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> A useful function would be to check out the HN frontpage how it looked at a specific time. Let's say I would like to see HN as it looked like 8am Pacific timezone yesterday.

sigh, kids these days. first of all, i'm sure this exists somewhere on the internet. start with archive.org and go from there. if not, witness:

0 * * * * curl https://news.ycombinator.com -o /tmp/hn-`date "+\%Y-\%m-\%d-\%H:\%M:\%S"`

for bonus points, version control it with github so everyone can see it. even better, send it into elasticsearch. hint: curl -X -F -H

you could implement a website that does this in literally an hour with today's tools. hell, you could even run it through some basic tools like python NLTK and matplotlib and twilio to text message you a fucking color-coded n-gram frequency pie chart every time it runs. you don't need ruby on rails, rabbitmq, redis, and a huge sql schema to do this, just a few lines of bash and python.

this would be more useful than 85.1% of startups operating today, which is probably part of the problem. feel free to steal it.




Several years back, I did this - it was called HackerSlide. A sliding bar with a few days worth of hours, slide it and the front page automatically updated - see http://peterc.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/hackerslid...

And.. no-one was really that interested. I used it every now and then to catch up but when HN moved to the new API I didn't bother updating it (although it would be trivial to do so if anyone were interested).


I can do that. But it doesn't solve the root problem.

It would be better if everyone can find insightful news stories and comment more. HN is so great because of the smart community and their comments.


okay, then take it a step further. train a bayesian classifier to automatically notify you of things you teach it to find interesting. this can be done in probably ~200 lines of python and 2 or 3 dependencies -- i did it at a previous job. they are remarkably effective at simple tasks like "you might like..."




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