sharc

performance. According to benchmarks, it can generate pages very slightly slower than real HN. (dang shared some timings on a particularly busy page, along with how many views it got over a certain time period, for benchmarking throughput. I never got around to verifying whether I can handle 24 million views a day, though, so I'd imagine something might break if you scale this up. On the other hand, I think it'll hold up.) If you're particularly offended that this is copying your comments, claim your account by going to your profile (for example, I would go to https://news.ycombinator.lol/user?id=sillysaurusx) and then click "claim" at the bottom. It'll ask you to put a 6 digit code into your real HN profile, at which point you'll be able to reset your cloned profile's password. Log in, go to your profile page, and set "redact" to "yes", the same way you'd set "showdead" to "yes" on HN. So, why make this? Eh, call it an art project. That's code for "It would've been a lot funnier with AI generated comments, but I seem to have stopped working on this for now." I'll post an update someday, if I can figure out how to do it without paying hundreds of dollars of API token prices. /ask and /show are missing. Those were the only two features left to clone. But pretty much everything else is there. It's been running for a couple months now, so I suppose it's stable enough for a public showing. Not that there's any reason to look. Shoo! Go find a more worthy project to devote your attention to. :) Kind of melancholy admitting that I spent four months with only something pointless to show for it. But then again, here's the punchline: go to any random comment on HN, then in the url change .com to .lol and you'll see an almost pixel perfect recreation. For example, https://news.ycombinator.lol/item?id=49995615 Sadly you can't form a loop, because if you edit your original comment with a link to itself, you'd only be able to go from HN to .lol to HN. But you could list both and switch between them as much as you want. For example: https://news.ycombinator.lol/item?id=49996495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49996495 This project was one of the most technically demanding things I've ever done. People look at HN and go oh, that? That looks easy. If you think so, I invite you to write it yourself -- it's an exercise that'll certainly make you a better programmer, and gain appreciation for how many subtle features we enjoy here on HN. Ha, and I just discovered a new one. I mixed up the "title" and "url" boxes just now. HN popped up a nice looking overlay that said "please enter a URL", pointing to the actual url box. https://i.imgur.com/agFas7x.png The HN team is always adding something or another, even if it's not always visible. Normally I'd dive into this and find out how it works and clone it, but ... eh, I'll settle for a 95% exact clone.

e to read finance related articles and stay in touch with the markets. The CSS for Trader News is linked to global market performance. On days when stocks are down, Trader News is red. On days where stocks are up, Trader News is green. I have an agent running a 24 hour cron job to research articles and post them to the site to keep it a stimulating place to read. I will tone this down if user submissions pick up. If there are sources you think I should include, please leave a comment. I also added a basic “chat” panel with polling every 30 seconds for casual market related chat. It’s open source and I’m very interested in feature pull requests. The code is available here: https://github.com/espressoplease/trader-news Public anonymised analytics are available with a 15 min delay here: https://tradernews.fyi/analytics [1] https://github.com/shawwn/sharc

imgur.com/ZocuK0L.png It's fun to tab back and forth and look at the diffs.

The real work is in the specifications. My port of HN is missing around a hundred features. Things from favorited comments, to hiding threads, to being able to unvote and re-vote. But catching up to HN is clearly a matter of effort (time spent actually working on the problem with Claude), not complexity. Each feature in isolation is relatively easy. Getting them all done within a short time span without ruining the codebase is the hard part. And I think that’s where a lot of people get tripped up: you can do a lot, but you have to manage it tightly, or else the codebase explodes into an unreadable mess. It’s true that if you don’t do that crucial step of “manage the results”, you’ll end up making more work for yourself in the long run, by a large factor. But it’s also true that AI sped me up so much that I was able to do in weeks what would’ve otherwise taken years (and did take dang years). I’m not claiming parity, just that I got close enough to be an interesting comparison point. AI can clearly accelerate us. But we need to be disciplined in how we use it, just like any other new tool. That doesn’t change the fact that it does work, and I think people might be underestimating how good the results can be.