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Hacker News API examples & templates
Use these vals as a playground to view and fork Hacker News API examples and templates on Val Town. Run any example below or find templates that can be used as a pre-built solution.
greenSnipe
@pomdtr
http
Code Search is Easy Earlier this week, Tom MacWright posted Code Search is Hard . He describes the research he his doing to improve the code search experience of Val Town . It was a great read, and you might have seen it trending on Hacker News . As Val Town's most active user (behind Steve Krouse, one of the founders of Val Town), I for sure agree with Tom that search feature of Val Town needs improvements. But while reading his post, I immediately thought of a different approach to the problem. And a few hours later, Val Town Search was born. Do things that don't scale How does this new shiny search engine work? Well, it's quite simple. I wrote a Deno script that fetches all vals from the Val Town API. I pushed the data to a Github Repository I added a Github Action that runs the script every hour to refresh the data. I created a simple frontend on top of the Github Search API that allows you to search the data. It's hosted on Val Town (obviously). That was it. I didn't have to build a complex search engine, I just used the tools that were available to me. Is this a scalable solution for Val Town? Probably not. Am I abusing the Github API? Maybe. Does it work better than the current search feature of Val Town? Absolutely! I hope that the val.town engineers will come up with a search feature that will put my little project to shame. But for now, you won't find a better way to search for vals than Val Town Search .
code_search_is_easy
@pomdtr
http
Code Search is Easy Earlier this week, Tom MacWright posted Code Search is Hard . He describes the research he his doing to improve the code search experience of Val Town . It was a great read, and you might have seen it trending on Hacker News . As Val Town's most active user (behind Steve Krouse, one of the founders of Val Town), I for sure agree with Tom that search feature needs improvements. But while reading his post, I immediately thought of a different approach to the problem. And a few hours later, Val Town Search was born. Do things that don't scale How does this new shiny search engine work? Well, it's quite simple. I wrote a Deno script that fetches all vals from the Val Town API. I pushed the data to a Github Repository I added a Github Action that runs the script every hour to refresh the data. I created a simple frontend on top of the Github Search API that allows you to search the data. It's hosted on Val Town (obviously). That was it. I didn't have to build a complex search engine, I just used the tools that were available to me. Is this a scalable solution for Val Town? Probably not. Am I abusing the Github API? Maybe. Does it work better than the current search feature of Val Town? Absolutely! I hope that the val.town engineers will come up with a search feature that will put my little project to shame. But for now, you won't find a better way to search for vals than Val Town Search . PS: This post was written / is served from Val Town
code_search_is_easy
@stevekrouse
http
Code Search is Easy Earlier this week, Tom MacWright posted Code Search is Hard . He describes the research he his doing to improve the code search experience of Val Town . It was a great read, and you might have seen it trending on Hacker News . As Val Town's most active user (behind Steve Krouse, one of the founders of Val Town), I for sure agree with Tom that search feature of Val Town needs improvements. But while reading his post, I immediately thought of a different approach to the problem. And a few hours later, Val Town Search was born. Do things that don't scale How does this new shiny search engine work? Well, it's quite simple. I wrote a Deno script that fetches all vals from the Val Town API. I pushed the data to a Github Repository I added a Github Action that runs the script every hour to refresh the data. I created a simple frontend on top of the Github Search API that allows you to search the data. It's hosted on Val Town (obviously). That was it. I didn't have to build a complex search engine, I just used the tools that were available to me. Is this a scalable solution for Val Town? Probably not. Am I abusing the Github API? Maybe. Does it work better than the current search feature of Val Town? Absolutely! I hope that the val.town engineers will come up with a search feature that will put my little project to shame. But for now, you won't find a better way to search for vals than Val Town Search .
