Comment by sillysaurusx
1 day ago
I’ve been writing an HN clone that’s literally a clone. It copies all front page posts and comments. I just wanted to say publicly that dang is awesome. Instead of shutting down the idea, he’s been actively helping the project by answering periodic emails and… well, not shutting it down.
Not sure what to do with it yet. Maybe I could let users have custom filtering rules. But the point is, companies should support community projects like this, not throw around ToS violation claims like they’d hold up in court.
This makes sense for HN as a marketing project for YC.
This doesn't make sense for ad supported platforms where the value is the eyeballs on their site.
To be clear, no ads. I might have a donation link just to cover hosting costs, but I'm not trying to extract money out of this. I have a full time job for that. This is just an art project.
yeah, it's X that has ads. Which is why they wouldn't be as receptive as HN.
[flagged]
I don't mean to discourage you, and it's great that you've gotten that support; but I don't understand what purpose this serves. I had understood that Nitter exists exactly because of the forces that would make X leadership tend not to like its existence. HN is already not trying to sell things or make the interface obnoxious for logged-out users, and it makes very responsible use of JavaScript; what is there to filter out?
No discouragement taken :) Thanks for the question.
Some people have asked for a "No AI" version of HN. That's one possibility.
Another possibility is to just stop cloning comments, so that only the articles are mirrored, and then launch the site. There would be few comments, but that might be a feature. I sometimes miss when HN was small.
A third is to AI-generate the comments. That way it's like https://reddit.com/r/subsimulatorgpt2.
Then again HN doesn't have ad revenue to protect, and you can only spend Karma at a limited number of retailers.
Hacker News custom apps don’t threaten the revenue the parent (YC) makes.
Is it available? Would like to peek around, I also made a clone. There are lots of little details about the HN ui that were difficult to get just right.
Oh no way, a fellow HN cloning nerd! Hi!
You’re absolutely right. It’s taken almost daily work from April till now, but I finally have almost everything. Navigation links were particularly tricky. I’d love to see yours too.
Right now it’s running locally on my laptop, but I plan to deploy it to https://news.ycombinator.lol soon. I was gonna make AI generated comments but the API costs are pretty high.
Source is fully available: https://github.com/shawwn/sharc
I started with arc 3.2, which is ancient, and implemented every missing feature one by one until I’ve mostly run out. https://github.com/shawwn/sharc/tree/main/docs/agents/handof... shows a chronological journal of the whole process.
Is yours up somewhere? Would love to compare notes.
EDIT: Here's a side by side screenshot:
HN Simulator: https://i.imgur.com/iZk5ypK.png
HN: https://i.imgur.com/ZocuK0L.png
It's fun to tab back and forth and look at the diffs.
hackernews clone but all the comments are AI would be kinda funny.
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Creating a clone is basically violating all copyrights of every commenter and contributor here on Hacker News. We could all get together and inundate you with DMCA takedown for our Intellectual Property. We still retain copyright and all rights to our User Content, while we've granted YC a non-exclusive license to it. Scraping and cloning is also a violation of HN's TOS.
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
It's not your content, and you're cheating us all!
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I used to contribute to Anarki but the lack of any reasonable error reporting made it insufferable, and I don't want to learn enough about compiler design and Racket to get a stack trace working. Good to see people are still working on Arc forks.
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I also made a clone. I haven't touched it in months. I was going to put it on one of my domains and decided not to until I can sort out moderation and all that. I'm not sure I want to be on the hook for moderating a forum full time.
I would like for things to be so, but these platforms relief on you being on their platform, hooked on their algorithms, delivering them data. They need this in order to make money. HN is not monetized like this, so of course they're more lax. But I don't expect this to be possible for many other social media sites.
On related note I really like serializer.io to read HN (I disable other sites it supports) in chronological order and have it synced across multiple devices under unique URL
Thank you for pointing out https://serializer.io. I hadn't heard of it.
you're infringing HN users' copyright (and possible other rights as well), as they haven't granted you a license to copy, store and republish their content
Some further analysis that argues this is fair use: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49439657
they certainly havr given that license
otherwise my browser could not make reproductions and store caches
they have granted a licence to HN (and YC-affiliated companies), not anyone else. It's that licence that permits HN, and HN only, to send users' content to your browser
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Nobody should have those rights. Copyright has been a disaster for the human race.
Didn't realise everything I posted online was copyrighted by default
Any creative work you create is copyrighted by default as soon as it is recorded onto some medium, at least in the US. https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/
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