Follow Hacker News from the Console

http://www.catonmat.net/blog/follow-hacker-news-from-the-console/

by ajbatac • 18 years ago

68 21 18 years ago

pg2• 18 years ago

Wow. This looks great. How often does it poll the server?

pkrumins5• 18 years ago

It polls the server once per 30 seconds (it's the default). The polling interval can be changed via '-i' command line option.

pg2• 18 years ago

That's a bit fast. And uselessly so, because the frontpage is only regenerated every 90 seconds. How about putting your email in your profile so we can continue this by email?

michaelneale• 18 years ago

kinda disappointing that in 2008 we still have to poll to get any sort of push on the web. But hey, it works. (yes there is the "comet" style of things to - perhaps pg will provide some API to work like that).

tlrobinson3• 18 years ago

Cool, but

    lynx "http://news.ycombinator.com"

is almost identical.

A little shell script magic gets you auto-refreshing:

    #!/bin/sh

    while true; do
        sh -c "sleep 90; pkill lynx" &
        lynx "http://news.ycombinator.com"
    done

(there's probably a better way that won't kill all your lynx sessions)

there• 18 years ago

while true; do clear; lynx -dump -nolist http://news.ycombinator.com/; sleep 90; done

pkrumins5• 18 years ago

I have not written about it yet, but the hacker-top program contains a python module called 'pyhackerstories.py' which you can import 'get_stories' function from.

Then you can do tricks like these:

    >>> from pyhackerstories import get_stories
    >>> stories = get_stories()
    >>> for story in stories:
    ...     print "%2d. %s (%d)" % (story.position, story.title, story.score)
    ...
    1. Hans Reiser leads police to body, believed to be his wife (23)
    2. Follow Hacker News from the Console (18)
    3. Scaling on EC2 - WebMynd's experiences (YC Winter '08) (57)
    4. Google Protocol Buffers - Open Sourced (19)
    5. Balsamiq - Software and Website Mockup App (47)
    ...

Cheers :)

fromage• 18 years ago

    watch -n 90 lynx -dump -nolist http://news.ycombinator.com/

god• 18 years ago

Is it possible to get rid of all the metadata in Lynx, like image names etc?

I tried "lynx -verbose" but it still displays stuff like [INLINE] and [LINK].

nadim2• 18 years ago

In case you're in the same boat as me: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/lynxt...

I can't believe it took me this long to realize it's not included.

tlrobinson3• 18 years ago

It's also available in MacPorts and Fink, I believe.

wheels• 18 years ago

I can't believe it took you this long to discover Fink. :-)

shafqat• 18 years ago

Very nice... Sometimes I forget how fun it is being a nerd. I love this kind of stuff.

axod• 18 years ago

Nice, but using Putty for the screenshots? ;)

rmanocha• 18 years ago

Looks great. I have wanted to do something similar (not for HN...) for a while now, but never really got around to learning curses etc. Can you write a post here or on your blog explaining the steps involved or maybe give a link to the curses tutorial you used - or did you just know all this stuff already :).

pkrumins5• 18 years ago

I'll write a post about it in near future :)

pkrumins5• 18 years ago

I'm writing the post now. Check my blog in a few hours :)

endlessvoid94• 18 years ago

i like it.

this could've been done hundreds of different ways (rss, lynx, etc, etc.) but i still like it.

python rocks.

Follow Hacker News from the Console

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