6 ms·

HNSearch API Contest

115 points by andres 15y ago

andres 15y ago
We just changed the contest date from June 15th to June 20th to give people more time to work on apps.
RobMcCullough 15y ago
Looks like fun, gears are churning.
jrussbowman 15y ago
Well this is as far as I got in about an hour for adding a /hn tag to Unscatter.com - http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fhn+facebook http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fhn+facebook Javascript paging still isn't and it needs to be prettied up, but I figure not bad for about an hours worth of work. And a good demonstration of the framework Unscatter.com is built on being suitable for rolling out new apis pretty quickly. I'd wrap it up today but I got family stuff today, should be complete by 6/20. Until I finish the javascript and layout /hn won't be advertised on the sidebar, but anyone is free to start using it, I won't be turning it off.
- andres 15y ago
  Awesome! It would be great to start a discussion about ranking algorithms in the HNSearch developer forum (http://groups.google.com/group/hnsearch http://groups.google.com/group/hnsearch). We'd like to implement some ThriftDB features to tweak ranking algorithms automatically but that won't be ready for a while.
  - jrussbowman 15y ago
    I haven't even gotten into ranking yet. I took the example url and rolled with that. I think the first thing I'll focus on is seeing if I can also offer /hncomment and /hnlinks to help people search different types, then work on the algorithms for all 3. Once I have /hn display looking good I can roll it out to the other 2 pretty quickly.
ezyang 15y ago
This probably won't win, but it would be great if someone could write a tiny app that converts search results sorted by date into RSS feeds. I might hack something up myself after I'm done with exams, if no one else does.
- ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
  Does this work? http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
  - ezyang 15y ago
    That is for all(?) of Y Combinator, whereas you might be interested in new posts with some criterion (keyword, points, etc.)
    - ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
      Interesting. I wonder how you go about setting up an rss feed.
ezyang 15y ago
What are reasonable rates for querying the API?
- andres 15y ago
  For now, don't worry about rate limits.
franze 15y ago
disclaimer: this is shameless self promotion for something i coded some time ago well, is somebody hacks up something nice via node.js why not transform the whole hnsearch api into a nice npm package using https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/apimaker https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/apimaker basically you put some nice URLs in -> magic -> a wrapped API comes out.
evanrmurphy 15y ago
If this is successful, will you consider running a similar contest for Arc Forum? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620297 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620297 Edit: Fixed link to have correct URL. Sorry for the mistake.
- andres 15y ago
  Has someone written a crawler for the forum? If so, I can help with the ThriftDB setup.
  - evanrmurphy 15y ago
    That would be amazing! I think there have been at least a couple crawlers written for it. (One being SearchYC's.) I'll let you know when I find something more concrete. Is there anything else that would help make the ThriftDB setup go more smoothly?
    - andres 15y ago
      I don't think so. Once we have the data it'll be easy to upload it. I'm emailing with the SearchYC creator so I'll ask him about arc forum data.
      - evanrmurphy 15y ago
        Thank you, Andres. I put up a message about it on the Arc Forum as well: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14772 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14772. Please email me at evanrmurphy@gmail.com if you need assistance.
      - evanrmurphy 15y ago
        Kartik is happy to contribute his crawler, but wonders if it wouldn't be easiest to reuse the HNSearch crawler (since both forums have the same structure). http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14774 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14774
callmeed 15y ago
Anyone wanna team up on this? I'm thinking of a WordPress plugin that shows links to related articles or discussions based on a post's title or tags ...
evanrmurphy 15y ago
What makes the monitor "hacker-optimized"?
- andres 15y ago
  It's really big.
d0m 15y ago
I sadly don't have time to implement it, but I'm still suggesting the idea. You enter a keyword - say Python. It shows a graph where nodes are submitted articles and comments intermixed. On each "Comment" node, we see the picture of the author (obviously if found), the karma and other possible information about him/her (Blog, website, startup company, etc.). Also, on each nodes start new related nodes.. So, if I search for python, I might have a link to a new node called Django which would then link to useful comments and other articles/comments. So, the overall idea is to really be able to "visually browse and learn through hacker news". "Vim" would give all plugins, author's plugin, etc.
zemanel 15y ago
anyone looking for a coding buddy to do something or ideas? i have some free time atm
- zemanel 15y ago
  How are group entries supposed to share the prize? Refund for dinero?
shykes 15y ago
Every hnsearch contestant gets a dotCloud account to run their app easily, and for free. Email hn@dotcloud.com to get started.
ary 15y ago
Just for curiosity's sake, how is this dataset populated? Is ThriftDB just scraping HN? Is there some kind of back-end DB feed?
vnorby 15y ago
Put in a quick first entry for the contest (HNInstant.com): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621144 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621144 More coming...
jbuzbee 15y ago
OK - I have no illusions about winning the contest, but just for fun I gave it a go by adding support to my existing Android app, SocialMediaTicker. My app is designed for when your device is charging or otherwise idle and is a bit of an eye-candy display. It's a 3D, interactive ticker-tape type display that scrolls facebook feeds, twitter streams, news headlines, photos, rss feeds, etc. Click once to stop an item, click on it again to call up the full photo, story, rss feed, etc. For HN, I added a headline search capability and also made it part of my experimental Twitter Trends mashup where the search terms for content automatically come from the currently trending topics under Twitter. This can be hit-and-miss for HN as oftentimes Twitter trending terms don't match well to the topics found under HN, but other times I've been surprised about what pops up. If you want to give the mashup a try, I'd turn most other content off, turn the mashup on, sit back and watch what happens! Configuration of all content can be found in the preferences menu. By default HN is off. To give it a try on your Android, download the app here: http://www.socialmediaticker.com/SocialMediaTicker.apk http://www.socialmediaticker.com/SocialMediaTicker.apk Feedback appreciated!
RobMcCullough 15y ago
Here is one: http://HNTop100.com http://HNTop100.com -- the top Hacker News posts of all time! Sort by most up voted or most commented on. This took me way longer than it need to because I kept finding awesome articles to read! Enjoy xD
zscally 15y ago
Hello I've spent the last two days hacking together a mobile site for hacker new search API... the mobile site is fully function but still needs some UI updating I currently working on integrating into twilio to allow you to pull search results via TEXT kinda over kill but why not! http://hnsearch.mobi http://hnsearch.mobi
knockknock 15y ago
Here's my simple HNSearch API JavaScript example. It lists submissions from the last 3 hours and sorts by points. http://www.hnjs.dotcloud.com/ http://www.hnjs.dotcloud.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2663282 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2663282

115 points by andres 15y ago

andres 15y ago

We just changed the contest date from June 15th to June 20th to give people more time to work on apps.

RobMcCullough 15y ago

Looks like fun, gears are churning.

jrussbowman 15y ago

Well this is as far as I got in about an hour for adding a /hn tag to Unscatter.com - http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fhn+facebook http://www.unscatter.com/search/?q=%2Fhn+facebook Javascript paging still isn't and it needs to be prettied up, but I figure not bad for about an hours worth of work. And a good demonstration of the framework Unscatter.com is built on being suitable for rolling out new apis pretty quickly. I'd wrap it up today but I got family stuff today, should be complete by 6/20. Until I finish the javascript and layout /hn won't be advertised on the sidebar, but anyone is free to start using it, I won't be turning it off.

andres 15y ago
Awesome! It would be great to start a discussion about ranking algorithms in the HNSearch developer forum (http://groups.google.com/group/hnsearch http://groups.google.com/group/hnsearch). We'd like to implement some ThriftDB features to tweak ranking algorithms automatically but that won't be ready for a while.
- jrussbowman 15y ago
  I haven't even gotten into ranking yet. I took the example url and rolled with that. I think the first thing I'll focus on is seeing if I can also offer /hncomment and /hnlinks to help people search different types, then work on the algorithms for all 3. Once I have /hn display looking good I can roll it out to the other 2 pretty quickly.

ezyang 15y ago

This probably won't win, but it would be great if someone could write a tiny app that converts search results sorted by date into RSS feeds. I might hack something up myself after I'm done with exams, if no one else does.

ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
Does this work? http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
- ezyang 15y ago
  That is for all(?) of Y Combinator, whereas you might be interested in new posts with some criterion (keyword, points, etc.)
  - ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
    Interesting. I wonder how you go about setting up an rss feed.

ezyang 15y ago

What are reasonable rates for querying the API?

andres 15y ago
For now, don't worry about rate limits.

franze 15y ago

disclaimer: this is shameless self promotion for something i coded some time ago well, is somebody hacks up something nice via node.js why not transform the whole hnsearch api into a nice npm package using https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/apimaker https://github.com/franzenzenhofer/apimaker basically you put some nice URLs in -> magic -> a wrapped API comes out.

evanrmurphy 15y ago

If this is successful, will you consider running a similar contest for Arc Forum? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620297 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620297 Edit: Fixed link to have correct URL. Sorry for the mistake.

andres 15y ago
Has someone written a crawler for the forum? If so, I can help with the ThriftDB setup.
- evanrmurphy 15y ago
  That would be amazing! I think there have been at least a couple crawlers written for it. (One being SearchYC's.) I'll let you know when I find something more concrete. Is there anything else that would help make the ThriftDB setup go more smoothly?
  - andres 15y ago
    I don't think so. Once we have the data it'll be easy to upload it. I'm emailing with the SearchYC creator so I'll ask him about arc forum data.
    - evanrmurphy 15y ago
      Thank you, Andres. I put up a message about it on the Arc Forum as well: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14772 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14772. Please email me at evanrmurphy@gmail.com if you need assistance.
    - evanrmurphy 15y ago
      Kartik is happy to contribute his crawler, but wonders if it wouldn't be easiest to reuse the HNSearch crawler (since both forums have the same structure). http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14774 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14774

callmeed 15y ago

Anyone wanna team up on this? I'm thinking of a WordPress plugin that shows links to related articles or discussions based on a post's title or tags ...

evanrmurphy 15y ago

What makes the monitor "hacker-optimized"?

andres 15y ago
It's really big.

d0m 15y ago

I sadly don't have time to implement it, but I'm still suggesting the idea. You enter a keyword - say Python. It shows a graph where nodes are submitted articles and comments intermixed. On each "Comment" node, we see the picture of the author (obviously if found), the karma and other possible information about him/her (Blog, website, startup company, etc.). Also, on each nodes start new related nodes.. So, if I search for python, I might have a link to a new node called Django which would then link to useful comments and other articles/comments. So, the overall idea is to really be able to "visually browse and learn through hacker news". "Vim" would give all plugins, author's plugin, etc.

zemanel 15y ago

anyone looking for a coding buddy to do something or ideas? i have some free time atm

zemanel 15y ago
How are group entries supposed to share the prize? Refund for dinero?

shykes 15y ago

Every hnsearch contestant gets a dotCloud account to run their app easily, and for free. Email hn@dotcloud.com to get started.

ary 15y ago

Just for curiosity's sake, how is this dataset populated? Is ThriftDB just scraping HN? Is there some kind of back-end DB feed?

vnorby 15y ago

Put in a quick first entry for the contest (HNInstant.com): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621144 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2621144 More coming...

jbuzbee 15y ago

OK - I have no illusions about winning the contest, but just for fun I gave it a go by adding support to my existing Android app, SocialMediaTicker. My app is designed for when your device is charging or otherwise idle and is a bit of an eye-candy display. It's a 3D, interactive ticker-tape type display that scrolls facebook feeds, twitter streams, news headlines, photos, rss feeds, etc. Click once to stop an item, click on it again to call up the full photo, story, rss feed, etc. For HN, I added a headline search capability and also made it part of my experimental Twitter Trends mashup where the search terms for content automatically come from the currently trending topics under Twitter. This can be hit-and-miss for HN as oftentimes Twitter trending terms don't match well to the topics found under HN, but other times I've been surprised about what pops up. If you want to give the mashup a try, I'd turn most other content off, turn the mashup on, sit back and watch what happens! Configuration of all content can be found in the preferences menu. By default HN is off. To give it a try on your Android, download the app here: http://www.socialmediaticker.com/SocialMediaTicker.apk http://www.socialmediaticker.com/SocialMediaTicker.apk Feedback appreciated!

RobMcCullough 15y ago

Here is one: http://HNTop100.com http://HNTop100.com -- the top Hacker News posts of all time! Sort by most up voted or most commented on. This took me way longer than it need to because I kept finding awesome articles to read! Enjoy xD

zscally 15y ago

Hello I've spent the last two days hacking together a mobile site for hacker new search API... the mobile site is fully function but still needs some UI updating I currently working on integrating into twilio to allow you to pull search results via TEXT kinda over kill but why not! http://hnsearch.mobi http://hnsearch.mobi

knockknock 15y ago

Here's my simple HNSearch API JavaScript example. It lists submissions from the last 3 hours and sorts by points. http://www.hnjs.dotcloud.com/ http://www.hnjs.dotcloud.com/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2663282 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2663282