Here's a small, crude, Scrapy spider, with hardcoded values and all. You can set the value of `DOWNLOAD_DELAY` in `settings.py` for courtesy. It puts the comments in a `posts` directory as `html` files.
It doesn't do upvotes nor stories/links submitted (they have the type `story` in the response, as opposed to `text` for comments). You can easily tweak it.
from pathlib import Path
import scrapy
import requests
import html
import json
import os
USER = 'Jugurtha'
LINKS = f'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/user/{USER}.json?print=pretty'
BASE_URL = 'https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com/v0/item/'
class HNSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = "hn"
def start_requests(self):
submitted = requests.get(LINKS).json()['submitted']
urls = [f'{BASE_URL}{sub}.json?print=pretty' for sub in submitted]
for url in urls:
item = url.split('/item/')[1].split('.json')[0]
filename = f'{item}.html'
filepath = Path(f'posts/{filename}')
if not os.path.exists(filepath):
yield scrapy.Request(url=url, callback=self.parse)
else:
self.log(f'Skipping already downloaded {url}')
def parse(self, response):
item = response.url.split('/item/')[1].split('.json')[0]
filename = f"{item}.html"
content = json.loads(response.text).get('text')
if content is not None:
text = html.unescape(content)
filepath = Path(f'posts/{filename}')
with open(Path(f'posts/{filename}'), 'w') as f:
f.write(text)
self.log(f"Saved file {filename}")
I wrote a JS one years ago. It still seems to work but it might need some more throttling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34110624
Edit: I see I added a sleep on line 83 a few years ago.
Edit 2: I just fixed a big bug, I'm not sure if it was there before.
Edit 3: I wrote a Python one, too, but I haven't tested it and it most likely needs to be throttled. It's also not currently authenticated so only useful for certain pages unless you add authentication.
https://github.com/gabrielsroka/gabrielsroka.github.io/blob/...
There are few tests for this script which isn't packaged: https://github.com/westurner/dlhn/ https://github.com/westurner/dlhn/tree/master/tests https://github.com/westurner/hnlog/blob/master/Makefile
Ctrl-F of the one document in a browser tab works, but isn't regex search (or `grep -i -C`) without a browser extension.
Dogsheep / datasette has a SQLite query Web UI
HackerNews/API: https://github.com/HackerNews/API
https://gist.github.com/verdverm/23aefb64ee981e17452e95dd5c4...
Fetches pages and then converts to json
There might be an HN API now. I know.theyve wanted one and I thought I might have seen posts more recently that made me think it now exists, but I haven't looked for it myself
Nothing out of the box.
There's a copy of the data in bigquery: https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-...
But the latest post is from Nov 2022, not sure if/when it gets reloaded.
You can export the whole dataset as described here: https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickHouse/issues/29693
Or query one of the preloaded datasets: https://play.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUICogRlJPT...