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.
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.
Awesome! It would be great to start a discussion about ranking algorithms in the HNSearch developer forum (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.
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.
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:
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 ...
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.
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!
Here is one: 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
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?
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
Thank you, Andres. I put up a message about it on the Arc Forum as well: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=14772. Please email me at evanrmurphy@gmail.com if you need assistance.
Email hn@dotcloud.com to get started.