[HN Gopher] Hacker News Made of Primes
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Hacker News Made of Primes
Author : keepamovin
Score : 45 points
Date : 2025-12-28 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dosaygo-studio.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (dosaygo-studio.github.io)
| smlacy wrote:
| I don't get it. What am I looking at?
| ramon156 wrote:
| > The idea was to deconstruct Hacker News and view it through a
| different lens -- not time or score, but the fundamental,
| dynamic of prime numbers.
|
| Even after this comment I did not get it until I checked the
| repo[0]. It seems like it's only posts with a prime number ID
|
| Also, the "Why?" does not explain why. It's a _what /how_.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/prime-news
| ggggffggggg wrote:
| > It's "useless", perhaps, but I find it fun!
|
| Reason enough I'd say.
| jtanderson wrote:
| The documentation is here: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-
| STUDIO/prime-news
|
| Basically only HN items with prime IDs and with filters on
| different classes of primes.
| d-lisp wrote:
| Post investigation, I can say that it shows in an ordered
| manner hackernews posts whose IDs are prime.
|
| No ?
| Ackchyually2 wrote:
| North Korean karma farmer posting non-sensical content in order
| to build up reputation for the next heist.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46404099
| tomhow wrote:
| _If a story has not had significant attention in the last year
| or so, a small number of reposts is ok._
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
| varispeed wrote:
| Finally a website with prime content.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Thanks for the front page! This "web art" project views HN
| through primes, not time or score.
|
| Tech: BigQuery dataset -> Node.js ETL -> 2.7M prime items packed
| into sharded SQLite (~500MB) -> queried client-side via
| sqlite3.wasm. No server.
|
| Fun discoveries while building this:
|
| - Only 7 Mersenne primes and 5 Fermat primes exist in HN's entire
| range
|
| - Exactly 781 palindromic prime (but only ~760 in HN because some
| of those primes must not have items, unknown why), largest being
| ID 9,989,899. Why so few? Even-digit palindromes are always
| divisible by 11, so palindromic primes can only have odd digit
| counts (1,3,5,7 digits). We've captured ALL palindromic prime HN
| items that will ever exist until HN IDs hit 100M+!
|
| The z logo = Riemann Zeta function, deeply tied to prime
| distribution.
|
| "Live Mode": The last page fetches from the live HN API and mines
| primes client-side, bridging the static past to the live present.
|
| Source: https://github.com/DOSAYGO-STUDIO/prime-news
|
| CloudFlare Static mirror: https://falling-
| king-6f50.cris7fe.workers.dev
|
| _Why?_ I wanted to create a mirror of Hacker News that ignores
| time and popularity, and organizes the history of the tech
| industry purely by mathematical property. A way to explore the
| ancient and long history of HN through a filter that might
| surface interesting things. Hope you enjoy the beige!
| delichon wrote:
| Why?
| keepamovin wrote:
| For fun!
| delichon wrote:
| Good enough.
| omoikane wrote:
| Does it fetch the whole database and filter the results on
| client side? Because it seems like it would download 54 sqlite
| shards to show the few entries available for Mersenne and
| Fermat primes. It costs 40+ seconds of time and ~172MB of
| bandwidth. A cheaper option might be to generate the prime
| numbers first and then just fetch the shards it needs.
|
| Other than that, I thought it was an interesting way of
| sampling the news as the time delta grow further apart between
| each item.
| keepamovin wrote:
| Yes, I agree there's probably a better way for the Mersenne
| and Fermat. And even the Germain we probably don't need to
| scan every shard for just the first page of them. Good
| points! And good idea to invert the lookup.
|
| Thank you for the comment on interestingness. I thought so
| to, but I didn't realize it in same way you did in your
| observation that it gets more selective over time - I like
| that, in a sense that's kind of natural as the environment is
| more competitive over time. Thank you for the interesting
| idea!
|
| _edit: Your ideas are implemented!_
| metabagel wrote:
| What is a "prime" ID?
| beardyw wrote:
| Every post and submission has a unique numeric id. Check the
| URL. Prime refers to prime numbers
| metabagel wrote:
| Thanks!
| lapcat wrote:
| Shouldn't this be a Show HN post?
|
| And how many of these self-promoting fake HN mockups do we need
| from the same person?
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
| onraglanroad wrote:
| 6 seems like a perfect number.
| keepamovin wrote:
| In fact, the smallest perfect number.
| thih9 wrote:
| Last page with most recent content is, at the moment:
| https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/prime-news/index.html?p=931...
| keepamovin wrote:
| Thanks! Now I get: https://dosaygo-studio.github.io/prime-
| news/index.html?p=931... (the next page) and interestingly the
| newest prime was 42 seconds old with a title of [delayed] -
| someone's delay setting I guess.
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(page generated 2025-12-28 23:01 UTC)