Hacker News: ers35

New comment by ers35 in "Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had"

ers35 — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:56:12 +0000

Use the trigram tokenizer: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html#the_trigram_tokenizer

New comment by ers35 in "The Quite OK Audio Format [pdf]"

ers35 — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 23:28:05 +0000

New comment by ers35 in "Actually Portable Executables"

ers35 — Sun, 28 Feb 2021 10:41:50 +0000

Maybe Cosmopolitan could be used with luastatic[1] to compile a Lua program to an "Actually Portable Executable":

  CC="" luastatic main.lua
  # Compile main.luastatic.c with Cosmopolitan Libc

[1] https://github.com/ers35/luastatic

New comment by ers35 in "A prerecorded message from Richard Stallman"

ers35 — Sat, 07 Nov 2020 23:51:44 +0000

Mirror: https://media.libreplanet.org/u/libreplanet/m/a-prerecorded-...

New comment by ers35 in "Teensy 4.1 Development Board"

ers35 — Mon, 11 May 2020 16:49:37 +0000

Mirror: http://archive.is/ewDJq

New comment by ers35 in "Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?"

ers35 — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 16:16:03 +0000

I've been focusing on reading, but it looks like there is interest in writing too. The HN API doesn't support writing, so the username and password has to be stored. It's important that reading keeps working even if HN changes their backend in a way that breaks writing. I'll think about it.

New comment by ers35 in "Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?"

ers35 — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 07:56:59 +0000

You can search previous comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

New comment by ers35 in "Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?"

ers35 — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 03:43:37 +0000

HN itself is fast, but the comparison I'm making is with readers that use the HN API. See how getting each comment requires an additional API request: https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/22481199.json?pri...

It's more about the consistency of operating on data local to the user. For example, see this comment referencing how HN paginates threads at 250 comments for performance reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22231055 A local database does not have that issue.

New comment by ers35 in "Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?"

ers35 — Thu, 05 Mar 2020 03:18:05 +0000

There have been many HN related websites posted over the years, but a lot end up as dead links. A self-hosted version does not depend on a third party. Another reason is to minimize the round trip latency of contacting a central server. Consider users without a good connection to the server.

New comment by ers35 in "Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?"

ers35 — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 09:32:12 +0000

That reminds me of how https://forum.dlang.org works: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed It also uses SQLite.

New comment by ers35 in "Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?"

ers35 — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 09:21:55 +0000

You might find this interesting: https://github.com/donnemartin/haxor-news

New comment by ers35 in "Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?"

ers35 — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 09:16:27 +0000

Great idea. This could also be useful to post a mirror for other users if the site ends up going down.

New comment by ers35 in "Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?"

ers35 — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 05:08:04 +0000

I prototyped this in Qt 2 years ago: https://ers35.com/files/hackernews-qt.png

1) It is possible to keep the whole site offline. A database from 2017 is 9 GB: https://archive.org/details/hackernews-2017-05-18.db I think a 2020 DB could be less than 20 GB.

2) My focus is on reading, not writing. Local favorites make sense. Maybe with importing public favorites. A user can set their name without logging in.

3/4) SQLite does the heavy lifting here.

Ask HN: What features for an offline Hacker News reader?

ers35 — Wed, 04 Mar 2020 04:27:37 +0000

HN is a treasure trove of information. The primary way I read HN is to bookmark stories and read the comments when the discussion is complete. Others actively participate. Some get jobs via "Who is hiring?". We all use HN differently.

There are ways to read HN other than this website. However, I have not found one that meets all of these requirements:

  - Self-hosted.
  - Offline access of data.
  - Query data via SQL.
  - Full text search of stories and comments.
  - Notification of replies to comments.

Some ideas:

1) A tool that maintains a copy of the HN API[1] in an SQLite database, with indexing and full-text search[2]. This supports the development of the other tools.

2) A command line tool that demonstrates how to use the database and supports the development of scripts. For example:

  #!/bin/sh
  # Run notify whenever someone replies to a comment.
  $ hn replies username | notify

3) A web UI for browsing and searching. This can be hosted locally or on a remote server.

What features interest you?

  [1]: https://github.com/HackerNews/API
  [2]: https://www.sqlite.org/fts5.html

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22481199

Points: 57

# Comments: 38

New comment by ers35 in "HN What rhyme is this?"

ers35 — Sun, 17 Nov 2019 18:37:21 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Bunny_Foo_Foo

New comment by ers35 in "New HN data dump available with over 14.5m entries"

ers35 — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 19:44:30 +0000

My DB covers from https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/1.json?print=pret... (10/09/2006 at 6:21pm UTC) to https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/14372035.json?pri... (05/18/2017 at 11:58pm UTC)

The dump posted claims to cover from 1 to 14566367 (06/16/2017 at 3:03am UTC)

New comment by ers35 in "New HN data dump available with over 14.5m entries"

ers35 — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 17:19:38 +0000

7.27 GB.

New comment by ers35 in "New HN data dump available with over 14.5m entries"

ers35 — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 15:58:20 +0000

You can see the size of the download by clicking show all: https://archive.org/download/14566367HackerNewsCommentsAndSt...

New comment by ers35 in "New HN data dump available with over 14.5m entries"

ers35 — Sun, 18 Jun 2017 15:34:08 +0000

See also: A dump of the stories, comments, and users from the Firebase API as a SQLite database with a full text search index: https://archive.org/details/hackernews-2017-05-18.db

VFsync – secure file synchronization system

ers35 — Sat, 03 Jun 2017 15:54:01 +0000

Article URL: https://vfsync.org/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14476943

Points: 4

# Comments: 0