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Nice! Of course, now you have a feed that would be useful for news aggregators if you provided RSS. Here's some quick suggestions: Front page isn't the ultimat

by tuukkah 19y ago

Nice! Of course, now you have a feed that would be useful for news aggregators if you provided RSS. Here's some quick suggestions: Front page isn't the ultimate snapshot. If you wanted that, wouldn't you rather take the 20 submissions from the last 24 hours that got the most up-votes? If I understand correctly what you're doing, you get some 1 and 2-point submissions that just happen to be on the front page at the time. Returning more to your use scenario, an alternative that gave you more control on how much to read would be to take the time you last read HN and use that to filter the list at http://news.ycombinator.com/best http://news.ycombinator.com/best

bootload 19y ago
"... take the time you last read HN and use that to filter the list at http://news.ycombinator.com/best http://news.ycombinator.com/best ..." I'm note sure /best would be that useful. For all intensive purposes it's static and changes only when a post beats the points on the list. Do you mean compare against http://news.ycombinator.com/news http://news.ycombinator.com/news which has the current highest posts? "... Front page isn't the ultimate snapshot. If you wanted that, wouldn't you rather take the 20 submissions from the last 24 hours that got the most up-votes? If I understand correctly what you're doing, you get some 1 and 2-point submissions that just happen to be on the front page at the time. ..." What you describe here is pretty much what /news and the RSS file http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss does anyway. So you could just parse the http://news.ycombinator.com/news http://news.ycombinator.com/news to do that or the RSS file. But the RSS file has some restrictions. One further point. An boundary case you might run up against is user 'deleted', which occurs when editors delete a submission. It only occurs only occasionally and you do not see it on HN pages.
- tuukkah 19y ago
  Yeah, I only meant /best in the abstract, not considering the implementation limit of 180 links. In practice you could collect this information over time yourself. The difference to what /news does would be that submissions with little points would not show in the results even briefly, and submissions with a lot of points wouldn't fall off even if you're away for a long time.
kirubakaran 19y ago
Thanks :-) I wrote it so that it saves front page because that is how I personally read HN. On the days that I am not able to check HN (like it happened to me last weekend), I don't know what made it to the front page. You are correct that this is certainly not the best way to do it. As bootload mentioned, the 'best' page is limited to 180 links and if the points gained a new post is less than that of the 180th post in 'best', then it won't make it to that list. May be we should collect links from front and front+1 page that are more than a day old and sort them in descending order of points? Your thoughts welcome.
- tuukkah 19y ago
  Indeed, I wasn't considering such implementation issues as the link limit of 180. Collecting links from some of the /news pages should be a good approximation. For longer times away, the collected links could be stored periodically and upon return sorted by points, descending.

by tuukkah 19y ago

bootload 19y ago

"... take the time you last read HN and use that to filter the list at http://news.ycombinator.com/best http://news.ycombinator.com/best ..." I'm note sure /best would be that useful. For all intensive purposes it's static and changes only when a post beats the points on the list. Do you mean compare against http://news.ycombinator.com/news http://news.ycombinator.com/news which has the current highest posts? "... Front page isn't the ultimate snapshot. If you wanted that, wouldn't you rather take the 20 submissions from the last 24 hours that got the most up-votes? If I understand correctly what you're doing, you get some 1 and 2-point submissions that just happen to be on the front page at the time. ..." What you describe here is pretty much what /news and the RSS file http://news.ycombinator.com/rss http://news.ycombinator.com/rss does anyway. So you could just parse the http://news.ycombinator.com/news http://news.ycombinator.com/news to do that or the RSS file. But the RSS file has some restrictions. One further point. An boundary case you might run up against is user 'deleted', which occurs when editors delete a submission. It only occurs only occasionally and you do not see it on HN pages.

tuukkah 19y ago
Yeah, I only meant /best in the abstract, not considering the implementation limit of 180 links. In practice you could collect this information over time yourself. The difference to what /news does would be that submissions with little points would not show in the results even briefly, and submissions with a lot of points wouldn't fall off even if you're away for a long time.

kirubakaran 19y ago

Thanks :-) I wrote it so that it saves front page because that is how I personally read HN. On the days that I am not able to check HN (like it happened to me last weekend), I don't know what made it to the front page. You are correct that this is certainly not the best way to do it. As bootload mentioned, the 'best' page is limited to 180 links and if the points gained a new post is less than that of the 180th post in 'best', then it won't make it to that list. May be we should collect links from front and front+1 page that are more than a day old and sort them in descending order of points? Your thoughts welcome.

tuukkah 19y ago
Indeed, I wasn't considering such implementation issues as the link limit of 180. Collecting links from some of the /news pages should be a good approximation. For longer times away, the collected links could be stored periodically and upon return sorted by points, descending.