by emagdnim2100 on 1/17/18, 8:01 PM with 1 comments
by emagdnim2100 on 1/17/18, 8:01 PM
I love HN, but frequently find myself mindlessly refreshing the page throughout the day. This feels unproductive and sometimes unhealthy. Tools like browser extensions that time-limit domains haven't been effective for me, so I decided to try to build something that would trick my brain a little more cleverly.
On the backend, Slow HN is a Go server that frequently pulls the best posts from the HN API. It persists data about those posts, as well as their position on the page, to a sqlite3 database. When a user selects their desired update frequency, they receive a list of the weighted-average best posts from the relevant interval. The whole thing is running on a $5 VPS.
I'm also picking up great historical data about HN posts and looking forward to publishing periodic summaries of the best posts!
(Another purpose for the project was to learn more about React, so apologies to the <noscript> crowd.)