What's all this about, then?

This is a little page that scrapes the APIs for Lobste.rs and
Hacker News, compares URLs for submissions, and prints a match if the URLs are the same.

I wrote it to give more depth to the discussions on Lobste.rs.

The numbers at the end of each submission is the score (net number of upvotes), the number of comments, and the comment/score ratio. The ratio is only printed if the sum of the score and comments is 10 or more.

Changelog

2023-06-14 - removed Reddit integration
2022-07-02 - implemented an update queue for HN entries
2021-05-31 - HTTPS implemented
2019-08-20 - links from /r/Programming that are shared with the links on Lobste.rs are now shown.
2019-08-15 - Link now show multiple entries, if they're present. Items are often reposted on HN , and previously just the first occurence in time was presented.

How it works

A script is run hourly, reading the latest entries from both sites. Then the page is generated.

The SQL is basically

select lo.url from lobsters lo
left outer  join hackernews hn 
on hn.url = lo.url

Limitations

It only matches URLs exactly, so if there are extraneous elements in a submission to one site, it won't show up.

While the HN API offers a list of the latest 500 entries, the script only scan the /newest page on Lobste.rs, and if the number of new entries manages to replace the page entirely between reads, the script might miss entries.

The scores and comments are only updated occasionally as I don't want to overload the API endpoints.

TODO

top scoring and commented post per year
better formatting of archive page
ensure "last generated on" JS code works in different timezones
~~make sure monthly stats are limited in time~~
~~present data for ratios etc. in an informative way~~
~~add Lobste.rs tags to entries~~
~~stats pages at end of each month~~

This page was generated on 2023-06-14 10:36:07+0200.

Lovingly handcrafted in Perl 5 using Emacs. This page is manually generated.