the ability to bounce between my interface and the original.

I'm sure hystry'll be back once PG's given us a timeout :) And it's a well-
deserved timeout. My crawler process seems to have gone rogue and I wasn't
keeping an eye on it. Definitely my mistake.

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dpapathanasiou
Are you sure YC is blocking hystry?

The hystry blog makes no mention of anything like that.

It might be that Kartik just stopped running it, for whatever reason.

Note that the last blog entry was back in November, so maybe he's just moved
on to something else, e.g.

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pchristensen
I found this out by emailing him yesterday. I thought it would be better if I
made the case for reinstating it by telling pg the value it creates for me
while using his site. Kartik had nothing to do with this public request.

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pchristensen
The comments page shows all of the comments in order, but hystry shows the
link to the article next to each comment, lets you filter out comments from
specific stories, and view all the parents of a comment.

It's hard to get a feel for it now since the feed got shut down, but I could
browse through the last 100 comments in just a few minutes, and quickly get a
feel for which stories people were talking about.

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pg
It was really pounding the server. Crawling for a search index is ok, but
retrieving pages to dynamically update stuff generates a lot of requests.

If you can tell me what you think is missing from News, I can try to add it.

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imsteve
What would be great for kartik's app is a live "push" style feed of all the
new content on hacker news (possibly including votes too). This way, the load
on the site would be minimal.

This would also let a lot of other people scratch their own itch to try out
outlandish new ideas. Few of us newsyc readers are even going to bother
thinking up ideas for your site because we realize that there's a low chance
of them being implemented. You just couldn't implement them all if you wanted
to. If you provide this feed though, it would allow people to get the instant
gratification of coding up their own ideas and, I think, a lot more innovation
would occur.

I don't think you're trying to get rich by selling this site so there's not
much to lose. Brand dilution likewise seems unlikely in this case. Any other
downsides?

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pg
_This would also let a lot of other people scratch their own itch to try out
outlandish new ideas._

There's an even better way to do that, which is to let users write little Arc
programs to control the way pages are generated. That is the eventual plan.

~~~
bootload
_"... let users write little Arc programs to control the way pages are
generated ..."_

Marc Andreessen has an article that describes how Ning is designed as a
_"Runtime Environment"_ just as you have described ~
<http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-three-kinds.html>

_"... I believe that in the long run, all credible large-scale Internet
companies will provide Level 3 platforms. Those that don't won't be
competitive with those that do, because those that do will give their users
the ability to so easily customize and program as to unleash supernovas of
creativity. ..."_

It would be a good way for hackers to develop, share, debug Arc code. Boost
the language develpment using the pre-release code.

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henning
Did hystry get permission from PG to crawl the server? Did they agree upon a
certain rate at which hystry would access hacker news?

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cratuki
Should they need to? They should be free to scrape and represent, and ycom
should be free to block them if they choose. When you pursue anti-rights
relating to the ownership of information distribution you come to disgusting
solutions like current copyright models.

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ojbyrne
How is that different from the "comments" link? Other than you don't have to
login.

