Follow Hacker News from the Console | Hacker News Reader

Follow Hacker News from the Console

catonmat.net

68 pointsajbatac21 comments

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)

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

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 :)

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

Sure, but you don't get the color :)

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].

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.

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

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

It's not that I haven't heard of it or macports, it's that I haven't really found a need until now.

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

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

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?

Done. (it's peter at catonmat dot net)

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).

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 :).

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

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

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

i like it.

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

python rocks.

Nice, but using Putty for the screenshots? ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com