Unlurker is a view of active discussions on Hacker News.
Unlurker is meant to help lurkers like me find active discussions to participate in. Its existence should remind me to stop lurking. But so far, instead of commenting on Hacker News I have been building Unlurker. So perhaps it doesn't work.
It displays discussions for stories younger than max-age where at least min-by unique users
contributed within window.
This site is not affiliated with news.ycombinator.com. It consumes the generous Hacker News API.
What are some interesting ways to use Unlurker other than the default settings?
To find fresh discussions just getting started, try something like 2/2h/30m.
People still comment on really old stories! Scroll to the bottom of 1/72h/120m.
How does it work?
The Unlurker Frontend is a small React Router app. The instance at hn.unlurker.com is deployed to Vercel. To retrieve data to render a page it makes an API call to the Unlurker Backend.
The Unlurker Backend is a small Go Gin application. It exposes an API to retrieve active discussions. The instance backing this site is deployed on a 2 vCPU VPS which also backs a few of my other projects. It leverages the Unlurker package.
The Unlurker Package is a dramatically overengineered client for the Hacker News API. It provides methods to efficiently retrieve stories and comments. In its default mode, it provides a local Sqlite-based cache of items to reduce load on the API.
All of the Unlurker projects are MIT licensed; feel free to use them for your own unlurking-related needs.
Is there a command-line version?
What a strange question! The answer is yes. Install unl from
here to unlurk straight from your terminal.
Terms and Privacy
In an excuse to link to my personal blog: unlurker.com is covered by the terms and privacy policy posted there.