What's the best way to stay in a conversation on Hacker News once you've commented?

petercooper · on March 20, 2009

Write a little script that pulls http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<username>; and does some magic to pull out the info into an RSS feed (yes, ideally pg can add this as a real feature, but I'm being pragmatic here ;-)).

Just a messy Ruby-based example I threw together. Works for me.

  require 'rubygems'
  require 'open-uri'
  require 'hpricot'
  
  username = 'petercooper'
  uri = 'http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=' + username
  doc = Hpricot(open(uri))
  
  puts %{<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
  <rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
  <title>Hacker News responses to #{username}</title>
  <link>#{uri}</link>}
  
  (doc/'td td table').each do |post|
    content = post.inner_html
    next if content =~ />#{username}</       # skip if we posted it
    next unless post.inner_html =~ /vote/    # skip if it's not a post
    id = content[/\_(\d+)/,1]
    comment_text = (post/'.comment').first.inner_text
    commenter = content[/user\?id=(\w+)/,1]
    puts %{  <item>\n    <title>Comment from #{commenter}</title>}
    puts %{    <link>http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=#{id}</link>}
    puts %{    <description>#{comment_text}</description>\n  </item>}
  end
  
  puts %{</channel></rss>}

It'd be better, but the HTML on Hacker News is from 1996. I was too sloppy to bother fetching the title of the current thread ;-)

With just adding a shebang line and a content-type header line, it works no problems on Dreamhost as a CGI script. Example: http://bigbold.dreamhosters.com/hnc.cgi

Anyway, thanks for giving me the idea. I'm using that now myself.. lol.

jamesheroku · on March 20, 2009

Nice work Peter. I wrapped this in two lines of Sinatra and deployed it to Heroku, so anyone can get an RSS feed for their username: http://hackernews.heroku.com/username

Code is here: http://github.com/jnl/hackernews-thread-rss

dreeves · on March 21, 2009

Holy crap, that's handy! Thanks so much!

Out of curiosity (and in hopes of eliciting a reply to see if it shows up in my new Hacker News Responses feed!) would this also be easy to do with Yahoo!Pipes?

petercooper · on March 22, 2009

I wondered about that. I've been using Pipes a little lately but am no expert. I'm not sure if Pipes can deal with operations upon non organized content. You could probably use a service like Feed43 first though.

avantbard · on March 20, 2009

I wrote a silly little Rails app one weekend to help me with problems like this.

http://SeeURLater.com

You add a bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks toolbar, then whenever you're on a page that you want to remember to revisit later, you use the bookmarklet which fires up a little popup window, delicious style, that lets you save the URL. Each night you get one email message with all the links you added the previous day, reminding you to revisit them. No links added? No email the next day.

It's stupid simple, and very minimalist right now, but it's been working for me, and you're all welcome to use it. =-)

aneesh · on March 20, 2009

Is there a way to subscribe to a convo via email or RSS, or do you just constantly have to come back to check for replies?

There's not really a good way. You just check back every so often, and even then, there's not a good way to view the comments that have been newly added. This has been discussed here before, but HN deliberately tries to keep things simple, so I wouldn't bet on this feature being added anytime soon.

aditya · on March 20, 2009

There is that 'threads' link (http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=<userid>) on the top menu which takes you to your latest comment threads, works pretty well for me. :) No way to get this into email/RSS, though.

aneesh · on March 20, 2009

Yep, that's pretty useful, but it only shows replies to your comments, and not other comments on the same article.

brianmckenzie · on March 20, 2009

Yeah, the threads link is also good in case someone comments on something that has already scrolled from the front page.

swombat · on March 20, 2009

I mostly use the "threads" view, and sometimes click on the story title to see whether someone has added a new interesting comment there.

It's a shame there's no way to visually identify new comments, though. When I post up an article and I'm interested in all the comments, after it goes past 50 or so it becomes very hard to track new comments.