Hacker News Made of Primes | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Made of Primes

dosaygo-studio.github.io

51 pointskeepamovin23 comments

Thanks for the front page! This "web art" project views HN through primes, not time or score.

Tech: BigQuery dataset -> Node.js ETL -> 2.7M prime items packed into sharded SQLite (~500MB) -> queried client-side via sqlite3.wasm. No server.

Fun discoveries while building this:

- Only 7 Mersenne primes and 5 Fermat primes exist in HN's entire range

- Exactly 781 palindromic prime (but only ~760 in HN because some of those primes must not have items, unknown why), largest being ID 9,989,899. Why so few? Even-digit palindromes are always divisible by 11, so palindromic primes can only have odd digit counts (1,3,5,7 digits). We've captured ALL palindromic prime HN items that will ever exist until HN IDs hit 100M+!

The ζ logo = Riemann Zeta function, deeply tied to prime distribution.

"Live Mode": The last page fetches from the live HN API and mines primes client-side, bridging the static past to the live present.

Source: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/prime-news

CloudFlare Static mirror: https://falling-king-6f50.cris7fe.workers.dev

Why? I wanted to create a mirror of Hacker News that ignores time and popularity, and organizes the history of the tech industry purely by mathematical property. A way to explore the ancient and long history of HN through a filter that might surface interesting things. Hope you enjoy the beige!

Why?

For fun!

Good enough.

Does it fetch the whole database and filter the results on client side? Because it seems like it would download 54 sqlite shards to show the few entries available for Mersenne and Fermat primes. It costs 40+ seconds of time and ~172MB of bandwidth. A cheaper option might be to generate the prime numbers first and then just fetch the shards it needs.

Other than that, I thought it was an interesting way of sampling the news as the time delta grow further apart between each item.

Yes, I agree there's probably a better way for the Mersenne and Fermat. And even the Germain we probably don't need to scan every shard for just the first page of them. Good points! And good idea to invert the lookup.

Thank you for the comment on interestingness. I thought so to, but I didn't realize it in same way you did in your observation that it gets more selective over time - I like that, in a sense that's kind of natural as the environment is more competitive over time. Thank you for the interesting idea!

edit: Your ideas are implemented!

I don't get it. What am I looking at?

> The idea was to deconstruct Hacker News and view it through a different lens -- not time or score, but the fundamental, dynamic of prime numbers.

Even after this comment I did not get it until I checked the repo[0]. It seems like it's only posts with a prime number ID

Also, the "Why?" does not explain why. It's a what/how.

[0]: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/prime-news

> It's "useless", perhaps, but I find it fun!

Reason enough I’d say.

The documentation is here: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/prime-news

Basically only HN items with prime IDs and with filters on different classes of primes.

Post investigation, I can say that it shows in an ordered manner hackernews posts whose IDs are prime.

No ?

North Korean karma farmer posting non-sensical content in order to build up reputation for the next heist.

Shouldn't this be a Show HN post?

And how many of these self-promoting fake HN mockups do we need from the same person? https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

6 seems like a perfect number.

In fact, the smallest perfect number.

Last page with most recent content is, at the moment: https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/prime-news/index.html?p=931...

Thanks! Now I get: https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/prime-news/index.html?p=931... (the next page) and interestingly the newest prime was 42 seconds old with a title of [delayed] - someone's delay setting I guess.

What is a “prime” ID?

Every post and submission has a unique numeric id. Check the URL. Prime refers to prime numbers

Thanks!

Finally a website with prime content.

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404099

If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com