HackiNews

A personal Hacker News reader. Stories are cached in Postgres and can be filtered by score, title, or by what has arrived since your last visit.

Requirements

• Ruby 4.0
• PostgreSQL
• dbmate (brew install dbmate)
• overmind or foreman (required for bin/dev)

Setup

bin/setup

This installs gems, creates hackinews_development / hackinews_test, writes .env.local if missing, and migrates both databases.

.env.local is loaded first and overrides .env. A typical local value:

DATABASE_URL=postgres:///hackinews_development

Run

bin/dev

• Web: http://localhost:3000
• Worker: fetches HN top stories every 5 minutes (WORKER_INTERVAL, seconds)
• Restart the web process after code changes (overmind restart web)

Or separately:

bundle exec puma -p 3000
bundle exec ruby worker.rb          # loop
bundle exec rake worker             # one shot

New since last visit

The listing marks stories that were not there on your previous load, and the pill under the score filter narrows the page to just those. It runs in the browser: the pages are served with public cache headers and a single ETag, so per-visitor state cannot live on the server without sessions or giving up caching. The baseline is the set of story ids from the last load (kept in localStorage under hn.visit.v1 for seven days), not a posting timestamp, because stories are often hours old by the time their score lifts them into the listing. Rapid refreshes within five minutes keep the same marks rather than clearing them before they have been read.

To exercise it without waiting for HN, run this in the console on the listing to forget the top five stories and push the baseline past the grace window, then reload -- they come back marked new:

;(() => {
  const KEY = 'hn.visit.v1', N = 5
  const s = JSON.parse(localStorage.getItem(KEY) || '{}')
  s.seen = s.seen || {}
  s.lastVisit = Date.now() - 10 * 60 * 1000
  s.cutoff = s.lastVisit - 1000
  Object.keys(s.seen).forEach(id => { s.seen[id] = s.lastVisit - 60000 })
  Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('tr[date]')).slice(0, N).forEach(r => delete s.seen[r.id])
  localStorage.setItem(KEY, JSON.stringify(s))
  location.reload()
})()

N = 0 gives the empty case, and localStorage.removeItem('hn.visit.v1') resets to a first visit, where nothing is new.

Keyboard

On the listing:

Key	Does
j / k	Down / up a row, holding the column (comments, points, title)
h / l	Previous / next link
space	Activate the focused filter
?	Show the cheatsheet

k past the first story steps up into the filters -- the new-since-last-visit pill, then the score pills, landing on the score already in effect -- where h/l moves along that row and space applies it. j walks back down into the listing.

Story pages take the same keys, minus the filters; ? there lists what applies.

Tests

DATABASE_URL=postgres:///hackinews_test bundle exec rake test

HTTP and worker tests are stubbed; they do not hit the live Hacker News API.

Console

bin/console