from Hacker News

Show HN: See my project YCnews: News and Comments "mouse over" apart

by valjavec on 4/6/11, 2:03 AM with 5 comments

Twitter is often my source of Hacker News, but I had a problem of getting just the news without HN comments, which many times are even better than news itself, so I came up with an idea to have news and comments under the same URL.

I parse RSS feeds, put new items in database, get bit.ly short link and post all to Twitter.

Links on twitter are like this http://xcode.x10.mx/?id=2411858 and to see HN comments all you need is to move mouse over the handle on the left side.

What do you think? Like it, have any suggestions, ideas or anything else in mind feel free to speak up.

I'm happily using it and if someone else find it useful too even better:)

http://twitter.com/YCnews

  • by Swizec on 4/6/11, 2:59 AM

    Nice idea, but I'm seeing a few problems.

    Clicked the "A JVM does what" link on the twitter feed and after a wait that was an eternity in internet time (probably int he 10 second range or more) the page looked like an iframe with the original url loaded in.

    And the interface is confusing. It is never good when I first feel like crying out in rage that there are none of the promised comments, then only realize where to find them after reading your explanation a few times to pinpoint the info (I'm a product of the internet, read very sparsely :P)

    My suggestion is to make it more obvious where the comments are, or even to parse them out of the HN page and display them in your own way.

  • by petercooper on 4/6/11, 2:45 AM

    I like the idea and this has been an issue I've felt while following most HN Twitter feeds but the implementation is a little.. shiny. If you made it a bit more basic (fill the window for starters, no need for the giant margins) and ditched the transitions, it'd fit in better with the geek aesthetic.

    Also, consider branching out to the firehose sometime. I come to HN anyway so I don't really need such a thing for stuff that's already on the front page, but having everything in /new with something like this means I'm more likely to vote it up :-) Anything that encourages people to monitor /new is a big win.

  • by valjavec on 4/6/11, 2:13 AM