Show HN: Share, rediscover and keep track of all the gems you find on HN

http://socialhn.r12.railsrumble.com/

by patrickaljord • 14 years ago

39 20 14 years ago

socialhn.r12.railsrumble.com

It was done by a few friends during Rails Rumble. It allows you to share and see what your friends are sharing. Basically, just install the extension and keep upvoting interesting posts as you always do, it will appear in the app automatically. You can also get suggestions.

munyukim• 14 years ago

It's something that I am going to use regularly. Well done

dcu5• 14 years ago

thanks man, if you have feature requests please let us know. We are already working on a plugin for Firefox.

codereflection• 14 years ago

I was just about to ask for a Firefox plugin. :)

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

Does this rely on an external server (assuming so with the API key) and if so how taxing is it for you, is it just going to become too expensive one day and get shut down, or is operation trivial?

It's a really great idea, I had exactly this problem earlier with reddit (I saw a submission about the redbull stratos jump that had a comment I was interested in, but I couldn't relocate the submission...) and it's happened here before too.

dcu5• 14 years ago

yes, it relies on an external server. This is an app we built for our selves, it solves a problem we all have had before so we are not thinking about killing it. Besides, I am thinking about making it open source so people can easily deploy their own version on heroku for free, it's just a couple of commands.

We'll suport reddit once we complete the HN extension, this is our roadmap:

- map HN usernames (so you can find people easily) - import saved links - save link to HN discussion

hardik988• 14 years ago

Just FYI re:Reddit - Reddit has a nifty save button on every thread and comment. You can see your saved links in your profile.

citricsquid2• 14 years ago

Yeah, I save lots and it's always the ones that I don't save that I want after the fact, heh :( They have a side bar item that lists the last 5 clicked stories, but it's clientside so it's not helpful either!

up_and_up• 14 years ago

"Share, rediscover and keep track of all the gems you find on HN"

By 'gems' I initially assumed they were talking about Ruby gems.

wolfparade• 14 years ago

Alternatively you can just upvote the stories you want to save and then go to your HN profile.

nicksergeant• 14 years ago

Yup, that's what I do. And then I have a little scraper that pulls the RSS and auto-adds to my Pinboard account (using IFTTT).

drumdance• 14 years ago

This is really cool. I was just thinking I needed something like this the other day.

One thing that's not clear to me is how to use the Chrome extension? Is there anything for it to "do" or is it just a background thing that injects info into pages?

dcu5• 14 years ago

it works in background, the code is in github: https://github.com/SocialHN/social-hn-chrome

fastball• 14 years ago

Why does this extension require access to my data on all websites, and not just HN?

dcu5• 14 years ago

not sure why it says that. we only ask permissions for HN: https://github.com/SocialHN/social-hn-chrome/blob/master/man...

dmritard96• 14 years ago

Is anyone else bothered by the lack of smoothing in the "How many times you have seen interesting..." font? looks like "Ubuntu", sans-serif. maybe I need to just get a higher dpi monitor...

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

in your free time ;o) could you add a way to track users here? i think it would help the site by making personalities more persistent. the idea is that you can associate (private) comments with different users - perhaps they would be displayed when you moused over the username. then you could, for example, add "nice person; helped with XXX" next to someone and try harder to help them out some point later...

simonsarris• 14 years ago

Just thinking out loud here:

I wonder how things would be different if we could "review" other users, Amazon style, on HN. And those reviews would show up at the bottom of your profile.

I wonder if that or something like that would make this a better, or more interesting (or more communal) place. I think the idea as I just spouted it wouldn't help much, but there must be similar concepts worth exploring here.

domdelimar• 14 years ago

I'm a Firefox user so I couldn't try it and went on to read the comments instead, especially since the linked website didn't explain anything.

It may be interesting to you that I didn't really understand what this is doing until I read the following comment from citricsquid (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4656462): "Yeah, I save lots and it's always the ones that I don't save that I want after the fact, heh :("

So, this extension allows to search through all the stuff user clicked on from HN? That's great!

If that's true, I'd change the title to this: "Share, rediscover and keep track of everything you find on HN" and also do a better job of describing what it's doing on the website.

P.S. Does it also search the content on all those pages linked from HN?

dcu5• 14 years ago

you are right and yes, it search the title and content.

Show HN: Share, rediscover and keep track of all the gems you find on HN

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