HN Explorer

Ask HN: Fastest Crawl of HN Articles

8 points by agencies ↗ HN
HN links to over 6 million urls in stories and comments. Many domains have expired or content is no longer available. Internet archive has much of the content but throttles requests. What's the fastest way to get the historical content?

13 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] thread
arinlen
HN does have a REST API which is quite easy to use.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API

I'm not sure what rate limiting policy is in place, but in theory you can start with a request for maxitem and from that point on just GET all items down to zero until you hit some sort of blocker.

agencies
To clarify I'm not asking about HN itself but articles linked from HN.

As you said the HN api is great and there are at least 2 existing published crawls of it that help a lot.

krapp
The fastest way to get that would probably still be through HN's API, you just have to take the URL field for stories and ignore everything else.
tedunangst
And how do you get the content once you have the URL?
krapp
Use IA more responsibly, perhaps. Instead of scraping it, convert the list of links from HN to point to IA? You still have to work with whatever limits the site puts up in any case.
arinlen
> And how do you get the content once you have the URL?

I don't understand your question. If you have the URL, you just GET it, like any regular URL? Is there something that I'm missing?

agencies
Many domains have expired or content is no longer available.
agencies
If a HN story is a link to Wikipedia, the HN api serves the content of the Wikipedia page??
arinlen
> To clarify I'm not asking about HN itself but articles linked from HN.

I might not have a clear picture of what you're looking for, but items of type "story" returned by the HN API do have a URL field, which I believe correspond to submitted links.

You can scrape the text field of comment items, but that takes a bit more work.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
Hopefull this will help: you're talking about a submission to HN, e.g. a link to a WSJ article complete with comments section, and OP is talking about the specific WSJ article.
jpcapdevila
The best way to do it is from Google BigQuery.

There's a dataset containing everything: bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full

You can write SQL and is super fast. Sample:

SELECT * FROM bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full LIMIT 1