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Show HN: Hacker News 2.0 - A Work in Progress

7 points by zupreme 14y ago

voxx 14y ago
Nice work so far. Any plans to implement a comment view?
- zupreme 14y ago
  Definitely. Thanks. If you or anyone else have suggestions on an attractive way to incorporate them, I'd appreciate it.
tzaman 14y ago
Not impressed. This is why frames are dead for quite some time now. Feels unnatural and breaks importance of catchy titles.
- zupreme 14y ago
  TZaman: I used an iframe because it was the only way of displaying the content I could think of without resorting to copyright infringement (i.e. doing a CURL query and reproducing the article on the site). If you can suggest a better and more user-friendly way, I'd be happy to consider it. Thanks a lot for commenting.
  - tzaman 14y ago
    It's not the technology, it's just that I do not want a "preview" feature for every post on HN. When I see an interesting title, I click on it - otherwise I ignore it.
benologist 14y ago
I would want HN2.0 to not have the same mass market blogs being submitted to death by karmawhores. Not having comments makes it less interesting as well I think.
- asselinpaul 14y ago
  comments are a must
  - ziggerg 14y ago
    I'm sure I'm not the only one that comes to HN for the comments rather than the articles. So basically, for me it's missing the only feature that makes HN worth reading.
  - zupreme 14y ago
    Agreed. I plan to add comments over the next couple of days (once I get things working to the extent that HN will not block the GET requests due to traffic)
- zupreme 14y ago
  Benologist: Thanks! Unfortunately this site is just a (more attractive I hope) mirror of HN. Whatever HN allows to hit the front page will hit HN2. To be clear: I'm not trying to steal HN's audience. I just think the folks at YCombinator have better things to do than to address UI issues and add new functionality. I'm trying to fill that gap with HN2.
kristianc 14y ago
Not impressed really. No comments, breaks my back button, and needs JavaScript to work.
- zupreme 14y ago
  You're the first one to report a back button issue. Can you give me details on what browser and OS you are using so I can try to duplicate the problem? Thanks.
Fizzadar 14y ago
Some thoughts: + Comments are an absolute must (in the sidebar somehow?) + The page doesn't reach the bottom (gap between the bottom bar and above frame/sidebar) + Perhaps make the sidebar smaller (slide in/out on hover?) when viewing a site, it currently takes up too much of the sites space + Padding! Also, I just reloaded the page and it's suddenly empty (not sure if that's just Chrome going weird though).
- zupreme 14y ago
  Congratulations Fizzadar! I think your refresh was the once that pushed the site over HN's limit :-) I'm going to try using a different server to fact the data as a proxy which will then get stored to a database. I need to look around and see if HN has published any query limits so I can schedule the fact accordingly. Thanks for looking and for your excellent feedback!
michaelmartin 14y ago
Doesn't seem to work at all on Chrome for Mac. Just seeing a single black line down the page. It's fine for a test product to not support all browsers, but I think that at the very least, the most up-to-date version of each of the main vendors should be tested.
- veyron 14y ago
  Or on any chromium-based browsers (SRWare Iron)
  - aimacs 14y ago
    Off-topic but there is probably no good reason to use SRWare Iron: http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam. Something might have changed after that was written but it doesn't seem very likely.
- thu 14y ago
  Same here on Firefox 9.0.1.
- mackyinc 14y ago
  I have the same problem. Just a black vertical line. I'm using chrome on Win 7.
- ziggerg 14y ago
  It was working a few minutes ago. I suspect a weird bug or server misconfig, since looking at the HTML/JS it seems like the scripts/markup have been truncated.
  - zupreme 14y ago
    HN is refusing the GET requests now. I think they have a daily threshold set for queries. I'm troubleshooting options for working around this now. Most likely it will involve a cron job to pull entries on a set interval and saving those entries to the database instead of retrieving the entries in real-time when users visit the site
flav0ur 14y ago
The guys at http://hackful.com/ http://hackful.com/ open sourced their HN "clone". You can have a look at https://github.com/8bitpal/hackful https://github.com/8bitpal/hackful.
veyron 14y ago
I can't tell if it's just me, but for some reason it doesn't work (just shows a vertical line) on Chrome, SRWare Iron (Chromium-based), FF and Safari.
alex_rockt 14y ago
Since I don't see anything at the moment I still prefer http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/
zupreme 14y ago
Thanks for the feedback everyone. It was working earlier - it looks like it hit some throttling threshold on HN due to the traffic. I will have to wait until the throttling period expires and then enable caching of requests. Thanks everyone.
zupreme 14y ago
Update: Per PG's post at the location below, it looks like I can query once per minute safely. I'm going to do better than that and query once every 2 minutes. Hopefully a 2 minute delay won't be too much for HN readers to bear. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105
zupreme 14y ago
And the site is back up. Thanks for everyone's patience!
zupreme 14y ago
Next up: Handling sites gracefully that employ frame busting methods. I don't mind the ones that break out of the frame and redirect the visitor to their site - if they wish to do that, then that's fine by me. What I need to figure out is how to best handle the sites that simply refuse to show their content. I'm thinking that, I should create a Javascript event that will just forward the user to that site (window.location = xxx) in the event that the site refuses to show content in an iframe. That way the user still gets to the content they want without interruption. Does anyone have any feedback on that approach, or can anyone suggest a different one?

7 points by zupreme 14y ago

voxx 14y ago

Nice work so far. Any plans to implement a comment view?

zupreme 14y ago
Definitely. Thanks. If you or anyone else have suggestions on an attractive way to incorporate them, I'd appreciate it.

tzaman 14y ago

Not impressed. This is why frames are dead for quite some time now. Feels unnatural and breaks importance of catchy titles.

zupreme 14y ago
TZaman: I used an iframe because it was the only way of displaying the content I could think of without resorting to copyright infringement (i.e. doing a CURL query and reproducing the article on the site). If you can suggest a better and more user-friendly way, I'd be happy to consider it. Thanks a lot for commenting.
- tzaman 14y ago
  It's not the technology, it's just that I do not want a "preview" feature for every post on HN. When I see an interesting title, I click on it - otherwise I ignore it.

benologist 14y ago

I would want HN2.0 to not have the same mass market blogs being submitted to death by karmawhores. Not having comments makes it less interesting as well I think.

asselinpaul 14y ago
comments are a must
- ziggerg 14y ago
  I'm sure I'm not the only one that comes to HN for the comments rather than the articles. So basically, for me it's missing the only feature that makes HN worth reading.
- zupreme 14y ago
  Agreed. I plan to add comments over the next couple of days (once I get things working to the extent that HN will not block the GET requests due to traffic)
zupreme 14y ago
Benologist: Thanks! Unfortunately this site is just a (more attractive I hope) mirror of HN. Whatever HN allows to hit the front page will hit HN2. To be clear: I'm not trying to steal HN's audience. I just think the folks at YCombinator have better things to do than to address UI issues and add new functionality. I'm trying to fill that gap with HN2.

kristianc 14y ago

Not impressed really. No comments, breaks my back button, and needs JavaScript to work.

zupreme 14y ago
You're the first one to report a back button issue. Can you give me details on what browser and OS you are using so I can try to duplicate the problem? Thanks.

Fizzadar 14y ago

Some thoughts: + Comments are an absolute must (in the sidebar somehow?) + The page doesn't reach the bottom (gap between the bottom bar and above frame/sidebar) + Perhaps make the sidebar smaller (slide in/out on hover?) when viewing a site, it currently takes up too much of the sites space + Padding! Also, I just reloaded the page and it's suddenly empty (not sure if that's just Chrome going weird though).

zupreme 14y ago
Congratulations Fizzadar! I think your refresh was the once that pushed the site over HN's limit :-) I'm going to try using a different server to fact the data as a proxy which will then get stored to a database. I need to look around and see if HN has published any query limits so I can schedule the fact accordingly. Thanks for looking and for your excellent feedback!

michaelmartin 14y ago

Doesn't seem to work at all on Chrome for Mac. Just seeing a single black line down the page. It's fine for a test product to not support all browsers, but I think that at the very least, the most up-to-date version of each of the main vendors should be tested.

veyron 14y ago
Or on any chromium-based browsers (SRWare Iron)
- aimacs 14y ago
  Off-topic but there is probably no good reason to use SRWare Iron: http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam http://chromium.hybridsource.org/the-iron-scam. Something might have changed after that was written but it doesn't seem very likely.
thu 14y ago
Same here on Firefox 9.0.1.
mackyinc 14y ago
I have the same problem. Just a black vertical line. I'm using chrome on Win 7.
ziggerg 14y ago
It was working a few minutes ago. I suspect a weird bug or server misconfig, since looking at the HTML/JS it seems like the scripts/markup have been truncated.
- zupreme 14y ago
  HN is refusing the GET requests now. I think they have a daily threshold set for queries. I'm troubleshooting options for working around this now. Most likely it will involve a cron job to pull entries on a set interval and saving those entries to the database instead of retrieving the entries in real-time when users visit the site

flav0ur 14y ago

The guys at http://hackful.com/ http://hackful.com/ open sourced their HN "clone". You can have a look at https://github.com/8bitpal/hackful https://github.com/8bitpal/hackful.

veyron 14y ago

I can't tell if it's just me, but for some reason it doesn't work (just shows a vertical line) on Chrome, SRWare Iron (Chromium-based), FF and Safari.

alex_rockt 14y ago

Since I don't see anything at the moment I still prefer http://hckrnews.com/ http://hckrnews.com/

zupreme 14y ago

Thanks for the feedback everyone. It was working earlier - it looks like it hit some throttling threshold on HN due to the traffic. I will have to wait until the throttling period expires and then enable caching of requests. Thanks everyone.

zupreme 14y ago

Update: Per PG's post at the location below, it looks like I can query once per minute safely. I'm going to do better than that and query once every 2 minutes. Hopefully a 2 minute delay won't be too much for HN readers to bear. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1721105

zupreme 14y ago

And the site is back up. Thanks for everyone's patience!

zupreme 14y ago

Next up: Handling sites gracefully that employ frame busting methods. I don't mind the ones that break out of the frame and redirect the visitor to their site - if they wish to do that, then that's fine by me. What I need to figure out is how to best handle the sites that simply refuse to show their content. I'm thinking that, I should create a Javascript event that will just forward the user to that site (window.location = xxx) in the event that the site refuses to show content in an iframe. That way the user still gets to the content they want without interruption. Does anyone have any feedback on that approach, or can anyone suggest a different one?