hacknews

A command line utility to access Hacker News website (https://news.ycombinator.com/) in a more fun/useful way.

Description

Hacker News website has two features: pages and points. Each page has links to 30 news articles/pages and the user can go to the next page by clicking More at the bottom of each page. The points feature lets you filter search results based on the number of points articles have received from the users. Using these, and in addition to the categories (keywords passed as a command line flag), you can filter articles you want to read.

Categories are just keywords that are matched over all the links found on the page(s).

Installation

$ cd hackTechNews
$ python setup.py install

Usage

usage: hacknews [-h | -help]
                [-p <number of pages to scan>]
                [-c <categories to search for>]
                [-n <number of pages to open at a time>]
                [-points <points used to display pages with points higher than this>]

Syntax for flags:
    -p:         <Integer greater than 0>
    -c:         <category1,category2,category3, ...>
    -n:         <Integer greater than 0>
    -points:    <Integer greater than 0>

Default values of flags:
    -p:         Default value is 1
    -c:         None
    -n:         Default value is 3
    -points:    Default value is 1

Example usage:
    hacknews -p 2 -c c++,linux,apache -n 3
    hacknews -c script -n 2
    hacknews -c os,guide,database,jquery,rust -points 150

Additional information:
    1. Google Chrome web browser is needed.
    2. urllib2 and webbrowser libraries are needed.

Note

It assumes that you have Google Chrome installed and the path to its executable is /Applications/Google Chrome.app

Author

Deep Aggarwal
deep.uiuc@gmail.com
Date Started: 11/16/2015