Comment by geuis
5 days ago
oh boy I wrote one of these many years ago for HN.
Within like an hour or two pg emailed me asking me to stop. I didn't know it at the time, but HN was being run on a rusty potato and scraping the homepage every 5 or 10 seconds was causing significant load.
Haha, my version makes a websocket connection to the official Firebase that the HN servers already send everything to, so it is zero extra load on HN
Yours is the MUCH better approach. When I did it, no api!
That sounds interesting, are there any public details on this? Is it https://github.com/HackerNews/API ?
You can stream the ID of the most recent item with something like this:
Then you will need to iterate through the new item IDs and fetch them, e.g.
https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/45534174.json
Afaict, HN is still running on a rusty potato. The software's written well, so it doesn't need to run on more than that. (What's going to happen to it? Someone links to it from HN?)
less rusty as of ~sep 2024 :-) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44099006
They've upgraded to a multi-eye potato‽ Truly the wonders of modern technology have no bound.
9 replies →
A LISPy potato, right?