HN Explorer

72 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] thread
wwwwww
comments are essential to much of HN
Zikes
Yep, sometimes that's where the real story is at. Heck, one of today's front page posts is comprised almost solely of two HN comments.
mbreese
I see one with three comments, but not one with two...

Oh well.

But, you're right, comments are really where places like HN shine.

[deleted]
(comment deleted)
wasd
Exactly, how can a community be valuable without a voice?
footoverhand
I was first interested in this post since I do most of my HN browsing via newsbeuter/w3m which are terminal applications. To post, the easiest way seems to be to just pull up the story in my web browser.
MatthewPhillips
Or just use elinks, which works great: http://i.imgur.com/FuxUew1.png
jlgreco
Unfortunately comments don't nest nicely in elinks. Otherwise it's great.
MatthewPhillips
That's because HN uses an image tag to do the nesting and apparently elinks ignores the width property on image tags.
IanCal
I'm quite disappointed that this is the case. I don't expect a crazy parallax motion-sickness inducing css3 but I do expect decent markup.

I was disappointed when you said they used images.

I was more disappointed when I looked at the source and realised it's nested tables.

For shame, HN. For shame.

NathanKP
If it bothers you submit a pull request that fixes it.
timothya
To where?

As far as I know, the current version of HN isn't open source.

nilved
Indeed it definitely isn't.
asveikau
Comments nest in w3m, which is my favorite text web browser on the strength of its formatting. However I've never been able to log in with w3m.
dhimes
I just gotta say, you were awarded one helluva filename there!
themodelplumber
Hmm..this might be enough to get me to try Ruby. Looks neat and I've been wanting to learn the language. I hate dependency plumbing but this looks like it might work out of the (my) box.
AndrewVos
It's a very fun language. You should definitely give it a go.
ck2
There are no links to comments, because you should never read the comments.

wait, what? There are some great comments around here.

krapp
Right? It's a forum, not a link aggregator. Comments are the entire point.
aspensmonster
Grabbing all the comments and intelligently displaying them in a terminal would require substantially more work, I suspect.
krapp
That's probably true. The nested format would be a challenge at the very least.
Watabou
Then the author should say that. "You should never read comments" just doesn't make sense in HN when comments are the entire point of why I'm here.

Right now, I don't see why I should use this tool when I can just use elinks.

devgutt
I used to use elinks with a filter (words.txt) by topic

  elinks -dump news.ycombinator.com | sed -n -e 's/\([0-9]\+\)\.\ \+\(\[.\+\]\)\+\(.*\)/\1: \3/p' | grep -f words.txt -i
rdl
An HN to nntp scraper would be awesome.
jingo
Just so I understand correctly, are you saying you would like to be able to read HN using an nntp client?
rdl
Yes!
tzs
I want that for mail. I keep planning to write something that can connect to an IMAP server and present the contents via NNTP, but it is low enough on my list that I don't know if I'll ever do it.

I know that the effect can be achieved by running an NNTP server, and using a mail/news gateway, but that's a lot more complex. Most NNTP servers are meant for big multiuser situations, and that makes configuring them complex, and often requires a lot of supporting software. Massive overkill for someone who just wants to read their mail in their newsreader and get a good threaded message view with a good UI.

namlem
And yet they are all but impossible to read without greasemonkey scripts.
[dead] paranoiacblack
> wait, what? There are some great comments around here.

lol

malandrew
Exactly. There are lots of stories where I'm more interested in the comments than the article itself. Usually, the more mainstream the news source (TechCrunch, HuffPo, NYTimes, etc), the better the comments are relative to the article. Much of the time that value of the comments far exceeds the value of the article itself.
derefr
Or, to flip that concept around: the better the article, the worse the comments. The best "technical-focus" articles rarely have any comments at all. It's only when people post stupid shit that everyone feels the need to rebut, that we get a discussion.
8ig8
I often read the comments first. Dessert before dinner.
cgag
I rarely read the articles at all.
k2enemy
My interpretation was that if you are reading HN in a terminal, you are probably procrastinating from work and therefore shouldn't get sucked in to the discussions that make this a great place.
antitrust
While I will freely admit many parts of this industry, and many of the people hailed in heroes within it, are basically bogus "right place, right time" cases who are just as blockheaded as the MBAs in suits that came before them, the comments here can be as valid as the articles.

Especially since many of the participants in this forum are significant participants in the industry.

gala8y
OP may have his tongue stuck in cheek.
Oculus
I have to admit that sometimes I even skip the articles and read the comments because I can usually rely on HN to filter out the BS and make note of the juicy good parts (which I can then go and look at in the article/post).
Nux
Same here! HN without comments is like pissing without farting.
jfb
The comments can be far better than the dreck that usually gets posted.
jespi
Here, I made a crappy version with comments: http://pastebin.com/Y9F1PYLM I also removed the light background...because I like my terminal that way - feel free to edit it back in...
D9u
My immediate response was, "Ruby? Ugh! You should never use Ruby."
mknappen
Thanks!
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
__voidcast__
I may have been more inclined to use this, if it did have the feature to read the comments!! More often than not, I go through the comments first just to gauge the quality of the article and only if I am satisfied do I actually go read the article. That's why I don't like using desktop rss tickers for HN.
sea6ear
I've been reading HN in a terminal for a while via Emacs and w3m mode.

EDIT: or also, just use w3m outside of Emacs.

tlarkworthy
50 commentators fail to get the comment joke... (he is British I spose)
AndrewVos
I don't get the British reference?
moocowduckquack
It should be possible to do this in a line of bash, this is my current start point -

  curl https://news.ycombinator.com | sed 's|<[^>]*>||g'
edit - for reference, this is being done in an osx 10.7.5 terminal, so ymmv

getting somewhereish, I only have a slight understanding of regex to be honest :)

  curl https://news.ycombinator.com | sed 's|<[^>]*>|-|g' | sed -e 's/-------/\'$'\n/g'
...

  curl https://news.ycombinator.com | sed 's|<[^>]*>|-|g' | sed 's|------------|-|g' | sed -e 's/-------/\'$'\n/g'
gre
Wrote this into Factor last year. It even has the orange color in the terminal!

https://github.com/slavapestov/factor/blob/master/extra/hack...

    IN: scratchpad USE: hacker-news USE: io.streams.256color [ hacker-news. ] with-256color`
Hacker News

1. FBI pressures Internet providers to install surveillance software (news.cnet.com) 104 points by ojbyrne 2 hours ago | 32 comments

2. Hard drive hack provides root access, even after reinstall (spritesmods.com) 200 points by pd0wm 5 hours ago | 46 comments

..

serf
M-x hackernews

uses the api instead though.

joeblau
Awesome little utility. Next step is letting me comment :).
Aloha
Couldn't I just use links to get the same effect? But with the comments (what I consider the best part of HN)
dickler
emacs-w3m is the best hacker news reader!