hnfp - Hacker News Front Page

A tool that determines if an article is on the front page of HN, and lets you measure how long it's been there for.

** Due to limitations in the Hacker News API, hnfp will only let you measure how long an article has been on the front page from the time you've started running the tool. **

Table of Contents:

1. Installation
2. Usage
3. Future Goals
4. Authors
5. License

Installation

hnFrontPage is installable via npm and depends on Node.js.

$ npm install -g hnfp

Uninstallation is just as simple.

$ npm uninstall -g hnfp

Usage

Step 1. Submit your story to Hacker News via the website

Step 2. Get your story's unique ID by clicking "discuss", and getting it from the url.

Step 3. Enter the following in the command line:

$ hnfp [your ID here] [polling frequency in minutes]

So, if you're trying to check the Hacker News API article shown above every 5 minutes, you would type:

$ hnfp 8422599 5

and you'd get the following outputs initially, then every 5 minutes thereafter:

----------------------------------------
Thu Oct 16 2014 19:21:12 GMT-0700 (PDT)
"YOUR TITLE HERE", by: YOU
Not on the front page yet! Good luck :)
----------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------
Thu Oct 16 2014 20:46:13 GMT-0700 (PDT)
"YOUR TITLE HERE", by: YOU
On the front page for 0 hours, 5 minutes, and 59 seconds.
------------------------------------------------------------

Step 4. Leave hnfp running for as long as you want to measure. Please note that closing your terminal window will reset the counter.

Future Goals

1. Track upvotes
2. Track number of comments
3. Show top comments
4. Track changes in position on front page

Authors

Kia Fathi

Andrew Zey

License

Licensed under the MIT License.

Changelog

• 0.0.1 Initial Release
• 0.0.2 Update Documentation for Clarity