[HN Gopher] Show HN: Ampie - See HN or Twitter discussions menti...
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Show HN: Ampie - See HN or Twitter discussions mentioning the page
you are on
Author : posobin
Score : 85 points
Date : 2021-09-29 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ampie.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (ampie.app)
| valarauko wrote:
| Odd... it doesn't seem to show me HN links for the current page,
| at all. I tried it on a few top HN linked articles, and Ampie
| shows me only other pages on the domain, but not for the page in
| question. I had tweets show up for a few pages, but never the HN
| discussion (the 'other pages on the domain' do have tweets & HN
| links as expected)
| posobin wrote:
| Yeah there is some lag in the indexing, I do scrape all the HN
| submissions but like once a week (it's in plans to make this
| immediate but haven't gotten around to it yet). Just to make
| sure, if you go to one of those other pages on the same domain,
| do you see the the HN threads/comments in the sidebar on that
| page?
| valarauko wrote:
| > _if you go to one of those other pages on the same domain,
| do you see the the HN threads /comments in the sidebar on
| that page?_
|
| yes
| posobin wrote:
| Ok yeah that's just the indexing. I am using the bigquery
| HN dump to index, but using their free quota I can go
| through the archive only ~once a week. Ideally ampie would
| just go through the new submissions regularly using the HN
| api, but I haven't built that yet.
| i_like_waiting wrote:
| It's amazing, first I wasn't sure why I need to register, but
| very well worth it! Good job
| yagudin wrote:
| I amplified >500 links, am a huge fun. An undocumented use case
| is keeping up with that posobin is reading by following
| https://ampie.app/posobin :P
| siddish wrote:
| 500!? Wow! Can you share your profile, so I can find cool links
| across internet?
|
| Recently removed extension, it was occupying quite a bit of
| screen and am not discovering new pages anymore so
|
| Btw here's mine: https://ampie.app/siddish
| posobin wrote:
| Hi HN! Ampie is an extension that lets you discover backlinks to
| the page you are reading: either from HN, tweets, or blog posts
| that ampie scraped. It's been unexpectedly useful for myself:
| finding alternatives to libraries or apps I was going to use, see
| reviews for books, discover related blog posts or talks. I think
| of it as an assistant that helps you find connections you
| wouldn't have found otherwise.
|
| Here is a 2min demo video of what it can do right now:
| https://twitter.com/posobin/status/1443269542323658753
|
| I've been working on it for the past 1.5 years now, and there
| have been a bunch of features over that time, but now I am trying
| to simplify it and see if people like it if it is condensed to
| its essence. Give it a try and tell me what you think =)
| Retr0id wrote:
| Did anyone else find the layout of the landing page visually
| overwhelming, and hard to follow?
| smusamashah wrote:
| I use https://epiverse.co/ to see HN and Reddit discussions for
| the page I am on. This is a great addition to that.
| devgoldm wrote:
| Just to offset the negative comments on here, I think what you
| did is great! I don't think people appreciate the 1.5 years of
| individual effort you put into this and the demo looks like
| something I would find genuinely very useful. This clearly has
| lots of potential!
|
| I would honestly prefer paying for it, perhaps with a cut-down
| free version (perhaps using cached data only?) without sign-up to
| try it out, so one day you can work on it comfortably and doesn't
| require commitment for me to try out.
|
| However I'm sure you'll refine it in the years to come
| considering how well you've done so far. Keep up the good work!
| posobin wrote:
| Thank you for the kind words! Yeah, I haven't thought about a
| no-sign-up version, might do something like that.
| soheil wrote:
| This is great, it'd be amazing if there was a place to comment on
| directly about the page using this extension or otherwise a
| central database where all discussion about a URL exists beyond
| the control of the page itself.
| posobin wrote:
| You actually can amplify the page and add a comment! Other
| ampie users will see that you've been there and the comment,
| and you can see the list of amplified links of other people,
| e.g. mine: https://ampie.app/posobin Though you can't respond
| to others comments for now, but thank you for voicing the
| interest in that!
|
| There are other extensions that provide just the commenting
| part (e.g. https://web.hypothes.is/, https://curius.app/,
| https://glasp.co/), but I find that they suffer from the cold
| start problem, i.e. it's rare to stumble upon comments for a
| page you go to.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You could add those to Ampie. (I say, as if that isn't
| something you haven't thought of.)
| posobin wrote:
| Sorry, what do you mean by "those"? Add comment threads to
| ampie, or integrate comments from other services into
| ampie?
| vort3 wrote:
| Why does it require sign up though?...
| [deleted]
| camhart wrote:
| Plus connecting twitter account
| rememberlenny wrote:
| It uses your user's Twitter account to make queries to avoid
| rate limits. Very normal. Also works really nicely.
| posobin wrote:
| That is needed to see the tweets mentioning the page, but it
| is not required to use Ampie. This is done because twitter
| api is very limiting otherwise.
| camhart wrote:
| Makes sense, thanks for the answer.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Why is it free at all? This should be charging money for the
| service from day one. Maintaining addons isn't a charity.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| > First, please sign up at ampie.app
|
| I installed your extension, which is a pretty big investment in
| your product as a user. Uninstalled it at this point.
| posobin wrote:
| Sorry about that =( This is done in part to prevent abuse of
| the api, since all the requests are processed on my server
| and not offloaded to e.g. algolia.
| mikkel125 wrote:
| Are all URLs I visit sent to your server? Or is there a way
| I can see related HN/Twitter comments only on a button
| click when I choose so?
| floatingatoll wrote:
| How else could it work, if _not_ in that manner?
| posobin wrote:
| Actually Ampie used to work differently: Ampie would
| store the local cache of links from your twitter feed and
| links submitted to HN, and check against it when you went
| to any web page. If there were hits, it would show a
| small tab in the bottom right corner, showing that there
| are N tweets, M HN submissions with this page. Then you
| could click on the tab and the sidebar would pop up, so
| no requests were sent until you actually clicked on the
| tab.
|
| There are two problems with this: first, the cache had to
| be large, several hundreds of megabytes, because there
| are a lot of links (~200k from HN, and each person I
| follow on average tweeted 1k links among the last 3k
| tweets that twitter lets me access) and indexeddb is not
| memory-efficient. Second, this is easy to miss, and those
| numbers alone don't give enough information to go through
| the effort of clicking there every time. And this doesn't
| include the backlinks and HN comments mentions (fun fact:
| there are about 4m URLs mentioned in HN comments), so
| you'd miss out on a lot of stuff. You could suggest Bloom
| filters as caches, but that is a bad solution since now
| you only can show if there is a hit or not (instead of
| two numbers), but also there are false positives so the
| sidebar is not reliable anymore, and given that you go to
| hundreds of URLs a day, the FP rate has to be really low
| which makes the cache really large. Maybe using something
| like https://jlongster.com/future-sql-web would have
| reduced the memory usage, but at that point I gave up on
| that approach already.
|
| Given how technically hard it was to maintain those
| caches of links (they had to be updated incrementally,
| for example, not to send hundreds of MB every time they
| were recomputed, you had to wait to download the cache
| after installing ampie), the fact that most of the
| friends I have talked to didn't mind if the request was
| sent on every URL visit (as long as I promised not to
| save it), and the fact that this made the sidebar less
| fun, I decided to remove those caches and just send the
| URL to the server on every visit.
|
| So yes, every URL you go to is sent to the ampie server,
| but I do not save the URLs sent to the server, and if
| ampie is disabled on a domain (you can disable it on a
| domain in the settings), it will not request information
| about pages on that domain at all.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Thank you for the clear writeup. I wasn't able to find
| any link on the Ampie homepage that would have let me
| know your intentions regarding user-submitted data
| lookups. If that's not yet present, I encourage adding
| something about that.
| mikkel125 wrote:
| I don't use twitter, but would love to see related reddit
| threads.
| Guillaume86 wrote:
| Kiwi Conversations is an extension that does it, I use it all
| the time.
| hbn wrote:
| Years ago I had found an extension that did this. Can't
| remember the name, but I loved it until a reddit API change
| broke it, and the dev had seemingly disappeared.
| smusamashah wrote:
| https://epiverse.co/ shows HN and Reddit discussions for the
| page you are on.
| ernopp wrote:
| Awesome! I've always wanted something like this to exist. Thanks
| for building it <3
| ernopp wrote:
| I just hope there won't be too much of a performance impact on
| my browser or the page load times
| posobin wrote:
| IIUC the content scripts that extensions use load after the
| page is loaded, so this shouldn't affect page load times. But
| please reach out if you feel like it does!
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(page generated 2021-09-29 23:00 UTC)