HN Explorer

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burtonator
I computed this list of top PDFs using the Internet Archive data.

Basically it crawls the front page of HN and finds any .pdf link, records the number of upvotes, then sorts by score.

I did the same thing last year and it was a great way to find awesome/unique PDFs.

Ironically, the first post was about web scraping being legal and here I am computing the list via web scraping!

inetknght
> it crawls the front page of HN and finds any .pdf link, records the number of upvotes, then sorts by score

How do you deal with the numbers changing over time?

burtonator
I take the max in a 24 hour period.

I don't always have snapshots for all hours though so there might be some skew

Invictus0
@dang: please note this user is constantly spamming self-promotion links to his site.
ASalazarMX
Fellow user here. Is it forbidden? This user submits mostly content from his blog (sometimes twice), but I can't find anything against self-promotion in the guidelines.

This is the closest guideline:

> Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should do those things when they run across something they personally find interesting, not because someone has content to promote.

grzm
The best way to reach the mods is to email them via the Contact link in the footer. They don’t see every comment.
burtonator
I've posted 4 posts in the last 6 days, one of which has 245 up votes and trended on the front page for the entire day.

I only post content I feel is valuable to the Hacker News community. If it isn't valuable it won't trend.