Hacker News Reader

chengmion Show HN: Hacker News Instant (3 hour project)

It's been a rough week. Hopefully things will return to normal once DNS propagates.

chengmion Show HN: Hacker News Instant (3 hour project)

Little known fact: SearchYC does instant search if you add &instant=true to the URL: http://searchyc.com/hacker+news?sort=by_date&instant=tru...

It's not enabled by default because it's not as useful without autocomplete.

chengmion Some things I love about Hacker News (and a few I don’t)

I agree quoted strings in queries would be nice. There are some technical challenges in handling mixed queries where some terms are quoted and others are not, though.

chengmion Some things I love about Hacker News (and a few I don’t)

"Abandonware" may be a bit extreme. How would you change SearchYC?

chengmion Protesters Gather At Google; 600 Employees Sign Petition, Organizers Claim

Those comments were cached when comment scores were turned off 10 months ago. It's strange that they haven't been updated since then.

chengmion Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

Well, no. SearchYC has no revenue. I maintain SearchYC and host it out of a box in my closet as a service to the community. It doesn't make any sense for me to commit to do "whatever it takes".

That being said, with a few hundred dollars worth of hardware and some software changes, SearchYC should be able to gracefully handle a couple orders of magnitude more traffic.

chengmion Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

As it stands, SearchYC doesn't get enough daily uniques to justify beefing up the system. Frankly, SearchYC was an experiment in how quickly I could learn a new technology (RoR) and build a system. I was completely expecting someone to come along a few months later to make SearchYC obsolete. It's been 2.5 years, and I don't think that's happened yet.

chengmion Ask PG: What's the deal with search on HN?

HN handles considerably more traffic than SearchYC.

chengmion Hacker News bans Google and all other search engines

Not unless pg replies to this with "Please stop".

chengmion Apple Expects To Ship 10 Million Tablets in First Year

I wonder if the FTC is scratching their heads wondering what to do about Apple product rumors.

chengmion HN top-100 sorted by karma per day

SearchYC doesn't scrape the user pages containing the account creation date. We could generate numbers based on days since the user's first post, though.

chengmion Searchyc.com down again?

I just moved the box from Cupertino to Palo Alto. Should be up now.

chengmion Http://searchyc.com/ down?

Oops, just restarted the server. Incidentally, the server will be down at some point in the coming few days because I'm moving.

chengmion YC Top List

http://top.searchyc.com/commented_sans_pg

chengmion Too much noise in HN? (Open question)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=607285

edit: How often does Google reply with the answer when you comment that you can't find something using their site? Now that's service right there...

chengmion Tell HN: Perseids: "Last Chance" for Best Meteor Viewing Tonight

Anywhere dark and clear, preferably in the mountains or on beaches away from the city. Skyline Blvd has worked well for me.

chengmion Top Domains posted on Hacker News

Why are so many sites filtered out? And by what criteria?

http://top.searchyc.com/domains_by_average_points

chengmion How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary

Gah! Thanks for the tip. There's a bug relating to quotes on SearchYC and "how to be a" are all stopwords or ranked very low in relevance.

http://searchyc.com/programmer+short+comprehensive+personal+...

chengmion Investigating sine waves in Google Trends

We may be reading too much into this: http://www.google.com/trends?q=base+10%2Cdirac%2Ccheerios...

chengmion Investigating sine waves in Google Trends

I wouldn't be surprised if the "pi" trend correlates well with vacation times in academia.

chengmion SearchYC Presents: SearchAF and SearchNM

Server restart--I'm still pushing out a few minor changes.

chengmion Hey HN: I need a dead simple automatic way to backup my databases.

I hope you realize the implications of handing over your databases to a third party.

chengmion What You'll Wish You'd Known (2005)

Had to go into the database for this one: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58424

chengmion Programmer from Finland has lost finger replaced with USB drive

I don't think this qualifies as a garden path sentence because the reader doesn't "build an incorrect structure because the next word doesn't fit into that structure".

This is more an example of syntactic ambiguity where a sentence may be "reasonably interpreted in more than one way": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity

Interesting link, though. I didn't know the formal term for these types of sentences.

chengmion Programmer from Finland has lost finger replaced with USB drive

Did anyone else read the title as "Programmer from Finland has lost (finger replaced with USB drive)"? I have a tendency to lose USB keys...

chengmion Computer Vision for Python

It's a Python interface to OpenCV's shared libraries. You still need the OpenCV binaries to be installed, though not necessarily the source.

chengmion Things I Wish I’d Been Told: Tips For Students with a Bachelors in Computer Science

Inflation. $50k in 1999 is roughly $63k now. http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

chengmion Remind HN: Open Hacker House every Wed in San Francisco

What about those of us with 9-5s?

chengmion SearchYC Performance Enhancements

That's strange. We made changes to DNS a few days ago. I suppose it's possible that if you're on the very outskirts of the internet, that it hasn't completely propagated yet.

chengmion SearchYC Performance Enhancements

Notifications was one of the original motivations for creating SearchYC, but there are a couple of fundamental flaws:

1) How would we know if you've already read a comment/submission? It would get spammy really quick unless we did some kind of periodic digest. We decided that creating RSS feeds for search terms (e.g. username) is a happy medium for this, but we're open to suggestions.

2) New items can take quite a bit of time to get indexed (usually 0-2 hours depending on the number of new items and position in the queue).