Tell HN: I wrote a Ruby lib to access Hacker News. | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: I wrote a Ruby lib to access Hacker News.

github.com

33 pointstimmorgan13 comments

Not sure how unique this is (there are probably dozens of these), but it was fun for learning to deal with submitting forms and handling session cookies.

Feedback welcome.

Edit: I should say, the reason I wrote this -- I wanted to track my upward progression of karma (and hopefully, average karma) over time. I have a script that runs daily and stores those two values in a CSV file.

On the one hand, this is pretty cool. On the other, I'll wind up wasting more time on HN now :) Good job.

That's a downside?

/me reads next article

Seriously? Why? Why do you care about your points on here?

It's cool that you built this. Kudos for figuring out the code part.

Negative kudos for having a purpose that won't lead to building a kick-ass company or technology.

I know I'm probably going to loose karma due to this comment. I really don't care about karma. Karma should be the side-effect of your activity/comments here, not the driver of your activities/comments.

I'd recommend spending time more wisely.

The point of karma is to ensure quality in your contribution to the community. For me, figuring out which things I say and submit people find value in has been a very interesting exercise.

Would you mind sharing any conclusion(s) ?

Your comment is trollish. Who are you to judge how the poster wants to spend his time? How do you know the code he wrote for this didn't teach him something that will some day lead to him building a kick-ass company or technology? That might not be his goal. Even if it was, everyone needs some time to unwind. Some people happen to do that by writing code.

If everyone was trying to build a kick-ass company all the time, nobody would have time to use the services of your kick-ass company.

Nice work. I built the Hacker News iPhone app and just pushed login/reply/voting/ last week. Reverse engineering a site like HN is fun, especially dealing with FNIDs.

I'm hoping to open-source some of my stuff too, once I clean it up. I think it would be great to see apps built on top of HN.

For reference: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews

Reverse engineering? You know the code is open sourced, right?

Now we just need a karma ticker to embed in a website or as a desktop widget.

You can already get that here:

http://duckduckgo.com/karma.html

Nice try hacker news password harvester!

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