Local search index is the key to responsiveness.

Where does hacker books and hackertube get the data from? Is there a regular dump somewhere? Scraped, api?

I believe there’s a hackernews dump on google big query public datasets.

Also Hacker news does have a public API. It's ugly and awkward and they're never going to improve it but it's also free and not rate limited.

Thanks! First version was clunky, and hot-linked all cover images. Right now its plain JS and static JSON files, hosted on Cloudflare. First load pulls a ~30kb index of the top books, the full 16k list loads in the background, and everything has hashed filenames so it's cached forever. Covers are on R2. The data pipeline is python + duckdb over the HN dump.

And fair on the post, I had claude draft it and only edited it a couple of times. Should have just written it myself.

I wonder if plain JS will make a comeback with how good AIs are at writing code (at least for one off simple sites)

talk about speed! I have never seen anything with useful content load that fast. Very curious on what went into making it.

It does load faster than Hacker News itself here…

Ow it doesnt load anymore