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?
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.
Great idea. I always knew my crawler was a bit of a hack and would be eventually obsoleted.
Until we get there, though, may my crawler be let back in? Like I said in email I promise to only restart it after I embed controls over how many URLs I get per hour deeply inside it, and to log my crawling activity and keep an eye on it in future.
The reason I was crawling every few minutes was to get notified of updates to conversations as they happen, before the 'herd' moves on to new feeding grounds. But I can make it crawl even hourly and it'll still allow me to stay kinda abreast of the conversation here.
"... 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.
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?