
Show HN: A cryptocurrency news scraper inspired by Hacker News - howiem
https://cryptonewsagency.com/
======
eggbrain
If you model your site after Hacker News, people are going to try to use it
like Hacker News, and the expected behavior of your site is incredibly not-
hacker-news-like.

1\. I click on a story expecting for it to take me to the site, but nothing
happens. After feeling confused, I realize it actually added some text content
after the story. What? It was only after looking in the comments here that I
realized I had to click the link in parentheses (which on Hacker News shows
you submissions from that website, not links you to the content)

2\. I see a lot of "points", so I try to understand how things are upvoted -
is it accounts? No, no accounts for your site. Is it based on the links
popularity (eg trending tweets, hot news, hot reddit stories, etc)? No, there
are some stories with hundreds of points, but linking to a reddit post with 2
upvotes. It's only then do I realize by clicking on the title, or the link,
I'm "up-voting" it, even though it might not be good content (and in fact,
each time I click it adds a point).

3\. I search for the ability to comment, but realize that's not there, but
again since it looks like Hacker News I think there's comments and go to click
on something that doesn't exist.

In general, I think your site could be really useful, and there's a lot of
cool stuff you did, but I'd either change your design so people don't treat
your site (interaction wise) like the site your referencing, or try to at
least link up expected behavior in a more consistent way.

~~~
howiem
Thanks for your comments. This is very much an early prototype and I
appreciate your comments. I will be looking to add the ability to comment
next. Regarding adding text at the bottom I thought it might be easier for
people to read a glimpse of text before deciding to open the link, I’ve found
this useful in my own browsing. The actual link has a 5 second redirect
because I am using the free tier currently for webhose.io api (a great news
scraping provider). if I get enough traction I may look at getting a paid
account, but this is very much a side project

------
Moter8
I can't middleclick links. Unusable for me.

Also, please don't attach /?sort=new (or remove it) to reddit threads. It
overrides the user's sorting.

~~~
dmm
HN works great without js. This site I can't even click the links?

~~~
czechdeveloper
Inspired by HN without all the thinks that makes HN great.

------
sickcodebruh
One of the reasons I love Hacker News is because of the high quality of
content and discussion. Looking like HN is nice but the fact that your top
post includes a nice little "(((bankers)))" remark from /u/BigNuts881 was a
rough reminder that this isn't to be a much better than just looking through
the results of a broad Twitter search.

~~~
petercooper
That _is_ a good part of Hacker News, but I'd suspect if it's like any other
community site maybe 10% of people bother reading comments and 1% bother to
make them. There's plenty of room catering for the 90% who just want the links
Drudge-style, and kicking off a community that actually has discussions is
super hard work.

~~~
optimuspaul
that's funny because I read the comments on far more posts that I actually
follow the links to.

~~~
bringtheaction
Me too. I thought most people on HN came here for the discussion -- even if
that means primarily reading comments and not necessarily speaking up.

~~~
kaycebasques
I spent about an hour yesterday learning all of these amazing insights about
the solar energy industry, thanks to Hacker News comments.

------
nijaru
This is not crypto news, but _cryptocurrency_ news.

~~~
colecut
In a world where 'literally' can be defined as 'figuratively', I'm not sure
why we bother splitting hairs on terminology... what is accepted is what is
accepted.

~~~
optimuspaul
I don't accept crypto to mean cryptocurrency.

It's like saying butter when you mean butterscotch. Doesn't mean the same
thing and shouldn't.

~~~
colecut
99% of the population would have never uttered the word "cryptography" before
"cryptocurrencies" started to catch on.

In either case, crypto is an abbreviation.

~~~
criddell
This is being shown on HN, not Facebook.

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Retr0spectrum
Side note, I find the font very hard to read. The letters are too thin and
grey. Removing the "font-weight: 300;" style from the body makes it infinitely
more readable.

------
nulagrithom
Why does a 0-points, downvoted Reddit thread with an (((echo))) have 640
points on this scraper?

~~~
Geee
I think the vote count is obviously manipulated. Stay away from this site.

------
howiem
I built this using the webhose api to scrape and filter for cryptocurrency
related topics from reputable news sources and trending forum posts. I'm a
terrible designer so I eyeballed the hacker news layout and finger painted
some CSS over it. Hope people find it interesting :P

------
howiem
I’ve now added the ability to comment and am fine tuning replies :) thanks
again for all the great feedback.

------
blueprint
Gah. Crypto news? More like cryptocurrency. Wait. No. More like news for
cryptocurrency traders.

------
justboxing
Congrats on shipping!

What's the tech stack you used? I see from your comments buried at the bottom
that you are not a designer, so will give you a pass on the usability issues
that others are whining about.

Would suggest you buy a HTML template off of wrapbootstrap or themeforest and
customize it. If you can't do that, hire someone from upwork to do the
customization for you.

PM if you wanna chat more. Email in profile.

------
Vervious
What is all the metamask code for?

------
hanniabu
3 suggestions.

\- when I click on the link to go to the side, I'd much rather prefer it to
open as a new page because it allows for quicker loading when you hit the back
button, which would then close that page and bring you back to your site
without needing it to reload.

\- when visiting a link and then going back, I need to tap it twice. Just
tapping once brings me to the redirect and then it just goes to the link
again. This doesn't need time be fixed if the link is opened in a New tab
though

\- the tickers up top should give priority to a watchlist we could build and
store in local storage so sign up isn't needed. Should be pretty trivial to
implement

------
a13n
I would visit this daily if the content quality were better. Maybe start with
scraping, then let people post themselves, and gradually move towards no
scraping.

I like the ticker. Saves me from needing to check elsewhere.

~~~
galfarragem
Yes, the ticker is great! I would love a chrome extension that could attach a
ticker like this to HN.

~~~
howiem
Thanks. I've simply used the coinmarketcap API to get the currency feeds,
super straight forward. It fetches from the client side. Anyone can use it
here [https://coinmarketcap.com/api/](https://coinmarketcap.com/api/)

------
shit-show
Good stuff, I highly recommend applying as a researcher to the top leading
forecast reporting firm called cryptonaire.com. They have many clients that
are large investment groups that will be using their research when the full
app release is out. It would be nice to have more researchers that love crypto
rather then investment. Give it a try, they are the first research firm in the
industry.

------
howiem
Once again I’d appreciate any great 101 resources people have found explaining
blockchain, cryptocurrencies and other related topics. I will look at adding
more content to the 101 page. I know very little about the topic and just
chose this as a random topic for news scraping. I am very much learning :)

------
howiem
Thank you everyone for the great feedback. Please feel free to share any
helpful links that explain blockchain, cryptocurrencies, ICOs etc. and I will
post on the 101 resource page. I am very new to this and only a curious
observer of the cryptocurrency wave

------
kristianp
Not sure how this one got in there at number 33: "Iranian woman reported
missing after waving headscarf in public without wearing a hijab". Possibly a
spam comment about cryptos got parsed.

------
phoneboy
I'd like to see a sentiment for each article as well. If you add that, then
add a green/red indicator on the price chart as well for when the news came
out.

~~~
howiem
Great idea, I actually had this before. I was feeding the articles into
google's natural language processing API to get a sentiment index from -1 to 1
(-1 negative, 0 neutral +1 positive). The issue I was having that it wasn't
really that accurate. Google NPL has trouble analysing contextual news
articles. e.g. if a headline says "Bubble in cryptocurrency markets", it
doesn't recognise that bubble is negative in news contexts. I have been
looking for some different NPL libraries that might be better including AWS
Rekognition. I'm not a data scientist so don't think I'll do very well
building my own machine learning algorithm. Any suggestions of good libraries
people have used for news sentiment would be greatly appreciated

------
showkiller
Overall the site looks nice and functions well.

The ticker a the top is hard to use as I could not see that you could scroll.

I like the concept of the 101 section, could use some more info.

~~~
howiem
Awesome thanks for the feedback. I’ll feed some more content for the 101s :)
id appreciate any interesting posts or links anyone recommends explaining
crypto currency and block chain in plan English

------
lsadam0
Any plans to add a comment system? Edit: I'm excited by the idea of a crypto
focused HN-ish site, I'd love if there was a comment system :)

~~~
vthallam
I thought that was Reddit is for. The /r/Cryptocurrency subreddit exactly
serves this purpose.

~~~
QML
/r/Cryptocurrency is literally all price-talk and shilling -- very few posts
of self-reflection or technicals.

------
Xeoncross
It would be really great to be able to login 1) save stuff and 2) discuss
articles. It doesn't even need to be threaded or have voting at first.

~~~
howiem
I've just added the ability to save interesting posts. You will see a button
that says "favorite" under each post. You will be prompted to sign up and then
it will save it your account to access at a later stage. Next up comments and
discussions :)

------
shepardrtc
I like the ticker, and I like it overall. Good job!

------
skeleton
Unless I'm reading the cryptocurrency market table incorrectly, the market cap
row appears to be a horizontal scroll bar.

------
txsh
Would you mind adding sentiment analysis to this?

Ex:

bitcoin: negative; ethereum: neutral; bitcoin cash: very positive

I would love you forever.

------
zencash
Lose the tickers. Add discussions.

------
Ftuuky
I can't open the links for the original posts, is this happening with you all
as well?

~~~
Moter8
You have to click the domain (reddit.com for example) for it to open, which is
of course unintuitive

~~~
Ftuuky
Thanks. It is indeed not very intuitive.

------
notnull
Can you say more about how you built this? How you did the scraping, etc. ?

~~~
howiem
For scraping I've used the webhose api (I am still on the free account hence
when u click on the link it has a 5 second redirect). I've found it is an
excellent resource and easy to use API, I highly recommend it
[http://webhose.io/](http://webhose.io/)

For the tech stack its just node.js and express on the backend and vanilla JS
on the front end using webpack for bundling. I built this project really as a
means to teach myself to write unit tests better and mock integration tests.
In the first iterations I fed the news articles after they were scraped into
Google's Natural Language Processing library to get the sentiment of the
article. I scrapped this after it became too inaccurate.

------
FLUX-YOU
Horizontal scroll bar on the ticker covers the Mktcap row.

------
andrewcmyk
Plenty of cryptocurrency chatter on HN these days anyway.

------
sharemywin
would be nice to add some kind of json feed.

maybe add some kind of account login to get the feed.

some kind of database to collect all this would be neat for some kind of price
predictor

------
techaddict009
I am not able to click any story :(

------
metrue
Will you open the API like HackerNews ?

~~~
howiem
I may, in the meantime you can access it via my backend service. It's a
mongodb store
[https://cryptoserver.now.sh/threads](https://cryptoserver.now.sh/threads)

------
akkat
Any plans on making the inverse?

------
lawnchair_larry
That is not what “crypto” means.

~~~
sethgecko
It doesn't mean cryptography either, it just means hidden.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Hah, fair enough!

------
sharemywin
might add twitter.

~~~
howiem
Great idea, I'll put that on the list

------
IncRnd
This is A _cryptocurrency_ news scraper inspired by Hacker News.

Reading the HN title, and looking at the site name listed on HN, I had
expected there to be information relating to cryptography, which there is not.

~~~
howiem
Sorry for the confusion I've gotten used to referring to cryptocurrency as
crypto as shorthand

