issues

I added a virtual column (no storage overhead) to the output that easily links back to the source. It works nicely out of the box with datasette:

I got bit a bit by https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils/issues/411, so I went with a manual table_xinfo and creating the table via execute. Happy to adjust if that issue moves, but this seems like it works.

I also added my best-guess instructions for local development on this package. I'm shooting in the dark, so feel free to replace with how you work on it locally.

Tested with:

 hacker-news-to-sqlite user hacker-news.db fernand0

Result: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/ftricas/.pyenv/versions/3.10.6/bin/hacker-news-to-sqlite", line 8, in <module> sys.exit(cli()) File "/home/ftricas/.pyenv/versions/3.10.6/lib/python3.10/site-packages/click/core.py", line 1130, in __call__ return self.main(*args, **kwargs) File "/home/ftricas/.pyenv/versions/3.10.6/lib/python3.10/site-packages/click/core.py", line 1055, in main rv = self.invoke(ctx) File "/home/ftricas/.pyenv/versions/3.10.6/lib/python3.10/site-packages/click/core.py", line 1657, in invoke return _process_result(sub_ctx.command.invoke(sub_ctx)) File "/home/ftricas/.pyenv/versions/3.10.6/lib/python3.10/site-packages/click/core.py", line 1404, in invoke return ctx.invoke(self.callback, **ctx.params) File "/home/ftricas/.pyenv/versions/3.10.6/lib/python3.10/site-packages/click/core.py", line 760, in invoke return __callback(*args, **kwargs) File "/home/ftricas/.pyenv/versions/3.10.6/lib/python3.10/site-packages/hacker_news_to_sqlite/cli.py", line 27, in user submitted = user.pop("submitted", None) or [] AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'pop'

There is a problem of style with the patch (but not sure what to do) because with the new inicialization ( submitted = []) the part

 or []

is not needed. Maybe there is a more adequate way of doing this.

I think that each comment inserted into the database should include a column onstory that contains the ID of the story on which the comment was made. This is exactly equivalent to the link after "on:" at the top of an HN comment page (example). We could do this either by directly retrieving the HTML page and using Beautiful Soup to find that link, or alternatively recurse up the tree in the Firebase API using the parent field (probably using functools.lru_cache in case a person has commented a bunch of times on the same story).

The trees command currently has to make a request for every single comment. Algolia have an endpoint that bundles the entire thread together into a single request.

https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/ID

Here's an example that loads quickly, with about 50 comments: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/27941108

It doesn't appear to use pagination at all - if a thread is big then the response is big.

I ran this search to find some stories with more than 1000 comments: https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/search?tags=story&numericFilters=num_comments%3E=1000

Here's one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015967 with 4759 comments. Hitting the API takes 41s and returns 3.7 MB of JSON! wget 'https://hn.algolia.com/api/v1/items/25015967' 0.03s user 0.04s system 0% cpu 41.368 total /tmp % ls -lah 25015967 -rw-r--r-- 1 simon wheel 3.7M Jul 24 20:31 25015967

I want to be able to fetch every item for a domain, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=simonwillison.net