Re: Hacker News, Clojure, and GSOC

2013-04-18 Thread Zack Maril
Some fun facts:
1. You could probably get a full history of Hacker News by carefully 
crawling the HNSearch API[0]. Chronically crawling the new page for links 
would allow you to stay in synch with Hacker News proper, and a monthly 
refresh of the data would probably be smart to hit anything you might miss. 
2. The source code for an early version of Hacker News has been floating 
around, distributed with Arc if I remember correctly. From PG's comments, 
the main updates to the site has mainly been dealing with spammers and 
voting ring detection.

Combining the two together, it is quite possible to make a read-only 
version of hacker news with a full history and proper linking. Most of the 
changes have been made only to the write only sections. So, it would be 
pretty straightforward to clone hacker news and keep it cloned if you throw 
out the write parts. Additionally, if you got the lag for updates down 
below a few seconds, you could piggyback off hacker news and just redirect 
submissions and comments there (you could even really tricky with an iframe 
if that tickles your fancy). In that manner, you could clone the 
functionality of hacker news with a full history. It seems like this 
wouldn't even really take a whole summer to do. Maybe a week of 
concentrated effort, depending on how fast you can pull down the data from 
the API and how well you understand your stack.

-Zack

[0] https://www.hnsearch.com/api

On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 5:13:19 PM UTC+4, Stuart Sierra wrote:



 On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 3:27:59 AM UTC-4, da...@axiom-developer.orgwrote:

 Does anyone know anyone associated with Hacker News? 
 Can we clue them into immutable data structures? 


 I know that Hacker News is mostly written by Paul Graham in Arc [1], his 
 personal dialect of Lisp. As such, it's unlikely anyone will be able to 
 convince him to switch to Clojure. :)

 P.G. recently wrote an article [2] about how he broke the site when 
 manipulating the production database from the REPL.

 -S

 [1]: http://paulgraham.com/arc.html
 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239673


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Hacker News, Clojure, and GSOC

2013-04-17 Thread Tim Daly
At least 2 of the people on this mailing list read Hacker News.

One thing that really annoys me is the Link Expired message.
If you wait more than a minute or two on a page, the NEXT button
will fail to get the next news item.

It seems to me that the Hacker News people need an education in
using immutable data structures and a lesson or two in Hickey's
notion of state and time.

If Hacker News kept their news chains as immutable data structures
they could update the pages without expiring links. You get a fresh
head of the pages but I'm 3 pages further along on an old path
yet we're both walking the same immutable structure.

This is painfully obvious to a Clojure user like myself.
Does anyone know anyone associated with Hacker News?
Can we clue them into immutable data structures?

Better yet, does ClojureScript fully support a method of 
walking immutable host data structures so they could code the
pages with ClojureScript? That would be a very visible win in
a widespread community. 

How would Datomic play in this game? Would the global immutable
data structure living in Datomic? Or would you simply architect
multiple machines that push/pull git-like updates among themselves?

A clone of Hacker News in Clojure would be a good GSOC project
as it is well defined and small enough for a single person effort.

Tim Daly

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Re: Hacker News, Clojure, and GSOC

2013-04-17 Thread Stuart Sierra


On Wednesday, April 17, 2013 3:27:59 AM UTC-4, da...@axiom-developer.org 
wrote:

 Does anyone know anyone associated with Hacker News? 
 Can we clue them into immutable data structures? 


I know that Hacker News is mostly written by Paul Graham in Arc [1], his 
personal dialect of Lisp. As such, it's unlikely anyone will be able to 
convince him to switch to Clojure. :)

P.G. recently wrote an article [2] about how he broke the site when 
manipulating the production database from the REPL.

-S

[1]: http://paulgraham.com/arc.html
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5239673

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