This is some work-in-progress code for parsing Hacker News in the absence of a useful API for downloading comments/submissions.
The code is likely brittle and not broadly applicable, but if you want to use it you'll need:
- a PostgreSQL database with schema from docs/schema.sql
- a configuration file config.json based on docs/config.json with the database credentials and the list of users you want to follow
Then, run the job out of cron, thus:
0,30 * * * * $HOME/proj/hackernews-tools/watcher.js
If everything goes well, you'll get e-mails that contain text-only, hard-wrapped renderings of the comments left by the users you're watching.